… are not so fucking entertaining when it’s your own child. Your own severely verbally limited four-year-old who is puking and crying, who can’t tell you if it hurts or not or where or how much, who knows the words for how she feels but can’t get them out, who has an almost impossible time even confirming or denying the words you try to supply for her.
Just saying.
She was like this for days. DAYS.
And the resemblance. Seriously. Cindy told me last week that Nora is starting to look like me, particularly her expressions. I have to say, I’ve never seen it – she’s got my mother’s coloring exactly and every now and then, the pouty lip comes out and she looks a bit like my youngest cousin Brandy (who’s a fine girl, and what a good wife she would be). But any genetic combination unique to me appeared to have passed her by.
I just saw these pictures.
"Oh, please."
Soon, for the monkey. Beginning the 24th of August, just like the big kids. I can’t imagine days in a row with time to think… but they shimmer on the horizon like a domestic Xanadu.
Meanwhile, I write down how to make an armadillo while she sleeps, while Brian reads his webcomics or saves a corporate infrastructure or something before bed. Karmically speaking, even minus one beagle and plus some depressive episodes, I think that once again, I’m way ahead of the game through absolutely no virtue of my own.
And there appears to be a rather creepy movie on TCM. Ah.
ETA: The creepy movie has just segued into creepy movie about a mom dying and leaving her seven children who pretend that she’s not dead so they won’t be separaaaa… nope. Not watchin’ that.
Nora , me and some very aggressive minnows.
There were a couple of rather healthy nips among the nibbles, at least on my fingers. Those lines of rocks create several good-sized, slow-flowing shallow pools perfect for three-year-old exploration.
The weather was miraculously temperate. We drove through a line of thunderstorms around Kerrville and emerged on the other side at Junction and South Llano River State Park. It was cloudy at first, but of course the water was warm, and in the middle of July in South Texas the temperature didn’t rise above 80° all day. Also, because of the ominous weather earlier, the river was beautifully uncrowded.
done
Thank you, thank you. I have no idea how the opening shot of the menagerie and the closing shot of random camera movement got in there… still figuring out the editing software. But the middle was on purpose!
Have I mentioned that Nora is two? Very, very two.
Notice the sweet potato on her chin. She knows it’s there. Her grandmother knows it’s there. She knows her grandmother knows it’s there. She is suspicious…
… and rightfully so. The wipe! The dreaded wipe!
The reaction:
If that’s not a two-year-old face, I don’t know what is.
“Pretty” is such an insipid word. “Beautiful” – overworked, meaningless. And “cute” is faint, faint praise indeed for the fine joyous sight of my little love naked and perfect in the water.
Today, as often happens, I was attempting to take a bath and she was hovering over the water, giggling, dropping shampoo-bottle depth charges into Mommy’s excitingly large bathtub and making enormous splashy windmills. As also often happens, once I’d washed my hair I let her get in to play for a while. The tub is so big and we are so small that she can circle me, dipping and bobbing like a baby otter. She is astonishingly comfortable in the water, free and weightless and elemental, and all at once I remembered feeling that way, too, and so tomorrow we will join the pool down the street.
Because all good otters know that time on dry land, especially in the summer, is time wasted. Fortunately, my cub has just reminded me.
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