Shards

Some days our full lives seem a rich, exhilarating ride. Tom pulls up to get me from work at 4:52 (or so), and I climb into the car ready to enjoy our eight minutes of animated conversation about the small triumphs and challenges of our respective professional days, coasting on the tail end of the workplace adrenaline...before the happy reunion with the girls and turn to family life when we arrive at daycare.

Other days it feels as though we're barely holding the straining team in check, each obligation pulling us in a different direction, threatening to burst the thin harness. Sometimes the only thing holding it all together, especially when sleep is frayed and meals rushed and conversations abandoned in the face of a peppershot of interruptions, is the interior monologue creating the narrative out of all the scattered bits.

And sometimes we're too tired even for the narrative. I just read a book prologue reflecting on a typo in a student paper: how "shard experience" seemed a more accurate description of the student's topic (an esoteric New Age gathering) than "shared experience." So here, the shard experiences, the scattered bits:

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Yesterday we met a man whose father was born during the Lincoln administration. I'm still marveling over that one.

He was most improbably attending a preschool birthday party at which we were also guests--at Chuck E. Cheese. He asked my dissertation topic, and when I said it was American missionaries in Asia between the world wars, he noted that I should have interviewed him.

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After dodging all germs so far this fall, Alice came down with a virus today. The good news: It's not flu.

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Alice now says a very clear and intentional "Bye!" complete with wave whenever she notices that someone is exiting. She has a clear "tee" for the tall things shedding leaves outside the window, with which she is quite taken. Incidentally, she has decided that the black-and-white minimalist line painting of a mother and child over the changing table is a "tee." Interesting insight there into the developing mind's categorization of objects.

She claps her hands and pats her head appropriately when someone sings "If You're Happy and You Know It," and one morning I opened a bleary eye to see her bopping up and down in our bed doing those same motions, and I realized she wanted someone to be singing "If You're Happy and You Know It."

Funniest, though, is that she usually responds to an interrogative inflection with a blase, "Yeah." It makes for some amusing "conversations."

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Edith's first birthday party was loosely organized around her favorite things at the time: flags and spoons, balls and balloons. Were we to adopt the same strategy for Alice in a few weeks, the party would be about crayons and cups, trees and music. I tried to get some video of her "dancing" as she so often does when she hears music, but this abbreviated bit is the best I could do:

And another domestic scene, with Mirror Baby:

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Edith is not going to Africa after all--though Tom and I are. Sorry to get ahead of myself with that news. I do promise I'll write about it more at length soon. Tom was very much hoping we all could go, but the international flight with a 20-month-old quickly seemed like a nightmarish prospect, and after further reflection and conversation with the leader of the project on which we'll be working, we decided that it was quite possible we would find ourselves 48 hours into a trip to Africa finding that Edith was still holding out for Colby Jack cheese, applesauce, or cherry tomatoes, as at home...with disastrous results for the emotional well-being of the whole group, as well as Edith's physical integrity. So the girls are staying stateside next July with Mor-mor and Grandpa, and I'm coming to terms with leaving my babies for two weeks (not the least because it dictates an end date for the nursing relationship with Alice, if she hasn't quit of her own accord by then).

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I know there were other shards floating around in my head all day--happy birthday, Sesame Street!--but they've evidently been swept under the couch or ground to unrecognizable powder by now. So some belated pictures to close: