She Laughs at the Days

My dear Baby Girl. You have been here for 6 weeks already. The first month went by so quickly, I missed the day completely when you became a month old, I was busy doing something. Your Oma had just arrived and we were doing something and your one-month anniversary slipped by. Sometimes I feel this little twinge of panic at the back of my heart like I’m missing your baby hood. I am so busy, even with help I am busy, maybe busier because of it, and time slips by. I realized the other day that I’ve not sat and held you much at all since that first week after you were born. I’ve nursed you, a lot, I’ve carried you around while I walk, while I grocery shop, while I take care of your brother and sister and talk on the phone. You sleep next to me every night, curled in the crick of my arm, but my attention is always elsewhere. The moments when we look in each other’s eyes seem few and far between, and there are so many others to hold you as well. I’m imagining some of it I’m sure, because I …

I love to watch my children wrestle with their father, and I love to watch their father play with them. It’s as though the man I know and fell in love with emerges from within the tired shell that walks in the door, covered in fatigue and the dust of labor and life. Sometimes he’s too tired to do anything in response to their joyful greetings besides collapse into a chair and let them take of his boots. But often there is this moment, when they jump on him and say, “I want to wrestle with you daddy,” or start attacking him with their pretend swords, when it reminds me of that moment after a baby who is struggling takes it’s first breath and the grey is suddenly chased away and replaced by a healthy pink. It’s an instantaneous transition when life suddenly floods were nothing was before. I watch the life suddenly flood into the Genius Husband and just as suddenly his hand snakes out and fastens on an ankle and his hapless victim shrieks with glee as they struggle to get away while he t…

This morning in the early hours of dark o clock, which is early down here in the south where the sun in the winter still visits us before breakfast time, I dragged myself out of bed, put the Baby in the sling, waited outside in the frigid, though not frosty air, and boarded a bus. I was responding to a summons as imperious as any royal summons could possibly be. Arrive at 8:00 am on Jan 24, 2007, bring with me this paper and proper identification or I would not be seen. If late I risked the loss of any future audience with said governing body and eventual banishment from the kingdom. I have already spent a lot of time and money in hopes of being granted this appointment so I carefully prepared.

The bus only comes once an hour. In this land of rampant consumerism dominated by freeways and parking lots, not enough people use public transit to make it practical for the bus to run with any more frequency than that. I watched as the college students boarded in hoodies and scarves, all of us…

There are certain laws by which the behavior of all things is governed or at least described. We have the law of gravity that has something to do with mass and density and things attracting. There is the second law of thermodynamics, something about all patterns breaking down and increased randomness. (It’s been a while since first year physics ok.)

Slightly less well known are the laws that describe what goes on here at Chez Carrien.

For instance, for some reason that I’m certain science will want to discover at some point, the Genius Husband, who does not shave daily, and does so on a completely random schedule unknown even to himself, can be counted on to decide it must be done on any day that I decide to wipe down the bathroom counters and polish the taps. I can always expect to find poorly cleaned up man stubble sitting in the freshly polished crevices. If I have cleaned both bathrooms the same day it is even reasonable to expect that he may begin shaving in one bathroom and find i…

When the Baby was 10 days old the Genius Husband went back to work. The Baby would sleep most of the morning away as newborns usually do, and as a result and I could get breakfast and school out of the way before she woke up. That was until one morning recently when I slept in a little and she woke up a little early and I found myself with an infant that needed feeding and two small children that needed feeding and trying to do it all at the same time. The Boy wanted a fried egg, and I thought to myself, well that’s faster to make than porridge and since they were really hungry it sounded like a good idea. That was until I remembered that however handy a sling is for nursing and baby holding while getting things done, hot oil next to tender newborn baby’s head is not such a great idea. But I had already promised eggs, and as anyone who tends to children knows, changing your mind is not an option unless you have nerves of steel, being a little bit deaf helps too so you don’t have to li…

Wow, so the people who read here, at least those of you who delurked, thanks, are a really articulate smart bunch of people, at least if your comments are anything to go by, and I’m not saying that just because you all said nice things about me and complimented my children. I find myself half afraid to write anything else, perhaps in a fit of self-consciousness. This place has become for me what my journal used to be, only knowing that someone else might/will read it forces me to be more articulate, and keeps me motivated to keep writing. I had no idea when I started this how cathartic it would be.

Anyway, thanks for leaving those comments, it feels good to know I’m not alone in cyber space. I’m kind of awestruck that Mary, who is very smart, (You have to be smart to be a physicist don’t you?) would link to Notes from the Trenches and me in the same post since she is so very widely read and I’m well, not so widely read and think she is awesome.

So I humbly bring you all the latest editi…

It's time for some gratuitous pics of my kids, because they're cute. I've gone back and added pics to a few previous posts as well, including a picture of the horsey cake for Lisa.

So there was a lot of drama here last week and I missed national delurking week. But I really would like to know who you are and why you read this blog. I figure it's not because I post cute pictures often, because I don't. So tell me why you're here and a bit about yourself. If you want, 'cause it's not really delurking week any more, but I'd still like to know.

This was taken just after the Baby was born, and the Boy and Girl met their sister for the very first time. Happy Love Thursday everyone.

There is a certain poetry to a person who brings with them the external symbols of the relationship you share. Take my dad for instance. Every time I move I leave things behind, things that I don’t want any more, things that I leave specific instructions to others to keep if you want and if not throw it away. Every time my dad saves most of it for me in case I change my mind and want it later. I have handed things to him saying. “Here, this is for you I think you’ll like these.” I get a phone call a while later, a year maybe two, and he asks me if I wanted those or if he can use them. He is the keeper of all of my excess baggage, the returner of things I never expected to see again, the cause by which things of my past continue to make their appearance in my life, the orchestrator of revisitation.

This time was no different. He arrived with several things in a box that I didn’t want and don’t need, I’ve survived a year without them, they were in a box labeled for the dump, but he “resc…

I got a phone call yesterday morning saying, “I’m leaving today, and I’ll be there in a day or two.” That was all the notice I got to prepare for his arrival.

He’s talked of coming to visit this year, and how it probably won’t happen for reasons that are various and random, and I have truly thought I didn’t care. My exact words during our last conversation before that were “I don’t care, come or don’t come, our door is open. But just so you know mom is coming on the 14th and I know you don’t like being anywhere near her.”

Now he’s on his way. As I type he is making his way along the mammoth north south route that is the interstate 15, the Canadian snows have already passed beneath his tires and he is probably in the high desert somewhere near Nevada. I am freaking out.

If you read this blog at all you know that I have issues with my father, lots of them. I have for the most part made peace with him. I have chosen over and over to forgive him for the things that have passed between us, th…

I wrote this before I went into labor and was unable to post it, it's still something my brain is doing.

When the boy was born we very carefully buckled him into the center back seat of our little car and drove home from the hospital immersed in that surreal feeling that comes from just walking out of the maternity ward with a baby as the nurses at the station wave back at you. There were no papers to sign, no permission slips to fill out, they just let us go home with a person. That was one of the strangest and slowest drives we have ever been on.

When the girl was born and we finally left the house we strapped her into the middle seat again, because that is of course the safest in case of a collision. But then there was the dilemma of what to do with the boy. Did we move him to the side seat next to her? What if someone hit us on that side? What if we put him on the other side instead and got hit on that side? We could always put him in the center of that very back seat, we were n…