Tiptoeing through the bad patch

Things have not been going so well here at the old Bosche stead. Sickness has permeated our home. I spent one week being so inexplicably nauseated that I took four pregnancy tests just to be sure. (Granted, two would have sufficed, but I like to be thorough when it's even remotely possible there's a person growing inside me.) Thursday of that week, Katherine came down with a nasty cold, and I got knocked down by it two days later. Neither one of us have yet to shake it. Her fever is gone, but her cough still comes from the depths of hell and she's not eating, drinking, or sleeping well. The first two are new developments. Tonight she had a handful of shredded cheese, a little Gatorade, and some melted vanilla ice cream, just for its caloric purposes. Desperate times...

Last night she started screaming around 1 a.m. and wouldn't stop until we brought her in bed with us. She finally fell asleep sitting on my head.

Today there was non. stop. whining. She's clingy, and she wants me, but at the same time I can't do anything right by her so she's as frustrated with me as I am with her, minus, on her part, the guilt that comes with that frustration.

The bank messed us up, work hit one of those dry spells I've been told about but which I've been fortunate enough not to experience until recently, and things just generally and unequivocally sucked. I'm not sure, in this moment, if that should be present tense.

Bad times they do pass. I've taken on four decently sized work projects this week alone, and I have hopes that once we get Katherine's probable ear infection(s) squared away, she'll remember how to smile and return to her happy-go-lucky self. As for me, surely even the flu can't last much longer than two full weeks, and if you know different I beg of you not to douse my blue-moon burst of optimism.

Tomorrow Alex's school arbitrarily celebrates the 101st day of first grade with a hat parade through the halls that's scheduled 30 minutes before Katherine's doctor's appointment. I'm going to make it. He's proud of that pimp hat and I'm going to make it.




I find good in the fact that Steven and Alex were (knockonwood) spared this whatever-it-is, that I have work to do again, and that my in-laws are already planning our next beach vacation, which makes me think of warm sunniness, 4 o'clock happy hours, and games of '90s trivia at which no one, ever, will beat my husband.

For now, I'm just taking it minute by minute. Right now that means Caillou, Kleenex, and, as evidence suggests, an imminent diaper change.

God, grant me patience.

Laughter, the only medicine that makes a dent

Sometimes life is kind. The stars align in a pleasant way, the rain is pretty but not drenching, the dogs smell good and the kids act right.

And then sometimes none of those things happen. And they all not-happen all at once.

That's all I'm going to say about that, because I like things to be neat and preferably not too woe-is-me. It's just ... I'm ready for the lined-up stars and the pretty rain. More than ready. Nails dug in, feet planted, ready.

But even when it's not running as smoothly as one might have hoped, life does its thing. Alex gets bit by a horse and loses two teeth in two days, Katherine's feet grow a full shoe size overnight and she finally has enough hair for (tiny, sticking-out, hilarious) pigtails, Steven pretends that the remote-controlled helicopter he buys is for Alex but we all know better, I take on more projects than is maybe prudent because one day the well might run dry and try to weave sanity faster than it unravels.

It's probably bad form to find humor in your children's little mishaps, but I figure humor in just about any form is to be embraced, so in light of that I have to admit that it was not-not funny when Alex got bit by the horse. Only AFTER, mind you, once I'd ascertained that he was physically okay and suffered mostly from hurt feelings. After stewing for a few minutes, he came to tell me he'd forgiven the horse ("He's just an animal; he didn't know any better," he told me), and then I was more touched than concerned and "Alex got bit by a horse" became a funny phrase.



I've never liked horses. Crazy, I know. It's akin to disliking puppies, I hear. They're big, they're beautiful, they're helpful if you find yourself without appropriate transportation in the middle of a ... well, a field. They have big brown eyes and pretty tails. I had one or two in pastel rainbow colors with glitter on their plastic flanks when I was a kid.

When I was in eighth grade, I fell off a horse. It then kicked me as it bolted toward the horizon. Embarrassing enough when you're 13. Factor in that it happened in front of my entire church's youth group, including the guy I had a massive crush on, and it made me want to die. Twice.

I hadn't thought about that in years, but the day the horse bit Alex, it renewed my intense! dislike! At any rate, you won't catch me near one of those long-nosed beasts for quite a while, and I'm going to teach my children not to pet strange horses. You never know when the temptation or the opportunity might arise here in Nothing-Ever-Happens, Suburbia, USA.

But it's not funny that my kid got bit by a horse. That would make me a bad mother, right?

Just as it's not funny that Katherine is afraid of that remote-controlled helicopter I mentioned. At least, it's not very funny. But she gets so excited, and squeals and reaches for it, and then it swoops or moves toward her and she gets spooked and you can hear her little feet slap-slap-slapping away down the hall. Or she just barrels into the nearest pair of legs and grabs on for dear life. Or she ducks and covers, usually in the safe little nook under the slide of the climber she got for Christmas.

Funny in a good way, you see. Good for the mental memory book, for the psyche, a reminder that things don't have to be so serious all the time.

Unrelatedly, I've figured out one of the keys to the mysteries of childhood and plan to become a millionaire on the book deal: Teeth.



Besides the fact that I don't imagine a liquid diet would be terribly satisfying, I have renewed appreciation for them because Alex and Katherine are both growing them, and Alex is losing them (Sidebar: The child has really lost two in two days; why didn't anyone tell the Tooth Fairy not to set the bar at a dollar per year of age? Because he's got a lot more teeth and he's not getting any younger). Teeth have more power than we give them credit for. Alex cried when his second tooth was preventing him from eating his sandwich and then informed me when I cut it up into little pieces for him that he is not Katherine; he doesn't need little pieces, this is JUST TEMPORARY. (Yes, he really said that.) Ask your parents; I bet teeth once were the center of your universe, too.



Sorry if this blog post is worse than usual. I'm distracted by Katherine's playing with her doll and doll stroller. I hope her pretend-parenting skills aren't a reflection of our real ones, because if so, we need to go to classes or something. I don't recall picking either of my babies up by their ankles to toss them into the grocery cart head-first, chewing on their hands, or sending them sailing across the room in their strollers and cackling like a crazy person when they hit the wall.



But could be I just forgot.

Christmas Wrap-Up, 2011

Katherine's phrase du jour is shish kebab. Really not sure what she intends for it to be, but that's certainly what I hear.

"Katherine, do you want some milk?"
"Shish kebab."

"Katherine, where is your baby doll?"
"Shish kebab."

"Katherine, it's time to go night-night.. "
"No-wee-shish-kebab-no-weeeee!!!"

She also looks you directly in the eye, very seriously, and babbles incoherently for, oh, ten minutes at a stretch. If you smile and nod occasionally, and throw in a few "I know"s and "Really?"s, she doesn't require much from her audience in the way of feedback. When she's done talking, she nods definitively as if confirming that her point has been established, and wanders away.

I think she's practicing for her valedictorian speech at Harvard. Or Yale. One o' them kudzoo places.

Christmas was wonderful. It poured down rain all day long, making everything warm and cozy inside and inspiring me to shower and put on clean pajamas in preparation to spend the day not leaving the house. And I didn't!

I did, however, have to roast the turkey since Steven couldn't fry it in the rain. Unprepared for such a turn of events (it doesn't rain on Christmas!), I had to work with what I had on hand and a little help from Alton Brown on roasting times. Turns out that slathering anything in butter, garlic, and lemon juice, sprinkling it liberally with salt and pepper, and stuffing it with celery and onions yields good things. It's times like these that I'm glad I'm an ad libber in the kitchen.

I recommend that everyone have four Christmases each year. That's what we did: One with my sister and her three boys the day before Christmas Eve. Then Christmas Eve with my parents. Then Christmas the real thing, then a trip to Houston for Christmas with Steven's family. All were worth all of the December madness we all have to endure before the big day actually arrives. Alex enjoyed every second of his time with both sets of grandparents and both sets of cousins, and Katherine enjoyed the chaos, the wrapping paper, and the zoo. (Except for the part of the zoo where she approached a deceptively adorable little British boy who balled up a fist and socked her in the nose. She was not upset, per se, but she was baffled.)

For some reason, Christmas decorations and all things related to the holiday become hopelessly depressing as soon as it's over. That's why I was itching to get ours down. The tree was dismantled and taken to the recycle place yesterday (Alex was thrilled to learn our tree's new incarnation will be as a fish habitat in the Cahaba River), and I've pretty much found a home for all the new toys and assemblage of "stuff." My grandmother's cedar chest is now doing double duty as our coffee table and a cleverly incognito toy box. Although until I find some hinge locks it's not usable as much more than a digit guillotine.

I can't believe 2011 is over already. In fact, I'll probably have to write another blog post later if you'll pardon my spam. I need to reflect on the year past.

Brace yourself. This one's a downer.

As I sit here, choking down a sugary-plastic-coated Christmas-tree-shaped snack cake decorated with green sugar dots and red sugar lines, I feel compelled to write a post about death.

Wait. Don't call anyone. I'll explain.

Lately it's been on my mind a lot, usually there and gone like things we don't enjoy pondering too closely tend to do, but fleeting thoughts are thoughts, and I've been thinking. I have friends who have lost people recently: A mother. A grandmother. A baby. I know of people who have lost people recently. A son. A wife. I know people who probably won't be with us much longer: An uncle. Mine, in fact.

And then there are those who will step out unexpectedly, without warning or time to finish all those little things we tell ourselves we'll finish later. Because it's cliche, but there's not always a later. And one thing that's guaranteed is that we all, at some point, preferably later than sooner, will run out of later.

My husband sent me a spreadsheet of things I would need to know "in case." I hated that. As much as I know it's something we all have to entertain at some point in life, just looking at the words and numbers he'd entered into little Excel cells made me want to cry. I didn't, which is a small miracle. I'm known for my tendency to tear up at the very mention of tears.

My parents have told me where to find their important afterthings. I need to know, I suppose, but I don't want to know. Or, rather, I don't want to need to know. Ever. Ever.

I don't want to do it, I don't want anyone I know to do it. And it has nothing to do with my faith. I happen to believe in God, and heaven, and an afterlife that involves reunions with those who have gone before us ... including my childhood dog Bonnie, who will probably be too busy being snobbish to the other dogs to even notice when I step through the pearly gates.

I envision the scene that could play out if the odds were to screw us over: a bunch of people standing in a circle around our two crazy kids, eyeing them with trepidation, mentally calculating school clothes, grocery bills, and college funds, willing themselves not to be the first to say "one, two, three, NOT-IT!"

"It." Always "it." Because I don't even like to type the word. Does anyone? We euphemize the hell out of it: lost, passed, went, is gone, didn't make it ... but it all boils down to that word no one wants to say. It seems to be the most widespread and longstanding of all human superstitions. I mean, I'm not going to stand in front of the mirror with the lights off chanting Bloody Mary; I don't walk under ladders; I can't stand the numbers 3, 6, and 13 (don't ask me about the middle one; it doesn't make sense). I don't, however, throw spilled salt over my shoulder because I don't like a mess.

So I don't say that "D" word any more than I have to. Sure, the plant died. Okay, the battery died. Even, Lord help me, the car died.

But nothing else. Ever.

Sorry for the downer of a post, but it's on my mind. It. And I needed to get It out if I'm ever going to sleep tonight.

If I know you, it's pretty darn likely that I love you or at least LIKE you. (I pretty much like most people unless they are mean to my kids, rude to waiters, or carpool line cutters.) So be careful. Say your prayers. Don't break mirrors or open umbrellas inside or say things like, "What's the worst that could happen?" or, like that notorious fool on the Titanic: "God himself could not sink this ship."

Sure, it's likely nothing will happen if you do any of those things. But you won't see ME chancing it. And don't be surprised if, when I catch YOU chancing it, I body check you.

Facebook? Yes, please.

So let's talk about Facebook. Sometimes I think to myself, "Self? You post entirely too often on Facebook. It makes you look needy/overthinky/not busy enough to do other things." But for me, it's not about showcasing my kids (though I do plenty of that) or detailing my mundanity (though I do PLENTY of that) or spouting bumper sticker platitudes (I'm honestly not sure if I do that or not, but tell me if I do and I'll try to stop).

It started when I lost my job. That sounds so innocuous, "lost my job." I, along with people I cared about and people I started caring about the second we were thrown in the dinghy together, were ripped out of the fabric of an institution that has been idealized from what it was but which, for better or for worse, has become the yardstick by which I measure all other organizations. Not that I know a lot about those, really. I got a job almost immediately after being cast out of what has become Eden in my absurdly revisionist memory.

I had some great friends there. I have those great friends still. But I wonder sometimes if I would, had I not jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.

And then it became something more. A new job that didn't agree with me and at which I was slowly losing skills I'd spent almost a decade honing, coupled with my inherent ability to miss people from the tips of my toes kept me clinging, and clinging hard.

And then it became something more. I quit that job, came home to raise a baby and try my hand at trying my hand on my own. On the days I felt like a shut-in, or on the days I felt like I was doing it wrong, all of it, and had no illusions of anything but continuing to do it all wrong till the end of time, I used it like a life raft.

And now? Now it's more about keeping those ties that would've probably been severed long ago. That, and keeping myself from going stir-crazy in a house with only a busy and often-baffling one-and-a-half-year-old and two senior golden retrievers to keep me company.

It's a touchstone. And so I use it. Forgive me if I use it too often, and if you're sick of hearing about my plans for the day or the latest weird thing Katherine did or the latest unintentionally funny thing Alex did or why I love life one day and want to run away to Fiji the next ... well, feel free to defriend me, and I'll pretend I didn't notice.

A blog, on the other hand, feels like a safe place to blather on as I tend to do if given half a chance, and so here we are. I would tell you that Alex is driving me nuts with his perfectionistic tendencies which clash spectacularly with his newfound interest in origami tutorials on YouTube, or that Katherine has started speaking Swahili, best I can tell, or that the workflow is either white-water-rapids fast or stagnant like a swamp, or that my attempts to climb back on the diet-and-exercise train have all but failed because "idunwanna" has become a viable excuse ... but it's getting on up toward my bedtime and I never write more than I can conceivably complete to my satisfaction before I fall into bed.

So this is the Julie version of the short story: Tonight Katherine was the cutest thing I've ever seen, wearing nothing but tights over a diaper, belly hanging over the top of the tights, babbling incoherently at Charlie because she wasn't taking the pieces of dog food K was trying to shove between her teeth. Tonight Alex told me I'm the best mom ever and then, later, insisted (against my protests) that I'm "disappointed at" him because he's "only" on Level L books. (Which, fwiw, is equivalent to a third grade reading level.) Tonight I had soup for dinner and pizza for a pre-bedtime snack, which is probably one of the reasons I'm not exactly meeting my weight-loss goals at the rapid clip I had hoped for.

Tonight I had a fleeting idea for a story, maybe even a book, and then I lost it because the Dexter season finale broke my brain.

Tonight Katherine decorated our Christmas tree with tampons and I found my new lipstick floating in the glass of water I keep by my bed.

Tonight Alex slipped and called Steven "Daddy" instead of "Dad," and my heart broke just a little.

And who knows what tomorrow will bring? I'll likely put the highlights (or the lowlights) on Facebook, for my own reasons and against my better judgment. I might tell the world how much it sucks that you miss someone the most when you know you won't be seeing them for a while. Or how hard it is to not tell your kid to hang on for another week, he'll have real origami paper come Christmas and not have to make his origami ninja stars out of random pieces of looseleaf. Or how my heart leaks out of my body when Katherine appears out of nowhere, wraps her arms around my leg, and says, "Mwah!" Or how Alex and I are reading books by the same author. Or how much I love my friends and their ability to say the rightest possible thing at the rightest possible time. Or how weird I think it is that spell-check didn't put a squiggly red line under "rightest" just then.

For now, I'm going to read a chapter of my terrible teen horror novel, wish that I had the patience and the time to write one of my own, and then hope I can sleep and that Katherine's snot doesn't wake her up so that we're both equally cranky in the morning.

Because I have work to do. And she has messes to make.

Life is sweet, messy, maddening, and worth it.

TV and other mommy crimes

I ran out of cheesy secondhand teen horror novels, was just slightly underwhelmed by tonight's installment of my current television obsession, and am nowhere near tired enough to turn in, so here I am, scrounging out a long overdue (but pretty fluffy) blog post.

In Alex news, he's becoming a chess champion but still ends up guessing the wrong person when you play Guess Who? with him, which leads me to believe someone, somehow, is doing something wrong. We've made sure he knows the difference between a beard and a mustache, and where a goatee falls in the mix, and whether or not someone with just a ring of hair around the sides counts as bald and that "orange" hair is actually called red hair, and still, you'll be down to the wire and he'll be all, "Is your person George?" And you feel a twinge of pity when you have to say, "No. My person is Nancy."

But ask him which ways pawns move or what's the best strategy to protect your king or bishop or whatnot, and he's all over it.

He is now Alexander at school, in part I think because the other Alex in his class is an Alejandro, and the teacher wanted to differentiate but was iffy on how to pronounce the latter (or maybe just hasn't heard the Gaga song). And Alex is fine with being Alexander, and I am fine with him being Alexander because that's what I wanted him to be in the first place but everyone takes liberties and it's easier to just let them.

He moved up another reading level, he's into origami, and I'm easing him into becoming a horror-genre fanatic like his mama. We started small, with Goosebumps and R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour, but I have big future dreams of his accompanying me to the theater to see Blair Witch XII or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Returns years down the line. We were both a little freaked out by the Scary Mary episode of Haunting Hour, but in my defense I was subjected to a disturbing (if giggly) Bloody Mary experiment with my sister and her friend at the tender age of 5 and will never quite live down the trauma. But since then, and once you get past the extreme 1990s, extreme Canadianness (no offense intended), and extreme bad child acting of Goosebumps, it's not so horrible. And it's a sight better than Caillou.

Yes, Katherine has fallen under the spell of that infamous bald 4-year-old boil on the butt of cartoon-kind. If I were a better mother, perhaps I would stimulate her brain by reading to her all day, having her put together 100-piece puzzles singlehandedly, or taking her on a new, stimulating cultural adventure every day. Unfortunately (and not), I have to work. So she watches some TV. Her preferences are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (tolerable, now that we're far enough out from Alex's Mouse-ka-days that the hot-dog song doesn't make me want to drive rusty nails into my eardrums), Fresh Beat Band (even WITH the new Marina and her giant mouth and never-gonna-measure-up-to-her-predecessor desperation), and yes, leading the pack, Caillou. She likes Elmo but has no patience for the other residents, whether human or monster or unidentifiable muppet creature, of Sesame Street.

Most of the time, though, she has no patience for sitting and watching TV, which is great except when she brings me a toy, book, or random object and slaps it right smack down into the middle of my keyboard, either coincidentally or not (as I'm beginning to believe) shutting down the program I was working in or inserting a whole bunch of errors that my clients would likely frown upon.

When she's doing something wrong and I catch her at it, she immediately stands up, smiles so sweetly you'd swear she's the female Damien, waves, and says, "Hiiii!" And you're wrong if you think that's not persuasive. Sometimes I manage to hide my laughter in the couch cushion, but my girl she is no dummy. But I tell her every day, cute will only get you so far. We still don't rip pages out of books, lick the dogs, or poke our fingers into the Blu-Ray player slot. And now that Christmas stuff is up, we don't take the crudely constructed wooden baby Jesus out of his makeshift cardboard manger and try to eat him. Call me strict.

Christmas shopping is all but done, and every day that goes by that I trip over Katherine's play vacuum or slip on an errant marble or jump when T.J. Bearytales lets out a bone-chilling blat of discordant music as his batteries slowly die makes me more set on the idea that my kids just don't NEED a whole lot. Give Katherine an empty box and a Happy Meal race car. Give Alex a piece of paper and find him a YouTube video of the lady who does step-by-step origami. They're all set.

That's it for now. I'm skipping over the ugly details of our recently ousted stomach virus because I'm still two brain-bleachings away from completely forgetting the ordeal. In fact, I'm skipping over a lot of things. But here is my nod to what we're up to in this almost-December of 2011 world. I take some solace in the fact that there's no more significant news to report.

Wherein I blog badly

Forgive me if this post is only semi-literate. I'm tired. Katherine was up all night for the first time in ... well, ever ... and that's including those newborn days when she would wake up, suck down a midnight snack, and go straight back to sleep. Yes, I know how lucky we were.

Last night was a different story. She was very obviously having trouble getting comfortable. It started with moaning, tossing and turning. At one point I went in and her head was pressed up against the foot of the bed, one arm flung over the back of her head and one leg sticking through the bars of her crib (and here I thought one of the bazillion crib recalls had addressed that particular hazard).

She was fine as long as I was holding her, but when this became clear it was 3:30 in the morning and I didn't fancy standing next to her crib holding her for the next three hours. So I thought to myself, Self, no one is getting any sleep this way. Let's just put her in our bed. Myself and I did so. And we discovered, quickly, that our girl is a burrower. She would wiggle around until her face was smushed right up against my own, which was fine and dandy except that my nose and mouth were buried in her chubby cheeks and I couldn't breathe. So I moved, and she went over to her daddy, who was still out cold, and burrowed into his side until he woke up and made the grave mistake of rubbing her head, which she took as a sign that it was time to play. Cue flopping and rolling and general delirium culminating in her patting (slapping) me on the face a few times, until I opened my eyes and looked at her ... and she waved "hi" at me.

Suffice it to say, bringing her in bed with us is not an option.

Today, after a trip to the doctor, we know it's a virus and an ear infection and she's started antibiotics and is Motrined up. My plan is to attempt to sleep on the couch with her if it proves to be a night like last night. I figure one of us should get some peaceful sleep, and why not let it be Steven, since I can ostensibly neglect to shower and/or dress and still get some work done tomorrow.

Which brings me to the all-around ick that was this day.

Sometimes I think on-the-job training is insufficient when it comes to parenthood. There should be a boot camp of sorts, an immersion crash course covering every scenario you might possibly encounter over the next eighteen years and then some.

I mean, parenthood. It's arguably the most important job there is, right, and there's nothing that can prepare you for all it entails. It's the great equalizer, isn't it? We grow these creatures in our bodies, we plan and prepare and stockpile gear and necessities and read All Those Books like our lives depend on it and formulate opinions on things we never before considered (cloth or disposable? breast or bottle? co-sleeping or crib? paci or not?). We decorate nurseries as though matching a bed skirt to a window treatment or finding the perfect shade of paint for those wooden wall-hanging monograms of the future occupant's future name is going to make one bit of difference.

The rules change when it becomes reality, and that happens at different times for different people. Women, more often than not, have their epiphany earlier than men, who don't suffer the back pain or the massive body changes, the blood pressure ups and downs and the sleep deprivation from fifteen nightly trips to the bathroom, who don't feel the squirms and bumps of an ACTUAL BABY growing and subsisting in their ACTUAL BODY.

Fast-forward six years, to the child who someone less sensitive than I might call our guinea pig. When we had him, my husband and I barely knew anything about being grownups, much less parents. We got dogs and thought they were a good-enough trial run. Essentially, we were stupid. Or at least its kinder equivalent, naive. Ever since, there has been something new around every corner. First diaper change, first trip to Children's Hospital ER, first public tantrum, first day of kindergarten, first day he didn't want me to sing him a song before bed ... firsts every day, every single day.

It hasn't been easy lately. In some ways my boy is old beyond his years. The child has been speaking coherently since the ripe old age of nine months, and while he has retained certain little Alexisms from yesteryear (i.e. he still says "I had bleed," instead of "I bled," for instance, and his prepositions and verb tenses aren't so polished, and some of his mispronunciations I will never correct because they are just damn cute and I'll probably continue to think so when he's sixteen and other people deem it a bit odd). But he's six. He's six and growing up too fast because that's what kids do these days. I don't think we did. But maybe members of every generation believe that they were kids longer than they were, because childhood, when you're in it, seems eternal, vast and all-encompassing with no boundaries or time constraints.

So, as a mother, I struggle to merge the duality of my son's six-year-oldness and his desire and sporadic successes at being, or at least seeming, much older than that.

"You have recess after lunch?" my mother asked him one day.

"Yes, that's correct," he replied seriously.

Who talks like that? My sometimes-pretentious first-grade man-in-the-making.

Now, and by now I mean this week, he's obsessed with sportsmanship. He is a bad sport, he says, and having seen some of his disproportionate outbursts when he loses, I can't honestly disagree with him. But we've discussed how it's a choice, not how he feels when he loses, but what he does with how he feels. (Sometimes therapy starts at home.)

But he stubbornly refuses to admit that he knows that's the case. "I made the choice to be a good sport," he told me tonight through gritted teeth, from behind the pantry door where he'd chosen to hide so as to avoid looking me in the eye. "It didn't work."

Just now I went into his room for our reading time, and I found a note on his floor.


"That's for you," he said.

"Oh really, what's it for?"

"You told me how to be a good sport, and now the good sport is just popping right out of me."

I hope, hope, hope, that we're doing right by him. But again, without the handbook, who ever knows? I wish there were report cards for parenthood. Something to let you know if your kid is on the path to greatness, or to simple happiness, or to self-fulfillment ... or to prison. Not that those are the only options, mind, but I'd take any of the first three.

And I know it's not all nurture because nature plays a role. From that I take solace and find new worries, because I am me and it's my nature.

No one instilled it in me. It's just me.

Just like Alex is Alex, sweet and stubborn and earnest, goofy and serious and fiercely loyal, tenderhearted, maddening, and temperamental.

Just like Katherine is Katherine, affectionate and obstinate, funny and exasperating, a hyperactive, intoxicated monkey as a bunkmate and a squishy piece of heaven after bathtime.

All I can say is that we're doing it, day by day, helping these little people grow and trying our blind best to facilitate that growth, to guide without pushing, and to instill in them the simplest and the most important fact that anyone can hope to possess: that they are loved without question and beyond reason.