Don't type THAT.

He's only five, but today I realized it was time to put a parental control block on the computer. Because when you have a child who is so excited about learning to sound out words that he's doing random Google searches of his favorite ones, bad things can happen.

I know, because one of them happened today. I woke up from my brief but restless nap with Katherine to the sound of him cackling breathlessly, as only five-year-old boys seem able to do. I only caught a glimpse before he closed the window (we have rules about not doing anything on the computer outside of Playhouse Disney games, the occasional rousing round of Road Rash circa-1989 Atari, and a charming but annoying site called Learn to Read!) But what I saw just didn't look right, y'all. It didn't look like anything that somebody who was a baby just the other day should be looking at.

I mean, sounding out words is far from foolproof. In a world where he might type in words he knows and get results that are far from child- or even regular-people-friendly, you have to be careful. Alex might someday type in "race" looking for some cool cars and end up on a cyber-gathering place for skinheads. And then there are the words he almost knows. He recently sounded out the word "cake" in a book and ... well, I'm not even going there. ("Hm, Alex ... what other sound can "a" make?)

It's a dangerous place, this pass-through ramshackle town called Almost Literate. And of course I say this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek (though it occurs to me that THAT phrase could bring up some Google ghastliness), but I did have Steven set a parental control on Google searches.

He decided it was working when he typed in "boob" and got no results. Oy.

And another weekend has come and gone. I spent it enjoying my family: watching bad movies with Steven, painting pictures with Alex and watching him engage in all his weird little-kid doings, like putting all his stuffed animals in a plastic bag and arranging them in the middle of the trampoline. Putting his pants on backward and then telling me, when I pointed it out, that he likes them that way. Insisting on wearing his fleece-lined waterproof jacket to the grocery store because "it might rain, you never know."

And of course I spent plenty of time holding Katherine (a lot; she didn't want to be put down much this weekend), kissing rolls of baby fat and acting like an utter fool to make her laugh.

Tomorrow it's back to the new normal. I'm good with that.

I lost my kid today.

This walking thing.

Alex went to the park with his "new best friend in the world," Riggs (I don't know) today. Instead of meeting me where I was waiting for him at the top of the track.

I was busily engaged in an adorable conversation with a gaggle of little girls who were magnetically drawn to Katherine in her stroller and wanted to touch her toes, point out to me that her pacifier had fallen out, ask me if Katherine was with a "K" or a "C" (this one was from a Catherine with a "C" who had a Cindy Brady lisp that made the braggy spelling of her own name extra adorable), and otherwise act like tiny women.

Suddenly I realized that all the walkers had passed while I chatted up Kat's admirers, and nary a scruffy-haired, yellow-polo-clad, oversize-backpack-toting kindergartner among them.

My irrational heart jumped into my irrational throat. You remember that Movie of the Week called I Know My First Name is Steven? It's been a running joke between my husband Steven and me for some years now. Anyway, that movie came to mind. Irrationally.

I got up and started back down the track toward the playground, scanning the area and continuing not to see him. The girls drifted away to their waiting moms like obedient children, except for one, the daughter of a former classmate of mine, who is much chattier and precocious than I remember her mother being. Then again, I wasn't exactly friends with her mother. No, VHHS alum, I ain't telling.

And this story has a rather anticlimactic conclusion, but thank God for that. Alex and Riggs were there, at the playground, playing with a dog, looking for caterpillars (Shelby's sad little corpse has been deposited in our front flower bed because Steven told Alex the thing had to be outside to build his cocoon, oy), and just generally being 5-year-old boys.

Which means that when I called Alex's name, he glanced up briefly from where he was kneeling to pet the dog, looked vaguely surprised to see me there, and said, "Oh yeah, I got something for you." Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out one of those burr thingies that fall off trees, only this one was green instead of brown like they usually are, after they die, I guess. I took it from his grubby little hand and thought about how hard it is, this business of letting the rope out. Bit by bit, I'm giving him more slack when sometimes all I want to do is reel it back in. I look down and he's not there and I panic. Sometimes even when he's safe at school I have that moment, that zingy !!!where'smykid!!! moment that sends irrational hearts into irrational throats.

But of course we had the inevitable talk about how I have to know where he is at all times, even if he was "just about to leave but [he] had to see the dog and then there was a caterpillar but [he] lost it. And can Riggs come over??"

I'm so glad he's making new friends.

A post about nothing.

I haven't been sleeping right lately. By "right," I mean not like me. I used to be able to go to bed at 9, wake up at 10, and take a two-hour afternoon nap without missing a beat. Now I'm lucky if I'm asleep before midnight and I hate it when the husband comes to bed before I've even worked out the antsiness of the day by reading a chapter or two of whatever (usually) Stephen King book is on my nightstand or writing ... something like this.

Getting up is no problem, and I'm glad for that. I wake up naturally between 5 and 6 unless Katherine has other ideas, though thankfully she rarely does. She's been very reserved with her free thinking thus far, and yes, I realize I've just condemned myself to a night of ups and downs for feedings and Miracle Blanket jailbreaks.

There's just so much to do at night. Things I didn't do during the day that I kept meaning to do. Dishes to put in the dishwasher, for instance, or spit-up-stained clothes to wash. Apropos of nothing I just brushed my dog. It's 10:20 p.m. I have too much energy and too little time. AND too much to do. It's quite the conundrum.

I no longer have to pick out clothes for the next day because I just grab something pseudo-presentable that is not likely to get points and stares when I walk Alex to school. I've realized it's pointless to shower until I come back from doing that, at least until blessed fall graces us here in the far reaches of Hell. (Though that's not altogether fair; we had quite a lovely day today, and no, I am not going to blog about the weather.)

Katherine slept pretty much all day today, with the dual exceptions of when I took her by my (now-former) office and she demanded to be let out of her stroller (she was hijacked by the president of the company for a least an hour while I sat there afraid to tell her I had to go even though she no longer holds my livelihood in her hands) and then decided to turn on her fuss the second a friend came over to visit. Lessons learned: When you bring a baby into an office populated primarily by women, block off a chunk of the day and bring a bottle. And keep friends like mine, who understand that babies cry sometimes and it's neither a reflection of your failure as a mother or the baby's bad attitude.

I'm tired now, but not sleepy. Tomorrow I have nothing to do all day so I plan to get lots of work done. I realized I've also just condemned myself to a day of writer's block and lethargy, if not a cranky baby to boot.

Tonight I'm looking forward to the weekend, and beyond that to a girls' beach trip in the offing. If any one of you backs out, I'm going to personally beat you up.

For mothers.

Mothers, as a whole, are a resilient bunch.

They kind of have to be. Their hearts are beating not for one, but for two, three, four ... twenty if you're Michelle Duggar. (But let's not get into that maybe-pathology.)

Mothers are healers, short-order cooks, personal assistants, dictionaries, maids, and drill sergeants.

They are appreciators of confounding art and boosters of confidence.

They keep secrets and they share them.

They bury dead caterpillars and mourn lost toys and crashed rockets.

They bandage skinned knees and soothe hurt feelings.

They sing the same bedtime song every night for four years straight.

They mold and they shape and they hope that what comes out in the end is something as beautiful as what they started with, that gift they were given the day those heart-thieves took over their lives.

It's the most wonderful kind of robbery.

Jinx!

It was a rough weekend here at the ol' Bosche stead.

I earned every bit of it, every whine, every tear, every fit whether mine or that of one or the other of my offspring. Because my last post was just too life-is-grand to sustain itself.

It was brutally hot, both inside and out, and we never did get the rain I'd been counting on. I worked too much and drank too little. Alex regressed to the age of three, crying over everything that went even microscopically askew for no explicable reason.

Katherine, dear, sweet baby Katherine ... well, she just about did me in with her refusal to sleep and the resulting caustic crankiness. She wouldn't eat and five minutes later would scream for food like she was being torn limb from limb by a hungry mountain lion. She spat up so much we ran through most of the clean clothes in her drawer. And that's a LOT of clothes (thanks be to LJ!). No matter how we held her, swaddled, unswaddled, tummy to tummy, back to tummy, up high, down low, at an angle ... she squirmed and "ernnnngh"ed until you put her down. Whereupon she would scream.

White noise, fail.

Car rides, fail.

Alex making funny faces, double fail, as the failure hurt HIS suddenly extraordinarily delicate feelings and sent him into a funk from which he didn't emerge for hours.

Gas drops, Zantac, burping, bouncing, swinging, swaying, rocking, being still.

NOTHING WOULD WORK.

Thank GOD she slept through the night last night or I think I might have gone off the deep end. Which isn't saying much, as I usually tread water in that space in the pool that's right next to the rope line with the little buoys.

I got out of the house all of three times, and one was to get the mail and find no lottery checks awaiting me. Just a birthday invitation for some kid who called Alex a loser. (It was in the frame of preferred football teams, which really means this kid's DAD is to blame, so I won't hold it against him too hard. Though we are going to the state fair next weekend instead of to his party.)

One of my on-the-side articles got flagged for plagiarism, which set off every single defense mechanism I own all at once, at full blast. I would NEVER. It was cleared quickly, and it helped some that it was flagged by a computerized plagiarism checker, not a person, and only because I used a tiny phrase from a governmental document because I was scared to change the wording too much for fear of making it wrong and getting carted off to jail.

I don't know, I'm tired!

My birthday present to myself didn't work so we had to take it back.

My throat was and is on fire, and I'm hoping it's ragweed because if I'm getting sick I'll take a cue from Katherine and scream my displeasure to the stars.

...Otherwise, life is grand!

Small potatoes, I realize, and a minute price to pay for all that I do have and all that goes right more often than I have any right to expect.

But still. Next time I go off on a Pollyanna tangent, muzzle me.

***

Upon re-reading, I realize I used "defense mechanism" wrong. But it's really less of an error on my part than a compliment to anyone who's reading. My friends and family are smart. Y'all know what I meant.

Well, THIS is new.

I’m new to this work-at-home thing.

Eyes on my computer monitor, I reach over for my coffee and my hand comes back holding a bottle, a pacifier, a bottle of Mylicon.

That almost never happened at the office.

Alex started kindergarten last week, and now it’s just me and my little turkey, 9-week-old Katherine. She’s still sleeping a lot, as newborns are wont to do, and I usually set her up to nap next to me on the couch while I tap away at my laptop and listen to her gentle coos and rhythmic sucking sleep sounds.

One thing hasn’t changed from the days when she was in me instead of beside me: She still kicks me while I’m working.

I expected to feel a little shaken up at first, a little chicken-with-its-head-cut-off, and I do. I’ve never had a job under the same roof as my bed, my refrigerator … my underwear drawer. At first I worked feverishly to make up for the feeling that I was doing something wrong.

I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing hooky. I was in pajamas and sock feet in the middle of the day; how could I not feel that way?!

To outrun the guilt I threw myself into work. I wrote, I edited, I revised, I read, I repeated. I cleaned the house. I did the laundry. One day, I kid you not, I scrubbed the baseboards. I came back to write some more. Oh yes, and there was a tiny baby and a bored 5-year-old who both needed attention in diametrically opposed ways. People, I did it all.

But my work suffered; I noticed the quality slipping, and even though I’m one of my toughest critics, I maintain that when I’m mixing up “there,” “their,” and “they’re” and failing to make even a hint of a point in 500 words, there’s a problem.

And my mothering suffered, too. “Go outside and play,” I said to Alex one day when he was pestering me with his ballooning and absolutely valid boredom. “Mommy’s working.”

“It’s too hot,” he argued.

“Go get a snack, then,” I said, irritably. And as he ran off to the kitchen to get a brownie (I hadn’t specified, in my horrific display of lazy parenting, what kind of snack he should choose to relieve his boredom) I realized what I’d just said.

“Wait a minute, we don’t eat just because we’re bored!” I called after him. That child looked me straight in the eye and then, pointedly, at the open bag of potato chips on the table next to me.

Katherine woke to eat every three hours like a hungry little clock with a bloodcurdling wail to chime the hour, and I found myself rushing impatiently through whatever I was doing before tending to her.

I would type with one hand and feed with the other.

Even my dogs were being neglected. One of them adopted a stuffed animal "baby" of her own and the other developed an Eeyore complex and moped around the house sighing … wait, he’s always done that.



Slowing down wasn’t an option; I had to prove to the world that I wasn’t sitting on my couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah.

Or, because I was sitting on my couch eating potato chips and watching Oprah, I had to prove that wasn’t all I was doing.

I’d just taken on twenty times more work than I ever tackled at the office and I wanted everyone to know it.

“How was your day?” from my husband translated to, “Did you manage to drag yourself out of bed today while I was out in the real world breaking my back to keep our kids from starving?”

No, he doesn’t talk like that.

But because it’s what I feared, it’s what I heard, and my answer, a rattled-off list of every single solitary thing I had done since opening my eyes (very, very early) that morning, reflected that fear.

I’m getting over that fear slowly, coming to realize that working from home can truly be the best of both worlds. I can wipe noses and elicit toothless grins and not miss a beat writing daily posts for Corporate Wellness Advisor (shameless plug) or one of my other regular clients.

I’m learning that it’s all about time management and priorities. When the baby is spitting up and gargling on it, I am going to suction her out before I finish the sentence I was writing. Even if I’d had the perfect conclusion in mind and those few moments of oh-my-God-she’s-drowning panic blew it right out of my head.

If I don’t get enough done during the day because she won’t abide not being held (with both arms, the demanding little thing), I toss dinner duty my husband’s way and stomp on the little voice that tries to tell me he’s been working all day because so have I.

I can work while he does the parenting sometimes, and when that doesn’t cut it, well, that’s what wee hours and weekends are for.

I’ve realized it helps to get dressed … besides making me feel like less of a slob, I can’t very well walk Alex to and from school in my torn 15-year-old Victoria’s Secret nightgown. Even though it is the softest thing I've ever known.

Which reminds me that it’s almost time to get Katherine fed and Zantac’ed up (moms are all nurses, too; add that to the list) so we can walk down the street to meet him without her doing her “errngh, errrngh, errrrngh” thing the whole way. (It’s a sound of distress or annoyance, sometimes both, and I blame many a typo on it because it gets right down in the middle of your middle ear and vibrates your whole head until you want to jam a pencil into your eardrum.)

So here we go.

Keep the work coming, I say. I got the balancing act down.

All That and More.

Katherine hates Publix with a passion.



This is the fifth time she's been there, and the fifth time she has (loudly) expressed her displeasure about it.

Halfway down the bread aisle, I pulled over to try the pacifier rotation. This includes the Comfort Paci, the Frustration Paci (which Alex calls the Mad Paci), and the Hunger Paci, the latter to be used only temporarily while somebody gets a bottle ready, or to test the "she's hungry" theory when, according to the clock and all those books that don't know what they're talking about, she shouldn't be, yet.

When she spat all of them out with a look of contempt and opened that adorable little Cupid's bow mouth to yell at me, I stuck the emergency bottle into it. She shook her head at me. Yes, she did.

So then my little helper jumped in, as he does whenever he thinks he knows better how to handle any given situation than I do, which is pretty much all the time.

"Why don't you just pick her up?"

Fine.

So I got her out of the car seat, which was hooked onto the front of the almost-full shopping cart, and she instantly passed out on my shoulder just like she did after the birth experience, as if we had both not just been through something pretty noteworthy.

Pushing the cart, which OF COURSE had a bum wheel and wanted to pull stubbornly to the left, proved more difficult than my adviser or I had anticipated. We ended up walking in front of it, each on one side so that we took up the whole breadth of the aisle (the breadth of the bread aisle, heh), me barking navigational orders. "Turn right. No, your other right. Watch out, we're about to hit that guy!"

And I did almost take out an elderly lady who responded to my harassed-sounding, "I am so sorry," with "Oh no, baby, you've got your hands full, bless your heart!" Which made me extra glad I hadn't run over her because I'm a sucker for well-intended terms of endearment. Go on, call me sweetheart or honey, make me believe it, and see if I don't agree to lend you a hundred bucks.

But I got my grocery shopping done, and Katherine's mini-meltdown didn't faze me much. Alex and I even laughed about it as I was unloading our stuff onto the check-out belt one-handed and trying to get Alex to conform to my unloading method: frozen with frozen, cold with cold, boxes with boxes, cans with cans, etc. NO, I AM NOT ANAL RETENTIVE.

And I just realized I've written all of this about a fairly run-of-the-mill grocery store experience, so no wonder my uber-nice sister-in-law is usually my only commenter! I'm sure you've lived through a bazillion of these scenarios, C.

Bigger and better: Alexander started kindergarten.



He likes his teacher (whew, because she seemed a little less kid-gloved than I would have liked) and made three friends ("at the same time!!") because they all sit at his table. He doesn't remember their names but promises to tell us when he learns them. They're very tight.

Liddy, the girl next door who is very much in love with him, is not in his class but they did meet up at recess. I guarantee there was hugging. This girl hugged him so hard his feet left the floor (and she is a little girl) when we ran into them on Meet the Teacher day. Ever since he gave her a hydrangea blossom she's been his biggest fan. I figure if he's going to be a ladies' man, one day he can help us protect Katherine from the jerks Steven seems bitterly certain she's going to want to go out with.

I had a good birthday, spent Friday sitting around a metal table in a thunderstorm talking and laughing with awesome friends who sang Happy Birthday to me at midnight; enjoyed the gift of an extra two hours of sleep when Katherine went back down after her first bottle of the morning; went clothes shopping for comfortable things to wear in my "home office" that aren't pajamas but which I can wear out of the house and not be mortified when Liddy's mom drops by unexpectedly in the middle of an unsuspecting Tuesday morning. (When we ran into them at the school, she hugged me like we're BFFs and said she will be coming by to meet the baby soon. Scary, as sometimes I don't wear the requisite undergarments while I'm working on my couch, or I have on a threadbare T-shirt with chicken wing and wine stains on it. Classy.)

I wish there weren't windows in our front door.

My parents graciously offered to come over and watch the kiddos while Steven and I went out to dinner last night. I felt prettyish for the first time since this second birthin', and granted it took some WORK, but I think it was my new wine-colored lip gloss. I'm a fan of colorful lips. I ate chicken and lobster and drank Chardonnay and met someone with four kids and a passion for her church and a burning desire to share that passion with any and everyone. She happened to have graduated with my sister and was nice as nice could be and had lovely, well-behaved children but wouldn't stop talking to us. (Ironically, when we got there she said to her kids, "Leave these people alone; they're on a date night!")

I got awesome new knives (and boy does it take a brave man to buy his often-moody wife knives) and a lopsided chocolate cake with bumpy icing that was delicious and as cute as a baked good can be.



I also scored the infamous green mop that Alex saw on a commercial months ago and has been telling me he wants to get for me ever since ("It even has a powerful vacuum!" ... which it doesn't, but that's because I told Steven to find a cheap green mop that would satisfy Alex without costing too much), gift cards for !!!CLOTHES!!!, a salad spinner, and a necklace that lets me wear my kids where they belong ... no, not around my neck (though on a bad day it often feels like they're hanging there). Near my heart.

I also got lots of much-appreciated birthday wishes on Facebook and that special birthday feeling that lasted all day long.

I love my peeps.

Changes ... (y)uck.

Go download the song "Everywhere I Go," by Lissie. It's beautiful. I love it. I'm listening to it now.

I would also recommend anything at all by Matthew Ryan, but as I went back to insert this sentence his lovely "Some Streets Lead Nowhere" came on my playlist, so that's a good one to start with. It takes about 20 minutes to really get going, but it features pretty and evocative lines like "What I'm trying to say is I was afraid that you'd leave, so I slept with my failures and I started to grieve" ... so I'll forgive it.

Which is maybe why I find myself in this nostalgic place that usually leads nowhere but to a restless night's sleep and/or morning-after regret and toe-scuffing apologies.

Or it could be that Steven and I were watching the movie The Road, which, if you haven't seen it, don't. (Wow, this is a bossy post.)

We're only halfway through and I'm abjectly terrified that the kid's going to die. Even though the post-Apocalyptic world he and his dad are traveling is hardly a place I'd want to live. Bottom line, there's a little boy in the movie, and Steven made the comment that after you have kids it's harder to stomach movies in which kids are sick or hurting or in danger and whatnot.

It led to a conversation about our awesome Alexander Kirk, and how sweet he is, and how proud we are, and how he's starting freaking school next week. He's going to be fine, I know he is, but ... he's my baby. And it's a scary thing, this place in time when they have to let go of our hands and go it alone.

We all did it, though, right? And we're fine, most of us. And if anyone can do it, Alex can. That boy's got it all, and I have no idea where he got it, no offense to my wonderful husband or myself, but I thank God every day for blessing him so completely.

I guess I'll just miss that hand in mine.

Other reasons I'm indulging in my Playlist o' Melodrama?

Well, I quit my job on Friday. It's been something we've talked about and talked about until I almost broke my own staggering record for indecisiveness, but in the end it just made the most sense. Financially, logistically ... child-o-centrically.

I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing, essentially, which has been anything but sitting on my you-know-what in my pajamas all day long enjoying my UNPAID maternity leave. (Well, pajamas, so what?) I've been freelancing, and God willing the well won't run dry but if it does, I am secure in the knowledge that we will work it out.

The day I lost my job with perhaps the best group of people who've ever been thrown together to produce a magazine, I thought my heart would break and be swiftly followed by our bank account. Didn't happen that way. I dealt with it. I worked, I networked, I found work. And that taught me something about myself: that I can do it if I have to.

For this.



And for this.



And, at the end of the day, for me, too.

Now I'm closing out iTunes and going to bed. Night, all.

Keepin' On

I’ve devoted much of my last few posts to Katherine.

She’s new, she’s mysterious, she’s … loud. Quite, quite loud. And I’m not just saying she cries a lot (which she does) but the child, to be so tiny, makes A LOT of noise. All the time. She grunts, pretty much constantly, and the grunts have different meanings. There’s the “I’m hungry” grunt, which quickly turns to the “Feed me now or I’m going to shatter glass” screech.

There’s the “I’m kind of interested in what you’re doing” grunt, which makes you keep doing what you’re doing until she tires of it and her grunt changes to the “Stop it now or I’ll make you wish you had never started” one.

She grunts when she eats, she grunts when she sleeps, she grunts when she’s in any one of those states of being the book tells me small infants have: quiet alert, active alert, asleep, and the ones I don’t remember because Katherine only does those three.

Plus the crying. Did I mention the crying? She had her first public meltdown today in the (oh-so-quiet and oh-so-crowded, of course) waiting room of my doctor’s office. I, being someone who is not particularly keen on attracting undue attention, could quite literally have melted into the carpet in a puddle of blush-red goo.

And have you ever tried to change a seriously dirty diaper in a bathroom without a changing table? So that you’re doing all the maneuvering with the baby inside her car seat inside her stroller? It’s not fun, I tell you. Thank God for Alex, who stood nearby with helpful bits of insight like, “Maybe we can wait and change her when we get home,” and “Shouldn't you have brought more wipes?”

And he’s the one I wanted to talk about in this post. My baby boy, whose hands are now shockingly huge, and I have no idea if he’s recently had a growth spurt or if I’m just used to the comparatively itsy-bitsy baby ones. Either way, those biggish hands make me sad sometimes. He’s growing up so fast. Starts kindergarten in mere days.

We had a heart-to-heart on the swings at the park yesterday. He told me that the boy he met at orientation, the one whose name he didn’t know and who, according to the original version of the story, didn’t talk to him much if at all, is sure to be in his class. Furthermore, the boy’s name has since become Andrew, as in, “I hope my best bud Andrew is in my class, too.”

On my way down the hall toward bed tonight, I stepped over two paper airplanes (but don’t let him hear you call them that; they’re JETS) and a plastic Nintendo DS game case filled with pennies and a slip of paper on which is printed ALEX. It’s his wallet, and the paper is, of course, his ID. He’s been taping it to his shirt with masking tape every day, and offering to pay for groceries or whatever I happen to be purchasing at the time.

He wants a beagle. Apropos of nothing he decided this. Just got on the computer, did a Google search for “dog,” and found and fell in love with the picture that popped up first: a beagle puppy that’s up for adoption at a rescue organization in Harlem. “What button do I push to order him?” he wanted to know.

Tonight I got two good-night hugs (“You forgot something,” he told me the second time) and a promise that he will have a really cool dream so he can tell me about it in the morning.

Some days are hard. Some days Alex doesn’t stop talking and Katherine refuses to be appeased by any any anything. Some days I miss grown-up people and feeling like part of the world. Some days I get damn tired of my couch and my never-ending freelance work and my house that’s never quite clean enough for my liking.

But then.

Then I get a good night’s sleep. And then, in the light of day, I look at him with his untamable hair and his unfathomably huge eyes that seem able to read souls, and I look at her with her mouth wide open and her face beet red, ready to unleash howls from the bowels of hell (but also with her unimaginably soft hands that grip my fingers and the glimpses of that dimple that likes to hide beneath the pudge of her cheeks), and I wonder how I got so lucky.