Milestones.

Instead of milestones, I used to dwell too much on "lasts." One night will be the last night he wants me to sing him the ABC song and tuck him in. One day she will not be so eager to do ... well, everything. One day, one day.

I'm kind of a Debbie Downer. Or, I can be. I fight the tendency with a little help from my friends, who see things so much clearer than I do on a pretty standard basis. They are master redirectors, pep talkers, empathizers. How I fell in with them in the first place I'll never know. For a long time I suspected them of some hidden agenda, but I've pretty much let my guard down and no one has yet poisoned my drink. (Unless they're doing it slowly, the better to watch me suffer.) Ha! I kid!

Milestones abound in these parts of late. Alexander the Kirk is reading, really reading, books at a steady clip. That happened overnight and it still takes my breath away.

Princess Katherine is trying to crawl but has so far only succeeded in finding reverse gear. Tonight we found her head sticking out from under the couch. She had backed the rest of her trying-to-be-reasonably-mobile body under the couch. Oh YES I got pictures! And because she's one of the happiest babies in the world, she wasn't a bit concerned about her predicament but found it hilarious.

Other milestones: Alex bikes without training wheels. We finally realized we just had to let go and he'd get it, and he did! There were a few "I'm never going to be able to do it" meltdowns, a few threats to skip the infamously bratty birthday child's party completely, one or two discussions about how training wheels are not the mark of failure and will not doom him to the entire school's contempt, but in the end it didn't matter, because he got it. Debbie Downer SMILED.

Katherine eats peas. Regular ones, like what we're having, as long as I mush them up and look away so I don't have to witness the messy struggle that ensues as she tries to command her motor skills to not only grasp a squished pea in her tight little fist, but bring it to her mouth and then -- this is the tricky part -- OPEN, so that she can use her tongue to maneuver it inside. And then we all hope it stays there instead of falling out when she realizes she's succeeded and opens her mouth wide to grin at us (See what I did? See? See what I-- oh.) PLUNK. It's almost painful to watch. Minus the almost.

I'm staying busy and fighting the procrastination bug, which has been scarce since I had a real job (oops, an office job) ... because what was I going to procrastinate? But now there's daily work and longer-term deadlines, and I'm learning to juggle them all. A roll of duct tape is at the ready for that nagging voice that tells me none of this is a promise, none of it is forever.

Because nothing is. But I'm practicing living in the day, in the hour, in the moment. When you don't do that things happen too fast. Like your babies start riding bikes and crawling under couches, and you missed it because you were lost in the what-ifs of the future. I can't do that right now. I won't.

To borrow and paraphrase a phrase from the late, great Lost, what happens, happens.

All we have to do is be here when it does.

Little Hurts

I'm sitting here on my bed, pondering the two spots of blood that Alex dripped there today when he came in from outside, sobbing hysterically that he'd fallen on the ice and it hurt everywhere EVERYWHERE! And to be honest, it looked pretty bad. Not like one of those barely there scrapes he likes to flaunt and crow about and use up too many Band-Aids for (so that when you ACTUALLY have a bleeding wound from slicing your finger damn near off while chopping potatoes that no one wanted to eat afterward, you have to bind it with Scotch tape). His poor little thumb took the brunt of the accident, skin pushed up and aside to reveal a smoother layer of wannabe skin beneath. And lots of blood. Enough to where, when he started to panic, I lied unabashedly and without a second thought about how when the blood soaks through the Band-Aid, it's just proof that it's doing its job and healing the injury.

He lay next to me in bed (where I'd been napping lightly when he woke me up with that cry that every mother knows, the cry of her child in pain, so different in timbre, texture, and effect than any of those other cries we know so well) until he got himself under control. I think it was the idea of showing it off to Steven that finally won him over. "He'll be really impressed," I told him. "Daddy is easily grossed out."

A smile. That's what I was going for, and I got it. Plus a "Thanks, Mom" for fixing the hurt finger and kissing it even though he's probably too wise-beyond-his-years to think that my kisses have healing powers anymore (if he ever believed that).

It was nice, after our altercation yesterday, when I cut him off mid Mario Kart and told him he was done for the night because I'm not going to have that "Don't freak out when you lose" talk with him again and I have to stick to what I'm calling my Zero Tolerance policy for video-game-related outbursts. At this point I pretty much hate Mario, which is sad, since he was my friend growing up, too. And there are toothmarks in my old NES controllers to prove that I was every bit as irrational as Alex can be when I lost. (But we want better for our own children, don't we?) His "I'm not liking you ever again, and I don't love you anymore, either!" was vitriolic, uncertain at its core, and absurdly short-lived. If I thought it was a useful skill I'd show him how to REALLY hold a grudge. (I don't think it is.)

Today I fixed his finger, and he let me kiss the wound and hug him and treat him almost like a baby, although I was sworn to secrecy about how much he actually cried. So, for the record, he was an almost-silent trouper.

Our princess is growing so fast it's mind-boggling. Someone asked me today, while I was lugging the poor baby through the third store of the morning on a desperate search for biscuit cutters and a rolling pin for a photo shoot I have tomorrow, how old she was. My immediate response, shy by just a few days, of "Seven months," shocked me even as I said it. How can my little girl be over halfway to a year old? How can she be the age Alex was five hundred years ago? They JUST put her on my chest and covered us both with that hot blanket and marveled over the way she just went right to sleep there, two minutes after birth. Not just. Seven months ago. Yikes.

Steven wants her to crawl. I think he is mistaken about the importance of crawling to motor development. It's not necessary, and it's certainly not convenient on the range of handy skills they learn like sitting up, holding their own bottles, putting pacis back into their mouths without assistance ... I think she will be a roller. It seems to require less effort on her part, and my Kat she is lazy. But she has figured out that three rolls off her play pallet on the floor will get her over to the dogs' bed, where she can poke and prod Jack and try to suck on Charlie's tail while they give me silent looks that say, respectively, "Seriously?" and "Is this OK?"

I have work coming in from several corners and am endlessly grateful for all of them. I'm also grateful for a long weekend, Steven's clean bill of health from the orthopedist, and the fact that the biscuits I made for tomorrow's shoot didn't turn out terribly ugly. And that I have a girls' night on Friday, and a husband who is all for it.

The good, the bad, and the etc.

It's been a while since I've blogged, and it's not because things aren't happening, but because it's hard to find the time.

Katherine is getting more and more active. Of course she's sleeping less during the day, which is to be expected, but for the past few weeks she has also made me regret all those times I've raved about her nighttime sleep habits without knocking on wood.

It's unpredictable; that's always been my undoing.

Predictability, as far as I'm concerned, is an asset that trumps all others. It can be something predictably awful, like burning your hand on the stove every single day at 1:29 p.m., or something predictably neutral, like dinner at 6:12 every night. As long as it can be counted upon to happen, I adapt. But little K's tendency to keep us guessing is taking some getting used to.

We took the kids to see Santa on Saturday, and Alex was shy but determined to tell him that we will be at Nana's house this year (so he won't miss us). Santa promised to be there. Alex grilled me afterward about whether or not that was the REAL Santa, and told me it's a good thing I'm not Santa, because I'd get really tired of landing on all those rooftops in one night. (My trademark laziness is lost on no one.)

I think he's already questioning the logistics.

Katherine went willingly to the old man (who looked especially old this year, bless him) and touched his beard and graced him with one of her big gummy smiles. The girl tasked with making easily distracted kids smile with her jingly reindeer puppet said, "She's, like, the best baby ever!" which, while obviously little more than teenage hyperbole, warms a mama's heart.

This was before Katherine spat up all over me and her beautiful green satin dress and the bench and the floor while we sat in the middle of the mall waiting for Alex and Steven to come out of Game Stop.

She knows how to charm a stranger, that one. She's a magnet for all those baby lovers, smiling and cooing and flirting her little heart out, so much so that I've had two creepy offers by old men to PURCHASE her and one slightly less creepy declaration by a sweet-looking elderly lady: "Just give me a chunk of her, that's all I need!"

It looks creepier in writing.

Things aren't quite all sunshine and gummy smiles and roses these days, but that's life. Which is what I told Alex tonight, when he despaired all kinds of out of proportion about the fact that Scooby-Doo Camp Scare had to go back to Red Box before he'd finished watching it. I don't know if he bought it any more than any of us do, when it comes down to those day-to-day disappointments that make up so much of life. But we learn to live with them without tears and melodrama, and he will, too. He's just (relatively) new.

Stress is, of late, like a hitchhiker I've picked up and can't shake out of my car, even after we've passed the exit he claimed he was looking for. I'm thinking of stopping at the nearest rest stop and booting him out and speeding away in a cloud of dust. I'm not the best analogy maker, but it's Sunday night and I'm tired.

Source of stress? I think it's Christmas. And not having the energy to do all the things I know I should do. It's being displeased with so many aspects of myself, and the ways in which I believe I'm falling short, and questioning even the things I think I'm doing right, like helping to raise smart, grateful, sensitive, empathetic kids who say (or will say) please and thank you without being reminded and hug me spontaneously and unselfconsciously.

It's, in a word, life. Good and bad and up and down and sometimes just there. But it's a package deal, and I do realize how blessed I am. How could I not be, with a husband who makes me giggle and snort like an intoxicated college girl, a little boy who tells me I can always call him my baby (as long as I don't tell Daddy), and a baby girl whose fast-evolving personality is in equal parts disarming, charming, and familiar? And, of course, dogs who curl up together on their new puffy bed like the remaining two puppies in an adoption-dwindling litter.

And friends who make me laugh and keep me sane. Eager and adept baby-holders, devoted Alex appreciators, bad-reality-show sharers, bravers of cold weather for the wonders of girltalk. I love them all.

A few things that have little to do with one another.

I'm a worrier, ain't no two ways about it. I come by it honestly, with two parents who are worriers each in their own distinctive ways. My father will plot out a trip to an unfamiliar destination as far in advance as possible, probably do a test-drive or two, and still leave early enough on the day he has to be there to arrive at least an hour early. (I got that from him.) My mother worries in less predictable ways and often about unlikely scenarios (i.e. If I didn't call when I was supposed to, she might jump to the conclusion that I'm dead rather sooner than most). That's a mother thing, and I'm developing my own.

But I worry (ahem) when I see the same tendency in Alex. I don't want to label him because he's FIVE and he's CHANGING and there's no way to know if what he's experiencing is natural, age-appropriate worry or if it falls somewhere a bit higher on the scale.

He had fun at his Halloween carnival but only after we convinced him that it was fun. Before that he was just jittery and reluctant and infuriatingly close-mouthed about what was wrong.

He thinks ahead about things that he will worry about in the future, i.e. "I don't want to go to college because it's too far away from you and Daddy." My response? "Well ... let's revisit this in twelve years or so."

He worried on his school's Pajama Day that he would be the only one in pajamas, and asked us each on three separate occasions to check the calendar and make really, really sure we had the right day. As if we would play some cruel, traumatizing prank on our sweet boy and send him into a den of kindergarten lions to be made fun of for wearing his Mario pj's, which are pilled and tired-looking but the only ones he owns that actually fit. (No one needs to know my son prefers to wear pajama shirts that don't cover his navel and pants that don't come near his ankle, right?)

He is at the same time brazenly confident and heart-wrenchingly uncertain, and it's all part of growing up, and whenever I stop and think about it, the hugeness of everything that lies before him, I have to catch my breath and remind myself that he's got to do these things and that he WILL find his way. Just like I did. Just like we all do. But when it's your little boy who comes home devastated because his best school friend didn't wait to walk with him, it's harder to accept that truth.

And all I can do is tell him how wonderful he his, how bright and funny and sweet and kind and beautiful, how insightful and observant and emotionally more mature than your average fully grown man. Hopefully the words don't lose any of their impact spoken, as they are, by someone who still often has trouble being assertive, taking the first step, going to the grocery store with no makeup on.

I believe in him and I know, in my heart, that he'll be fine. He'll be more than fine.

But the mother in me, the mother that IS me, now, still watches, waits, and worries.

Katherine has woken to her world completely and lights it up everywhere she goes. She has a wide-open, crooked grin and a coquettish flirty smile, eyelash batting and everything, that she saves for her daddy. Her giggles are impossibly contagious; they sound a little like hysterical coughs, and the sound always seems to surprise her. She's still bald as a cue ball, and I love her that way. She's grasping things: toys, blankets, shirts, hair. She can roll from belly to back but not the other way yet, and I wonder if that's because she simply despises being on her belly. Why would she go to such lengths to get there?

She is eating rice cereal and carrots, and by rice cereal I mean she's had several bites on several occasions that did not immediately ooze back out onto her bib, and by carrots I mean I shoved a couple of spoonfuls in her mouth tonight while we were waiting for her bath water to warm up. I figured carrots = messy. Handy bath was a good idea.

Steven's recuperating nicely and returned to work on Tuesday. Next week they take the staples out. He asked me if I thought that was going to hurt. Um. Well. They're going to PRY the STAPLES out of your WOUND. It probably won't be ice cream and puppy dogs. But I didn't tell him that.

That's all I've got for now, for this "blog" that's quickly becoming more of a "dumping ground" for "random thoughts du jour." (Though, really, that should be the official definition of blog.)

Good night.

Stick a fork in me.

I'm so tired I can't make myself even try to sleep.

Granted, sitting around a hospital waiting room doesn't sound all that exhausting, but somehow it is, especially when you've been up since 4 and are worrying about someone you love while families gather and laugh and talk and share concern and kill time all around you while sucking down Starbucks concoctions. (Genius, having a Starbucks across from the main waiting room. Even I succumbed, and I find their coffee to be only OK.)

As for me, the bag holding Steven's belongings broke and my phone died far too early in the day, my contacts got hopelessly foggy and the book I'm currently reading is too depressing to keep me terribly committed to finishing it.

Hours do have a way of passing, though.

Steven's orthopedist was four feet tall and had a Napoleon complex and talked to me like I was a six-year-old with a severe learning disability.

I was allowed to go back to recovery after he'd been there almost two hours, and he was still groggy and IN PAIN and nauseated and seemingly very surprised and kind of ticked off that he wasn't ready to hop out of bed and drive home.

The important thing is that the surgery went well, and bones and ligaments are back where they should be. Steven is worse for wear but I'm hoping the fact that he went to bed at 7 tonight and hasn't made a peep since bodes well for his feeling at least marginally better tomorrow.

My parents came over at the crack of dawn so they'd be here to get Alex off to school and to stay with Katherine until we came home, which turned out to be nine-plus hours later. Thank God for family.

My kid doesn't like me. Does that make me a good mom?

Well this seems blogworthy, if only to document the date and time of Alex's first outright tantrum. I know, I know, we got lucky when he was little. He was more of a stomper-off-to-his-room, which turned out to be a good thing since it gave him a place to vent where we didn't have to hear it. But tonight, oh. my. lord. I came into the conflict in the middle, so I'm not sure what happened except that he was playing DS and forgot to watch his wind-down show, which then became my fault even though I wasn't even in the room. Then he hit himself in the face with his DS in frustration, and if you know of DS-gate, you'll know that's a BIG NO-NO. So Steven took the DS away and told him to pick his books. The screaming, yelling, out-and-out freaking continued, even after I gave him to the count of five and then NO books. He calmed down a little but then ramped it up again, so guess what? No books.

Then he turned his unfiltered fury on me.

"MOMMY? I'M NOT GOING TO BE YOUR BEST FRIEND ANYMORE ... IF YOU DON'T GIVE ME ONE MORE CHANCE!"

"MOM? YOU'RE NOT VERY NICE."

"MAMA? I DON'T LIKE YOU RIGHT NOW."

"YOU'RE A BAD MOMMY!"

At which point Steven reached into his hidden pocket of parental tricks and basically silenced the child by, well, telling him to knock it off. Why didn't I think of that?

Beach, Bones, and Blues

A girls' trip gives the soul a chance to breathe, usually in quick gasps snatched through uncontrollable laughter.

Three days away from the three most important people in the world make them even more important than they were before; make them vital, absolute, irrevocable.

I am ridiculously blessed to have had both experiences this past weekend.

I have to admit that when I had my feet sunk deep into blinding white sand, a diabetic mimosa in my hand and newly downloaded music in my ears, surrounded by people with whom I've traveled a bumpy road that didn't manage to shake us apart even at its rockiest, all I was really focused on was relaxing. We had flawlessly blue skies, a steady breeze that took the bite out of the sun (and maybe only just enough that I didn't recognize I was getting slightly burned until it was called to my attention). Relaxing, yes, and a little soul-searching, as that's what I do at the foot of the end of the land.

My mind was everywhere and nowhere, but the little boy who kept trotting by pulled my thoughts back home to Alex, and the sound of a baby anywhere, at any time, made me yearn to sink my lips deep into rosy, smiley, squishy cheeks.

And of course I was thinking of Steven, with his broken shoulder, never letting on that he's in pain and never willing to admit that he needs help with anything. Thankfully, his mother knew better. (Thanks again, Kirk and Cindy!)

I'm lucky. Lucky to have friends like those who forgive my moody tendencies and inclination to zone out a bit during shop talk, who say HILARIOUS things and are just so irresistibly themselves that you have no choice but to love them.

I'm lucky to have my husband who claimed he would have tied me to the top of the car and driven me to the beach himself if he had to, when I protested that I shouldn't leave him there by himself with the kids and his injury.

Lucky to have a little boy who met me at the top of the driveway jumping up and down and threw half his body through my car window to give me the first of many "welcome home" hugs.

Lucky to have a baby girl whose eyes light up like a Christmas tree when she's happy and whose funny little mannerisms make her adorable even when she's not so happy.

Steven has to have surgery on his shoulder. Turns out the bone broke in pieces and severed the two ligaments that hold those bones in place. Or something like that. It's not outpatient, and it's not minimally invasive. It's going to require four to six months of recovery, and I know that hurts him because he's been training for a half marathon and really wanted to do the Vulcan Run. And his weekend bike excursions have to be put on hold indefinitely, which breaks my heart for him because I know how he loves those.

But, realizing how much worse it could have been, I feel like we're pretty blessed there, too. It wasn't his neck, after all. He came home, after all. And it's easy to say that's melodramatic in retrospect, but no one knows what could have unless it does. And then it's too late.

Despite all of the goodness, I've been a little down lately. Slightly overwhelmed and under-productive. I could work morning till night and I'm not sure I'd get everything done that I would like to. I'm running a race that has no finish line. So I settle for day to day to-do lists and hope that the rest falls into place.

I've been told I'm too hard on myself, but I feel like that's letting me off the hook for living up to the standards I've set. And so what if that proves their point?

I'm willful that way.