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.