Nursing Buddha

I miss the woods and who we are when we get to be there.

I miss the woods and who we are when we get to be there.

She was sick for days. We watched lots of Elmo. She slept on my chest and dribbled snot on my shirt. It’s only when she’s sick I really remember her infanthood. Because once more my touch is constant and seems to be what she needs most.

She is feeling a lot better, thank goodness. Good enough to find her tutu and dance, declaring herself a ballerina. And I am sort of barely surviving the plague she handed over in her wet kisses and hot breath against my cheek. So I whine and hack and complain and ache, but still am thankful for her restored health and those moments of quiet when she needed me and I was there.

Morning zen with Elmo.

I can post from iPhone. Hello renewed sense of blog interest due to extreme lazy. And enjoy the autocorrect typos!

Slackety, slack, slack. That is the new tagline of poor Nursing Buddha, the world’s most neglected mommy blog. Which runs parallel to my parenting style, so it sort of makes sense.

So what have we been up to? Let’s see…

Nan and I took the Toddler Buddha downtown for an afternoon of lighthearted fun and hijinks. All was well until I realized I had locked the keys in the car so it turned into anxiety and despair hijinks. At least for me. Nan and TB being much more mentally together weathered the experience wonderfully. Nan hitched a taxi back to our house, where her car was, then drove to her house, where our spare key resided. She was back to rescue TB and I in no time flat. While we waited, we explored the depths of the parking garage. And like most exploratory adventures, what started out as fun quickly turned into meltdowns and wondering who would eat who first.

So I did what any responsible parent would do in my place…I handed over the extremely breakable camera and let her take a series of photos, haunting and ethereal and mostly of her little grublette fingers over the lens.

We took what was probably our last trip to the beach this year, at least the last of summer. Is it wrong to hand a loaf of cheap Walmart bread over to a child surrounded by a gang of Hitchcockian birds, just for your own amusement? Just kidding–I don’t care, totally worth it!

(Artist-rendered modesty top)

We’ve had a rash of “do it myself” lately, which includes dressing herself. And when dressing herself, the outfit is guaranteed to include a tutu and no shirt. And sometimes her knock-off crocs, which she has a 50/50 shot at getting on the right feet but her accuracy stats stand somewhere around 1 in 10.

(Artist-rendered modesty top)

Lastly, we attended the annual community picnic where The Man and I were married three years ago. Three years sounds like such a short spell, but marriage is sort of like dog years or something, where a single day can hold months and months of time. Though strangely months and months of time can seemingly pass in a single day. It’s the sort of thing Stephen Hawking could explain but I still wouldn’t understand. So here’s to three years of marriage–a brief blip, a tremendous accomplishment.

So, she’s two. Happy birthday to the Beebee! Two years ago today is the day I was hugely pregnant in the morning and holding a baby in the evening. Two ridiculous, joyful, painful, amazing, frustrating, beautiful years.

She’s changed as much in the second year as she did in the first. The talking thing is endlessly surprising. You know someone their whole life and they don’t talk. Then all the sudden, they start talking. It blows my mind. It feels like it happened overnight, right after it felt like it was taking forever. For months I fretted. The stupid baby books and stupid baby websites love to tell you a million different ways your kid might be delayed. They give horrifyingly vague descriptions of what may or may not end up being a lifelong disability or you know perhaps independently resolve itself next Tuesday. Because when you’re gripped with parental terror, the cloying and patronizing “but really don’t worry, children develop at different rates” refrain is so reassuring….and of course the message boards are loaded with people complaining about their 13-month-old delivering this really faulty critique of The Sound and the Fury at dinner last night and oh my god why isn’t my kid saying anything yet?

Basically as a parent I’m an idiot, but I know for sure this advice is sound: never, ever try to prepare yourself for anything related to pregnancy, birth or child-rearing. No internet, no books, no helpful conversations with nosy parkers in the check-out line. I’m pretty sure if something horrific should happen, you’ll still be blindsided and overwhelmed and devastated before beginning the completely self-guided task of moving on to the next step after something awful happens. If everything turns out okay, you’ll probably handle all the normal challenges just using gut-instinct and irrational emotion-based decision-making anyway, but all that scary “what if but not likely” information you’ve overloaded yourself with will shave at least three years off when your body’s anxiety management center will exceed capacity and explode your heart…and all over nothing anyway!

So yeah, I’m going to have an exploded heart earlier over nothing because my kid can talk like a normal two year old. The cat could start talking and I would be less impressed because she’s had ten years of exposure to learn. But this kid, this kid seems to have picked up all words about everything at once. It’s scary because once they start talking you know for sure they are listening. And you have to get really serious about not being such an a-hole all the time even though you really should’ve gotten serious about it ages ago and since you haven’t by now you probably won’t ever, even knowing she can listen and comprehend that you are such an a-hole. And by you I mean me, of course.

One of my favorite things with the talking is when she says something I don’t understand and she has to repeat herself. She sort of cocks her head to the side and repeats the word or sentence really slowly, further confusing me with this great exaggerated emphasis, over-shaping each syllable with her mouth, her eyes open wide and eyebrows raised with impatient expectation. Then she puts on this super fake smile and nods at me for confirmation. Like, “you get it that time, dummy?” She’s the ill-mannered rich lady giving orders to a Spanish-speaking gardener. “You plant-o the flowers-o before my party-ey, seeeee?” So rude!

Her cousin is in town for her birthday and my god, I need him on loan constantly. Somebody open the “rent a good-natured 5 year old” business and I will sign us up. She’s so impressed by him and he’s so amused by her. It makes me want another kid, but then I remember being impressed and amused by each other is more the exception than rule in sibling relationships. So maybe I should just be incredibly happy with what I’ve got since I wasn’t exactly filled with dancing unicorns and sunshine-colored gratitude while caring for a newborn who didn’t sleep and screamed incessantly. So really, somebody start that rent a nice 5 year old thing.

Her birthday party was cute. A couple kids from her class. Our family. A public pool with all the colorful characters you can expect at a public pool on a Saturday. And by colorful I mean sort of creepy or annoying, but you know, what can you do. We had fun. At the end, when everyone was mostly dried off and cupcakes were consumed and belongings gathered up, a little boy from her class started dancing in this area off to the side covered with padded mats, where swim teams stretch before meets. My kid sees her buddy dancing and she beelines it for the padded dance floor, yelling his name. And they dance. The other kids join them. Everybody’s dancing. There’s no music, but the kids are shaking it. So the parents start to dance, because when your kid is doing something rad and funny the rules of normal social embarrassment no longer apply and you can dance without music beside a public pool, too.

My kid often makes me wonder why growing up seems to be such a ruinous process, stripping away hilarious and awesome stuff to replace it with uptight and oh I couldn’t possibly unless maybe I get a drink or two in me nonsense. I don’t have anything figured out. I just hope she holds out as long as possible against the needless pressures and rigidity of what lies beyond childhood. I hope this for her sake, because what good does being self-conscious do anybody. And I hope this selfishly for my own sake, too. Because she gives me permission I’d never give myself. To be happy, to be silly, to be free. Happy Birthday, kidlet. Thanks again for being so much cooler than I ever was. Even if you are convinced when the water ferry turns around to sweep sideways into its slip that it’s actually chasing you and you should scream and run away really fast.

Somewhere exists a book which describes “living the life” as being plucked from bed in the early morning, eating breakfast in the car, arriving at an almost deserted beach, spending the morning poking stuff with a stick, exploring, screaming at kites and staring unashamedly at strangers, all in the comfort of your nightgown. If not, she is writing it now in her head.

Summertime is the season built for childhood. A kid raised in north Florida, my own childhood seems nothing but a long stretch of summer. Sweaty necks and bare feet and tan lines and watermelon and warm dirt and box fans pointed at beds. I remember my own through hers.

Summertime u-pick, the Beebee is a fan. We join her Nan and Pa to pick blackberries off the vine. One for the bucket, two for her. One for her, none for the bucket.

Last weekend, an early Father’s Day present, we ventured out on a boat. We saw dolphins, including a mama and her calf. The calf kept surfacing on one side of the mama and then the other, slipping beneath her belly every time they dropped below the waterline. Another kid in the midst of a perfect summertime childhood.