Category Archives: Asher

Revisiting

Posted in Asher, Holidays, Motherhood by

Hiya.

In (belated) honor of Mother’s Day, I thought that I would share a post that I wrote in 2011. I think that Asher was about 18 months old when I wrote this, but I’m pretty sure that I will be thinking about these car window down moments when he’s 40.

Car Windows Down

Yesterday when I picked Asher up I instinctively reached for the AC button, not wanting the car to be too hot or too cold and started to roll the windows up.  Before I clicked the button though, I looked in the backseat to see Asher’s downy red hair blowing straight up in the wind and he had both arms up in the air feeling the wind move through his fingertips with his eyes closed and the biggest grin on his tipped up face.  He was feeling the world, I could see it.

He was so beautiful in that moment.

So instead of rolling the windows up, I rolled the other two down and we drove on for 35 miles in the noisy sunshine filled cabin of our car singing the ABCs a little too loudly (me) and waving arms wildly in the wind (him) and as I was cruising down the highway a thought filtered through my mind that was so striking I had to stop in the middle of L-M-N-O-P to catch my breath.

I’ve known my whole life that this moment with my child was coming.

My mom used to pick me up from Mr. Ron’s (if you want to see my mama get all atwitter, ask her about Mr. Ron sometime) where I spent my preschool days doing the things that kids in Montessori preschools do.  One of my earliest and most distinct memories is of one of those afternoons in the car with my mom, or most likely a lot of those afternoons mashed into one golden moment; memory is broad-sweeping in its desire to distill.  Anyway, she worked as an educator in the hospital and so her workdays were marked in my mind with skirts and suit jackets, but in this memory I see her as I so often did, driving down the highway with all of the windows down in our blue Toyota Tercel (later dubbed the Blue Goose by my brother) both of our hair flying, her skirt pulled up over her knees, jacket off and in the passenger seat, fingers claiming a little of the blowing hair with her left hand and twirling it absentmindedly with her elbow crooked on the rim of the open window, her right hand on the steering wheel.  And that’s it, that’s the extent of the memory, but there we are, two women at opposite sides of the female spectrum, and I remember how free I felt, and I remember thinking how free she must have felt too.  I remembering thinking, we’re in this thing together.

Yesterday, in my own car, with my own son in the backseat, I could see the images of my mother and myself superimposed over the joy-filled bodies of Asher and me and it was one of those halting full-circle moments.  To feel that long-ago formed memory from the child’s perspective, I see my mother that I loved, confidently driving us home to dinner and bedtime kisses, patiently listening to me rattle on about all of the things that I never stopped talking about as a child.  To feel that memory now from a mother’s perspective, I think about my mom knowing that she was going home to an unraveling marriage, that she would have to cook for us, get a little girl settled for sleep, and a budding teenage boy settled from his own brand of divorced heartache, and I wonder what thoughts swept through her mind as the wind filled our car and blew us on home.

Just a couple of years after those car window down drives home, my mom would fall in love with her life-long partner, my brother would disappear into the world of college, we would settle into the house that I came to know as my childhood home, and the car window down drives would be replaced with my adolescent desire to control everything with air conditioning and radio stations.  But.  I can’t help but think that I can still remember a little of that acute observance that young children possess, and that my 4-year-old mind was watching my mom closely to figure out how to be a woman one day.  I can’t help but think that the beautiful abandon that I witnessed twenty five years ago reared its head again yesterday.

Part of parenthood is falling madly in love with your child, falling in love with parenting your child, learning your own thoughts and watching them change as you start to think like a parent.  But another astonishing (and I mean that, I’m not being cute here) thing about becoming a parent is seeing your parents for the first time.  It’s not like I didn’t know that was going to happen as one of the clichéd rites of passage into claiming a child as your own, that I didn’t know that I would one day empathize more with my parents than I ever believed possible, it’s just that I couldn’t have possibly known what it was going to feel like until it happened.  It overwhelms me.  Feeling what my mother in particular felt towards me, feeling the shame of abusing that love 1,000 times throughout my life, having an acute awareness of how potent it is, how fierce it is, how all-consuming it is to love a child, and finally understanding that I am on the receiving end of that love is overwhelming.  It overwhelms me because it’s such a powerful gift, and because I realize that Asher may not ever know the depth of my feelings for him unless he decides to one day have a child of his own.

One of my wonderful friends has been talking recently about her strong desire to be able to genuinely and effectively express the breadth of her gratitude to her husband as they’ve become parents together.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot because the truth is, there’s no gift that says thank you well enough when those are the kinds of the things on the table that you’re trying to thank someone for.  What I’ve come up with is that the biggest expression of gratitude is in our actions, and in this case it’s in the way that we love.  The kind of partner or parent or child or friend that we are and the level of thoughtful respect and care that we charge ourselves with in those roles.  I will never know how to say thank you adequately enough to my parents, all four of you, but I do know how to love my child as much as I possibly can, and I can pledge part of that love as a devotion to all that you have given me in your own ways.  I know that I will make mistakes as a mother, but I hope that in my triumphs my parents see a reflection of themselves and know that they are being honored and that I am, in my way, always whispering thank you.

My final thought is this: when Asher is in the backseat thinking his thoughts, is he observing a woman?  Someone who rolls the windows down and sings badly and looks so grown up?  Does he also see a skirt pulled up to free knees, an arm draped casually, a level of confidence that children assume comes with height?  Sometimes I think he might, others I’m beyond sure that my shortcomings are palpable. In either case, I am reminded of what my little brain knew way back then, which is that if nothing else we’re in this thing together, wind blown hair and all, and then I just turn the radio up a little louder and marvel at my beautiful child and the inevitable truth that we are marching forward, steadily on.

Week 19: Reckoning

Posted in Asher, Motherhood, New Baby by

There is a pinhole in the bottom of my cup and it seems that my two options for getting the contents out are letting them continue to slowly drip out of that tiny hole, or to completely punch out the bottom, and neither of these options feel very timely. I forget though that I’m a glass-all-the-way-full kinda gal and that my third option is to try to capture some it all as it proverbially runneth over. So I’m there. Somewhere between a pinhole and a floodgate. Holding a bucket. Totally normal, right?

I think the thing about this pregnancy is that I keep waiting for something to click, but second pregnancy love is a little more multi-faceted, maybe less simple. I stayed up all night the night that I found out that I was pregnant with Asher. Immediately I started talking to his little soul and the camaraderie was fast and intense. It was quiet and powerful, me and baby first, everything else second. Then between Asher and this little one, there was another one, the one that got away, and it bruised my baby-meeting optimism. And so with this pregnancy, I spent the first 12 weeks on my hands and knees, somewhat literally and figuratively. I was sick as a dog (another first) but also sick with worry that I would fall in love again, hard, and be left with a hollow core yet again, the weight of those displaced feelings anchoring me back to that isolated doubt.

Here we are at week 19 and I am ready to change my narrative. What I’ve been holding on to is not the loss of the baby, I do think that I’ve made peace with that, but it’s the betrayal that I felt from my body, the insecurity that’s come about in its wake, and it’s time to let this last little grief go. I’m almost half way through and still I get surprised every morning by my swelling shape, I still breathe a sigh of relief when I feel the first fluttering kick of the day, and I am still coaching myself along to trust the life-making process that happens inside of us. I’m converting my anxiety into a fake-it-until-you-make-it bubble of enthusiasm, and it’s working. I’m less enamored with the pregnancy perhaps, but almost ravenously excited about the end goal. The weight of this child in our arms. A gasping, air breathing, here-I-am-world cry. In many ways I think that the connection that I have with this child is one of reverence and a deep sense of being in it together.  Asher was a call, this one is an answer.

So there we have it. I am filled to the brim with absorbing these final months of just being a family of three, of negotiating Asher’s cycle of 3-year-old 8 minute emotional highs, mediums, and lows. Of navigating life with a growing child inside my body, and another one hanging all over us on the outside, of wanting to grow things in our garden, of riding the tides of my own crazy hormones, of loving this opportunity, and of finding gratitude for another day where it all seems to be working. It’s hard for me to know if what I’m experiencing is the universal experience of second-time moms, the universally silent experience of women who have lost a pregnancy, or, more likely, all of the above. I’m trying to patiently pace myself for this marathon, but the truth is, I want to sprint to the end, fold my arms around this little one and give thanks again and again for his or her presence in our lives. I want to be on the other side of this, watching those unexpectedly tiny fingers curl around ours. I want to see Asher smiling his shy smile when people ask if that is his little brother or sister. I want to be there. But for now, until September, we wait.

Thanks for capturing some of what’s in this cup with me, let’s take a stab at getting back to our regularly scheduled programming, shall we? Here are some more scenes from our world of late:

Shimmer

Posted in Asher, General, Motherhood by

On Thursday night last week, Asher’s teacher called to let me know that his name had been drawn the previous week and that it was his turn to bring home the class pet for the weekend. While I’m not terribly keen on any animal that requires a cage (being that it’s notoriously gross to clean out animal cages) I am intent on being participatory in Asher’s school stuff and thus gave a cheery response that we were looking forward to it. I didn’t realize that they even had a class pet (it’s a big room with various aquariums. Aquariums, I have learned, are integral to the preschool experience.) and asked his teacher, “what kind of pet is it?” and she responded that it was a frog named Shimmer and that Shimmer would be coming to us with a book so that we could record her adventures while she was with us. With devious images of a frog cage filled with booze and barbies in bikinis flashing through my mind, I said that we would dutifully show Shimmer a good time and record her ‘adventures’ for the weekend and then we hung up.

On Friday I reminded Asher that we were bringing Shimmer home and sure enough that afternoon there was a small but heavy black backpack hanging on his hook. I was informed that Shimmer was in the bag.

Here, dear readers, is where I made my first mistake. I did not open the backpack to examine Shimmer and I did not inquire as to what Shimmer would be eating, her zodiac sign, her favorite Beatle, or any other useful piece of biographical information. We are raising a child with moderate success, I assumed that we could wing taking care of a frog for the weekend. Plus I had already been told that there was a book in there and I figured that if the frog had a gluten sensitivity or an aversion to broad spectrum light it would be mentioned. It’s fair to say that I assumed much in this situation.

So we’re driving home and I briefly thought about the frog and wondered if it would be expensive to find its identical twin should anything unexpected occur, and then I got hot and tossed my jacket on the passenger seat (covering the backpack) and then I forgot about the frog.

Drew was working on Friday and I had plans to meet some ladies to see Silver Linings Playbook (really enjoyed it) so I was dropping Asher off with my parents where Drew would retrieve him on the way home from work. It’s been a balmy 20 degrees here for about a week and it had snowed a little earlier in the day, but the roads were fine, so after a kiss on Asher’s cheek I headed back out the door, excited to be going to a grown up movie with other grown ups who like grown up things.

I was cruising along happily until I got to the main road and looked over to see the black backpack still in the car with me. Shimmer. Given that it was only in the twenties and that Shimmer was likely used to the tropics, I knew that three hours in the freezing cold would not end well for the old girl. I dutifully turned around and drove back to my mother’s house to deposit the frog in the warm non-frog-killing climate that they enjoy and let my friends know that I was now running behind because of the turn-around. Once at my parent’s house, I got concerned that the frog might have already gone on to the great Frog Spirit In The Sky in the hour that she had spent in the freezing car, and thought that we better face the truth now in case I was going to need to call the teacher and run a recon mission to a pet store that night. Shock doesn’t really describe what I felt when we opened the backpack at my parent’s house and discovered that indeed the frog was not alive.

Ya’ll, meet Shimmer:

afterglow (1)

I share this story with all of you as a cautionary tale to prevent any epic parent-teacher miscommunications coming your way. In hindsight it seems very obvious that a three year old would not be sent home with a living creature, though I distinctly remember strapping my parents with a smelly fat hamster a time or two when I was of a class pet age. And to be fair, at no point did I ask about care instructions, mating habits, or anything else that might have led to the teacher telling me that Shimmer was a stuffed animal but…doesn’t that seem like something that would be put on the table from the get go? Would you be willing to take the class pet WHO IS A GIGANTIC STUFFED FROG WEARING A TUTU home for the weekend? Maybe just some friendly air quotes when the word “pet” was mentioned?

We all had a good laugh about it and I’ll be the first to say that I was thrilled with the way things worked out. Asher made quite a splash with his gigantic tie dyed frog at lunch on Saturday and all in all, the class pet is welcome at our house any time. Especially now that I know I can leave it in the car. Which I would never, ever do.

The end.

A day for heart

Posted in Asher, Holidays, Motherhood, pictures by

This year in honor of Martin Luther King Jr, I was thinking about all of the words that we whispered into Asher’s ear on the day that he was born…the world is here for the taking, little man, you can be anything. Even in the most dire of circumstances, I believe that every child hears some version of this on the day that he or she enters the world. If not from a mother or father, perhaps from a nurse, a family member, a social worker, but I think that nothing inspires hope like the face of a child taking a first breath. If even only for a moment, I do believe that we all start here.

We forget that as we age. We forget that we were all that baby once, that little vessel of possibility. We start to see color, money, differences, dogma, fear, selfishness, pride, partisanship and power. We forget that there was a moment for each of us when it was possible to become anything, love anyone, learn everything, become triumphant, all simply because we were born. Yesterday I was thinking about all of the children that Asher has brought into our lives and the way that their curiosity erases stigma, the way that their openness invites smiles, and the way that their intensity brings parents and people together because children are so thirsty for the experience of this world, not the divisions within it. We see examples every day of people taking one step and then another in a steady march toward this narrow brand of forgetfulness, but yesterday there were words all over the United States that were about hope and love and equality. Words that helped me to remember that every person is created equal. That every single person, every person, all of us, are created equal. Yesterday reminded me that I can be doing more to be working toward acceptance in my actions and with my words, that I too am forgetting our universal starting point and sometimes seek out what separates from us one another before looking for what is common between us. It reminded me that there is still work to do and that equality is not something that is to be earned, it is a birthright.

And on a lighter note, Asher is deeply absorbed in Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. Heartwarming to look in the backseat and see that on a chilly Tuesday morning.

afterglow

And because why not…here’s my post from 2010 on the subject. Little has changed.

Rocket Man

Posted in Asher, Holidays, House, pictures by

Despite our deep love for Halloween, Drew and I took it a little easy this year and let Asher do the majority of the heavy Halloween lifting.

Asher’s school had a parade for the kids on Friday before Halloween, so here is Asher walking in the parade with Miss Betsy:

And here he is a couple of days later hanging out at a Halloween party with his buddy Austin:

Don’t you just wonder what they’re chatting about there?

My adorably wonderfully dear darling little sister Julie Claire and her charming boyfriend Joe took a weekend off from college life to visit and we rang in the Fall spirit with fires and pumpkins and chili and hot cider and board games. I keep trying to convince her that it’s not lame at all to move in with your sister and her family, but I think she sees through my scheme.

Here are the perfunctory pumpkin pictures:

(Asher believes that ALL letter A’s are for him, so I couldn’t resist making an A pumpkin for him. He and Drew (Drew) carved the silly face on the left)

Joe’s pumpkin was definitely the winner for details and thought, but of course I don’t have a picture of the completed pumpkin so here’s a process shot:

We weathered Hurricane Sandy just fine in these parts, although Drew and I definitely had our eyes, fingers, and toes crossed for all of the (remaining) trees on our property. Our efforts were rewarded with only one small tree snapping and a loose shutter. We’ll take it! Asher got to come to work with me one day, and then we taught him about the very best thing about lousy winter weather: blankets, a movie, and hot chocolate. He took to it like a champ.

Riding in cars with (a) boy

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Despite what I have written in the past, if I had to make a top 10 list of reasons why living with someone who is discovering the world from the ground up every day is wildly rewarding, the ride home from school would be near the very top of my list. Where the ride to school in the morning can be a test of my motherly nerves, the ride home in the afternoons is like a little dose of this-is-what-it’s-all-about elixir. Asher is oddly forthcoming with his observations on things (“but I didn’t want to go up the slide and I said so and she said I had to and that hurted my feelings and didn’t make me feel good in my body.” or, “We live on the earth. Is it spinning right now? Is the sky, with the stars, is it spinning too?”) and he makes the sweetest expressions as he’s looking out the window and just sharing his thoughts.

Although he clams up a little whenever the camera is out, I had the idea the other day to try to capture a little of what life is like with him on these daily rides home with the thought that if the camera was going long enough he might forget that it was there (he did). If you’re up for watching the whole thing, I think it gets the best near the end, but of course, Drew and I might be the only ones that find this kind of stuff riveting. (A few notes? Betsy works in his classroom, the spider in question is a big paper mache spider that the kids made, and this was shot on a Friday.)

When I watch this, I am so clearly reminded of how my mom could ask me how my day was when I was in middle school and high school and the perfunctory grunt would head her off at the pass, but at some point the magic of the car would kick in and I would tell her everything at fire hose speed. I think I cried more to my mother about everything in my life in the car than I ever did otherwise…there’s something about the captivity and the moving scenery that can make it a confession booth if there are patient enough ears waiting to hear what’s going to come out. Now as a mother I’m really enjoying being on the receiving end of those thoughts, and I can’t get that kid out of school and into the car fast enough at the end of the day.

(For those of you worried about the safety of this activity, I used the ol rubber band (specifically a headband) on the head rest trick–my eyes were on the road, I promise.)

Lately.

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First fires:

Early mornings:

Celebrating a birthday (and the man who had it):

Traveling to Atlanta for work:

Watching the light change for Fall:

Growing (and growing!) firewood pile:

Puppy play date love to an excessive and charming degree:

Another season change:

Pumpkin muffins for the boy:

A budding book lover:

Recreating the ocean in the bathtub:

And always this smile:

And because there are no pictures of me to share, I will instead off  a little something that’s been on my mind:

I think that I go back and forth between fancying myself some kind of activist and equally some kind of peace maker. In this political season, I’ve felt the urge to wear both hats, but lately, that second one is feeling more and more correct to me. I’m not apathetic about the value of the political process, but I’m also not sure that I’m comfortable adding more negativity to what is increasingly feeling like a pool of vague buzz words that always seem to be true in one circle and false in another. My gut instinct is that this whole process is going to implode during my life time, and if and when that happens, (and I hope that it does, and I hope that this sentiment is a part of it) it is my hope that it’s done intelligently, compassionately, and not at the cost of our good sense.

I support our right to disagree and I support the foundation of democracy that we’re attempting to still stand on, but I do not support all of the rhetoric that gets tossed around at the cost of forgetting that there are humans behind those words, from both sides. My concern is that we get so attached to our perception of the issues, or to being the most clever or stinging in our rebuttal, that we forget which way is up. I am guilty of this, and that activist in me knows that there are things that I am absolutely willing to fight for, but not at the cost of behaving in a way that I would never allow my toddler to. I’m shelving any public name calling for a while and hoping to create another spot on the internet that isn’t based solely on what’s going wrong, as I still believe that there is a lot that is right. I read this quote in Oxford American’s June issue, and haven’t been able to shake the impact that it had on me: “Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?” (Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter). It’s not that I think, ‘oh, we’re all human so everyone can do anything and be just fine as long as we sugarcoat it and just say nice things’, it’s more that I think that we’re all human, we’re designed to disagree, and that the only way to move forward is to treat each other compassionately, no matter the degree of dissent. This lofty intention is, in my mind, the end of ignorance.

I think that the majority of the folks that I know and spend my time with feel this way, but as a way of affirming this for myself, I thought I might put it out there publicly too. My mouth often gets ahead of my heart, and something that I’ve been working on is being a bit more intentional with the content that I’m generating in this world wide web. I might get proven sorely wrong one day, but for the time being, I’m continuing to hope that it’s true that we can be the change that we wish to see, and in my case, I desperately hope to see a change for the positive.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

The big 3

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It’s hard to write these birthday posts every year (hence it taking a month to get to last year) because I want to say so much knowing that this blog is intended to serve in some capacity as our family’s time capsule, but I’m also aware that I write with all of you in mind and that perhaps more is not always more.

The thing is…this boy. This precious sage little child that has only made our lives better and more rich and multi-faceted, this infant that turned into a toddler and then into a baby-toddler-little boy, this person that we live with, he’s just so much, and it’s hard to know how to capture even one second of it with any justice. So this post is the time capsule post, it’s for the man that I have an impressionistic vision of in my mind who I imagine reading this one day and thinking to himself, I was three once.

September, 2012

Asher,

While I have my freak out moments and my weak moments and my occasional hysterical moment, there’s also this strange moment that pops up where I look at you and just can’t make sense of your existence. I can’t believe that you are a person that was incubated in my body with all of the best bits of your father cooking in there too, and now you’re out here and talking about things that interest you, and all of your joints and bones and muscles and nerves are hard at work and your eyes are bright with a rife internal life in that mind of yours and I just…I can’t always understand it. You are always and intensely the most intimate relationship in my life and oddly, the most foreign. That juxtaposition is motherhood to me; I have an innate sense of knowing you, and yet I spend a great deal of my time figuring out ways to know you better.

November, 2011

This past year has been a big one. (Aren’t they all?) When you turned two you had only been walking for six months and in some ways I think that held you in baby-land a little longer. You were talking like a champ with a vocabulary that was growing by the second, but there was still a lot of our baby lingering on the fringes of your assent into toddler-hood. This year, at three, there’s none of that. Instead of light threads binding you to where you’ve been, I see rubber bands winding tightly ready to spring you at a moment’s notice into all that you’re approaching. Three is all about EVERYTHING. You feel so hard and laugh so hard and run so hard and think so hard and question so hard and investigate so hard and cry so hard and learn so hard and look so hard and say yes so hard and no so hard and…just everything. You are not alone in this, and seeing you with your little band of buddies all doing everything at once is charming beyond belief.

December, 2011

You are still cautious, though some of that is fading a bit, but you still check in with us about whether or not you can do the big things. You were born with a ‘look before you leap’ soul, I think, and I hope that it’s something you keep forever, but I also love the moments when you know you’re being brave and get lost in the moment. You are strong-willed, but easy to redirect and more than anything you love questions. You do not like the way that most foods look, but if we can get you (trick you) into trying something, you almost always like the flavor of it which completely surprises and thrills you. Yellow is still your favorite color.

January, 2012

While your ongoing love affair with airplanes and things that go is alive and well, you’ve also become fascinated by the ocean and all of its creatures. You sleep right now with two whales named Bop-o and Geeko (you named them) if I’m talking about them, or Bop-o and Beepo if your dad is talking about them–naming conventions aren’t really this family’s strong suit. You’ve been telling us jokes that are actually pretty funny. You’re right on track with stretching out your bedtime by feigning trips to the potty and a deep soul-stirring desperation for a sip of water or one. more. story. You still snuggle with us in the mornings, and believe it or not, when we kiss your bumped head or bruised knee, you still believe that it’s better. You’ve memorized the books that we read to you so that you can recite them along with us. Particularly ‘Otis’, ‘Goodnight Ocean’, and ‘On the Night You Were Born’.

February, 2012

You are very friendly with all people, walking up to them and asking how they are or pointing to whatever picture is on your shirt. I might call you Captain Obvious behind your back, but the truth is, I love your frank observations and deep enthusiasm for the world that’s around you. You stay close to us, still wanting to play with us more than with your toys when we’re at home. I get frustrated by this when I’m trying to get something done, but writing this, I know too well that there will be day when I long for you begging to help make breakfast at my side, so I hope that you keep asking as a way to remind me to just chill out and take the time while we have it. You recover quickly from your tears and sleep on your back with your arms over your head. You will some times fake-laugh until it seems so funny that it makes you laugh for real. ‘Fake it until you make it’ is an important life lesson, so if you are 30 and reading this, take a tip from your younger self and keep this up.

March, 2012

It started to rain on Saturday just as we were getting ready to celebrate your birthday with a little party at home and while we were running around grabbing things from outside and feeling tempted by the urge to get irritated that the rain had come, you spontaneously looked at me at said with great confidence and reassurance, “It’s ok! We can still eat cake inside!” which immediately showed me that in a room full of adults, you were the only one with your eyes truly on the prize.  This endearing, logical, and positive outlook is you 100%.

April, 2012

In reading this over, I can see that I’m not reinventing the wheel with my motherly observations, but while there is so much that is very unique about who you are, more than ever, I’m also aware of the bliss that lies in how very much you’re just like everyone else. I don’t know that I can really explain that more deeply except to say that your father and I give thanks every day for your health and development and feel profound gratitude for your presence in our lives and the fact that we can draw comparisons to you and the typical three-year-old experience.

June, 2012

To that one-day man who I cannot wait to know, I say this: you are equipped with all that you need, even at this tender age. You have it all. If you are looking back as a way of finding answers, connect with this and know its truth: you were born happy. Your name means Happy. You are a bringer of joy, a bearer of light, a tempered and curious soul. All of the happiness that you will ever need in life is already housed inside of you. As the book says, Heaven blew every trumpet and played every horn on the wonderful, marvelous night you were born.

September, 2012

Happy third (fourth) year, sweet boy.

 

2 for Now

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Asher is still going to be 2 for less than a month. The transition from one to two was less stark and we were still counting months (why do we do that? Tricky business, that month counting) but now he’s almost to three and so much more three than two.

There are a couple of habits that we had let dwindle on out of convenience and parent-fear that we wanted to break before turning three. One of them was Asher still sleeping with a pacifier (don’t judge) and so, on the first day in our new house, we were sitting at the table with Asher eating lunch and I asked him if he would like to start sleeping in a big boy bed. He said that yes, he would, and I told him that one of the rules of the big boy bed is that he wouldn’t be able to sleep with a nu-nu (pacifier) anymore. He just looked at me and said as breezily as an almost-three-year-old can, “ok”.

Well ok then.

Ya’ll, I’ve written a lot about all that parenthood has taught us so far, and here’s what I learned from that lesson: we’re morons. Asher wasn’t hanging on to that nu-nu, we were. So now he’s turning three and he doesn’t sleep with a pacifier so we can check that off a list and go commiserate with other stupid parents about the stupid things that we do when we’re underestimating the little people in our lives. (Anyone?)

The first night that Asher slept in his ‘new’ (crib lowered without the front bar on it) bed, we were not terribly surprised to see him standing beside our bed the following morning. He climbed up into bed with us and as he was snuggling, Drew noticed that Asher didn’t have his diaper on anymore. Asher proceeded to tell us that he woke up in his bed, went to the bathroom, took his nighttime diaper off, went potty, flushed–he’s very committed to reporting on every step of the process–and then came upstairs to get us. Whose kid is this? Every morning since then, Asher goes through this little routine with a level of meticulousness most OCD patients would covet and then comes to find us or gets back and bed and starts hollering, “Mama! Can I WAKE UP NOW? MAMA! CAN I…” which is pretty funny. A weird twist is that he will occasionally put his diaper back on, but we’re working on that.

This morning he woke up and I listened to him go through all of his potty steps and then he went back to his room and got back in bed and started singing. He sang to himself for about 20 minutes flying, I think, an airplane around (if the words to the ‘song’ were any indication) and then started calling out to ask if he could wake up. So far his almost three-ness has been a lot more opinions, a lot more freak outs, and a lot more intensity, but if it also means that he’s entering into the stage of life when he can wake up, potty, and play by himself while we squeak out the last little bit of sleep that we can? Sign. Me. Up. Suddenly the child and the puppy are not seeming quite so similar.

It’s getting harder to pinpoint the big changes as they occur because it’s all so rapid-fire. Where this time last year we were able to notice new words popping out and seeing new levels of physical confidence emerge, all of that is starting to happen so seamlessly and quickly that it will just sneak up on us all at once. What is pretty amazing is that Asher is beginning to really be able to express what kind of person he is, and what kind of sense of humor he has and all of the little nuanced things that make us who we are. While we don’t have first steps to marvel over anymore, we do have the changing lilt in his belly laughter, the way his eyebrow moves when he’s speaking frankly, and his insatiable curiosity about why things are the way they are. I think Drew and I both love this stage because we’re starting to see more and more of the person that we’re spending our lives with.

Cooling Off

Posted in Asher, pictures by

WOAH it’s hot up in here! Ya’ll, it’s so, so, so, SO hot in Virginia right now. I would have given anything for my college grades to reflect the temperatures of late…perfect 100s (and a couple of extra credit days) across the board. Virginia has a 4.0 in Boiling Your Brains In Your Head 101. Bully for you, Virginia. Bully for you.

There’s nothing better to do in this situation than find water, so here are a couple of shots of Asher braving the local splash park (with 283458499 of his closest friends. Heat brings the people together.)

I feel better already.