brief candle life

Fine, all right, I'll do some grats. Because I'm feeling ungrateful about my nursing grizzly bear who takes 1.5 hrs to fall asleep, and because I completed the epic journey from my house in TX to my parents' house in WI today and just need to focus on the good, little things, instead of all the things that made today hard.

1. watching my 20 month old take off running when we finally got out of the car, into the still wet from rain, still lightly drizzling early evening light of the acreage of my parents' luscious back yard.

2. this honey vodka from my parents' liquor cabinet tastes divine

3. my 4 yr old fell asleep before her brother

4. 20 month old was pleased as punch to pee like a big boy in the gas station potty (well as much a big boy as you can be when mommy is holding you business-side tilted over the toilet) It was like pouring water from a watering can!

5. the little joys of cheap wrapped presents doled out to children over the course of a long flight and equally long car ride

6. leaving a love note for dh (who is not on vacation with us) on top of the coffee machine where he'll find it tonight

7. getting 3 weeks to relax and explore

I'm so proud of my son. He's outside, barefoot, wandering around in the great world of our back yard. Every few minutes I hear a jubilant exclamation, "Whoah! Ahhhhhh!" or sometimes "Ball!" He stoops down, his diapered butt sticking out, to extract a blade of grass stuck between his little toes. He toddles over to the hedges and methodically tears every leaf off a branch. Then he climbs into the toy car, closing the door behind him, and Flintstones it backwards over the basketball court. And sensing that I'm straying from my web design work to blog about him, he makes a beeline to me, demanding "muuhh", whereupon it takes me 10 minutes to type this last sentence because he keeps rabbit-kicking my typing arm away as he nurses and stops to babble earnest fake words at me.  

I'm dogged by the constant feeling that I'm forgetting something. I have more on my plate than the average person, though I know we're all super busy. It's 8am and a very dry morning. The baby has nursed me so dry it's like all my cells had to contribute to the milk to make sure there was some. I need a drink of water, but here on the couch, where Baby and Toddler are watching their "mommy needs time to wake up" show, is where I have to be stuck unless I want to hear Baby's shriek of separation anxiety lest I move a muscle.