2012
One Small Happy Family
Merry Christmas, blog friends and blog family!
Thanks for being awesome all year long, and may the new year bring you much happiness, more peace, and copious amounts of the beverages of your choice. (I’ll start with some black tea, make the switch to ice water, have a bit of Diet Coke around 3, check out how the G&Ts are flowing after work, and then finish the night with a tall glass of pink champagne. Can I get you anything?)
2012
Springloaded
Okay, this is kind of funny, although I don’t know whether to laugh or submit it to that “I Believe the Children Are the Future and Also Truly Bizarre” website that I just made up.
In honor of the solstice, please to be enjoying Wombat’s artistic study on Spring:
See how the golden sun shines down from above. See how the ground bursts forth with flowers. See how it all looks so…innocent and not at all borderline obsessive.
So, the next day: Spring! Again!
Lovely. Just lovely, isn’t it?
The next day:
And the next:
And the next:
His teacher was kind enough to label this one:
Saaaaaaay, I’m sensing a pattern…
You guys. This has been going for about THREE MONTHS–not every day, but two or three times a week and accounting for 90% of all artwork he brings home. Not included here is his first Spring, a large-scale painting in washable acrylics; his third Spring, on paper too big for the scanner; and all the other versions I didn’t scan because (a) he’d written his name across them in really big letters or (b) my scanning arm got tired because, damn, that’s a lot of Springs.
Now, as a former borderline-obsessive child who had no drawing skill and therefore only ever drew one of three tried-and-true scenes (a flock of birds over rolling hills, a caterpillar in a flower garden, and a scarecrow in a corn field) because what’s the use in doing something if you can’t do it PERFECTLY, I get what’s going on here. It’s comforting to repeat and repeat and repeat something you’ve proven you can do well (hello, my entire professional career), and I mean, yeah, he’s obviously a weird kid, but trust me that this isn’t even the half of it.
I started dating these daily exercises in early December, when my parents visited and my dad, who shares my sense of humor and love of order (or rather I share his) said I had to date them if they were to be properly preserved as the priceless family artifacts they undoubtedly are. “You’ll want to be able to track the progression as they change and get more complex,” he said. So I started dating them, and whaddya know, you can flip through them and see when the sun developed its sun spot (after Wombat saw one on his flashcards of outer space), and when the flowers started comprising many smaller flowers (drawn from life) and, when, behold!, we finally got a rainbow arcing gracefully dangling awkwardly in the sky, like the one we had seen two days earlier.
“I can make the rainbow any colors I want because I’m in charge.”
It’s spring…at night! Stars and brown moon and all. One of his polygamist preschool wives drew the fancy flower.
I shouldn’t be worried, right? I’ve seen him draw other things too–a smiley face, a Christmas tree, a turkey-style tracing of his hand that he turned into a red fire-breathing dragon that will “burn your face right off if you don’t watch out, Mom.” Tooooooootally normal.
2012
Who Could Ask for Anything More
I remember exactly how it felt to see boy bits on the ultrasound screen for the second time in a row. It was a black hole in my gut. It was an echo in my brain that said, “Do-over, do-over, do-over.” My hand grasped the exam table, searching blindly for a remote control with a Rewind Life button that doesn’t exist. My throat tightened with guilt.
For three days I was really and truly disappointed with our draw. For three days I composed many virtual letters of complaint addressed “Dear Management…”. For three days I mourned puff sleeves and pigtails and prom dresses. Three days isn’t very long at all, and although I think they were necessary, and although I don’t regret them, per se, I feel a bit silly, a tad narrowminded, a lot dumb.
Ah, hindsight.
Coming up on a year later, I have a boy with golden hair and sea-blue eyes, a boy who sits but doesn’t roll, a boy who feeds from a bottle but doesn’t sleep through the night, a boy who loves bouncing and t.v. and his brother. I have a boy who smiles at strangers while he sucks on two fingers (or anything else within reach), a boy who wears sweater vests and train-striped overalls and size 0 socks that look like lace-up tennis shoes. I have a boy who is demanding and impatient and a study in contradictions. I have a boy whose cheeks get flame-rosy in cold weather and whose first girlfriend is the baby in the pink diaper at the end of his favorite book. I have a boy who has his mama’s eyes and his daddy’s eyebrows and his brother’s pterodactyl shriek. I have a boy whose head the cats rub their noses on while he’s nursing, a boy they let pull on their ears. I have a boy who is a boy and is not a boy and is my boy and no one else’s.
Oh, I wouldn’t have spent even a second wishing for something, for someone, different had I known it wasn’t just a Boy Baby in there but Fox himself. Oh, Boo, I couldn’t have asked for anything better than you.
