Tuesdays with Sadie

6:45-7:45 A.M. Keep waking up once every ten minutes or so in anticipation of s waking up. When I finally wake up I feel like I've slept in forever, though I'm aware on some level that it's probably no later than eight or so. Such is the life of a parent. Of course, by three o'clock or so I'm entirely exhausted and still looking forward to an evening of work.

7:45-s is finally awake. We go downstairs for tummy time. While I'm fixing Sadie a bottle I decide to turn on an audio essay about 9/11. Sadie sits on the floor playing with toys and holding herself up admirably while the author talks about the CBS footage that they only aired once of the little specks, that turned out to be people falling from the sky.

At this point I'm not too concerned about what s can really understand, and it's a day that will live in infamy in American history anyway, so I figured she might as well start learning about it now.

9:32-She's wearing a little shirt with a picture of a ladybug on it. Ergo; I start calling her Sadie bug, and occasionally shortening it to just bug. On the porch I keep saying, "Do you see those bugs bug? while she leans over and tries to peer more closely at the chipping paint on our front porch.

Nicknames for kids are easy. You can pretty much call them whatever you want, and they don't know how to complain. However, sometimes as I'm mumbling bug, bug, bug, over and over I wonder if it's more for me or for the child. Am I trying to stimulate her mind or cover over the awkward and sometimes depressing silence that comes part and parcel with taking care of a person who is incapable of speech.

12:45-During a nap I take a Thesaurus into the side yard and read in the sun. I've decided that the precipitous decline in my verbiage has begun to take root, and that the only means of rectifying the situation is a very thorough reading of the thesaurus. Cenobium, execrable, autocthon. A more intelligent individual would have deftly wove those into the fabric of a sentence. I am certainly not that individual.

1:30-S has given us a new set of bottles for some reason or another. She always has some reason, but I believe it's because she likes changing things up on bug all the time, so that she never quite settles in. Anyhow, the new nipples, I said it, flow much faster than the old ones and s keeps choking herself as she tries to take it all down, and then she starts crying and attempting to sit up. This process is repeated over and over after about five seconds of feeding. It's episodes like this that exhausts parents in a way that is probably unimaginable to a person who has not spent any time taking care of an infant/baby.

2:30-I take bug outside to show her the Rhododendron, which is in full bloom. Of course, what I mean by full bloom is one weak looking flower starting to appear. Little white bugs zip about the leaves like snow falling from a globe. I'm not entirely certain that the thing will live despite the watering. I worry about whether I properly released the root ball.

In the yard bug snatches out her hand as quickly as I've seen it in an attempt to apprehend a passing insect.

During naps today, a trial in their own right, s generally takes a while to fall asleep sort of moaning to herself for upwards of half an hour like a crazy person. Anyhow, usually when I enter the room for an interrupted sleep s is sitting in her crib, nuk tossed aside, blanket either near her face or underneath her, and she is smiling, gaily, as if we're about to or have just had the most wonderful time of our lives. I jam her nuk back into her mouth and shut the door. It is time for sleep or, at the very least, a good deal of moaning to oneself like a mummy.

I listen to her whine for a while during her nap and then I hear the nuk hit the floor. And it's safe to say that it probably wasn't accidental. Welcome to this new phase of parenthood.

In the afternoon we sit in the yard and s tries to eat grass, and I pull up dandelions while the voices of children from the charter school in our neighborhood float by as if from the ether. After a time she gets bored and starts crying, and I pull her into my lap and tell her the names of all the things that she is seeing. Those are ants. That's a geranium. That's the chipped paint on the edge of the house. Those are oaks. All the while she vaguely looks at where I'm pointing trying to figure the whole world out.