Tuesdays with Sadie

7:20 A.M.
s wakes up happily. She always wakes up happily. She is either a morning person, or someone who just really loves a good nap. I hope that this remains for the rest of her life, and she doesn't wind up like most people I know who generally feel as though they've been flattened by a semi following a mid-afternoon nap.



8:00 A.M.
We drive down to Silver Spring to take the car into the shop. s does a good job of quietly looking on while we discuss the price of a new light and bumper. On the way home she sleeps while the metro rattles by and a car with a crappy muffler cracks into life on the street while I admire garden paths and bits of remodeling going on and try to figure out if it is related to an increase in home values or just that old adage about spring and birds and bees.

9:27 A.M. I commence feeding s, which stands as literally the grossest thing I've done for her yet. I kid you not, give me a poop filled diaper 100 times over. Note: This may be because I've already changed over 100 diapers as it is. Anyhow, s decided that she wanted to help me feed her the rice cereal, which is two parts rice and four parts breast milk or something, so when she stuck her hand in the bowl and then smeared it on her leg, cheek, my arm, and then ducked her head into the spoon leaving a mark on her forehead and a bit stuck in her eyelash, I was bit grossed out. I was up to my elbows in the stuff, and I eventually had to stop feeding her because it was too gross. She was pretty much covered in rice. And I'm fairly certain that she learned nothing and will be assaulting me as I try to feed her tomorrow as well as dribbling 9/10 of what I try to feed her on the bib while getting frustrated that I'm not giving her more to not eat/toss on her legs, my elbows, beneath her chin, on her elbow. Eh. Gross.



1:30 The strangeness of our neighbor removing the perfect dogwood from their backyard. Two weeks earlier I'd stood in the backyard with S and reflected on the satisfying brand of light that arrives as the days lengthen and that particular light still on the blossoms of the dogwood while we stood in shadow. (The tenor of light in late summer is a faded kind of silver that you see on cars that were once silver, but that haven't been retouched in years. This is the sort of light that arrives just before the uniform blue that precedes your garden variety darkness. Note: The strangeness is amplified by the fact that certain items, magnolias, dogwoods, azaleas, act as status symbols for brief periods of time in Washington, DC in the early spring. In the order listed above the bushes/trees come into full bloom and are not only beautiful but have attached to that beauty a kind of intelligence. Ie, the people viewing them, and probably not in possession of said items themselves feel keenly, or at least I do, a vague sense that the person with that item has gotten the better of me, that they are smart. Thus, it seems like not just an aesthetically questionable decision to remove the dogwood but almost intellectually, in a weird sense, as well.

3:15 At some point s becomes tired of lying on her stomach. Like any reasonable father I attempted to help her roll onto her back. Unfortunately during the rolling process I kind of lost her and she landed rather rudely on the back of her head and commenced yowling and crying while simultaneously holding on to me, by this point I'd picked her up, obviously, and grabbing on to my shoulders before leaning away again, so I could see the full force of what I'd done. (This reminded me of what most people wind up learning about relationships at one point in time in their life. That the people who bring you pain are often the same ones who we almost invariably turn to in order to alleviate that pain. I guess I hadn't thought of how it's born into us, that it starts when we are mere infants.)


5:15 She rolls over all the time now. Every time I put her down to try and get a chore done I come back and find her lying in a new place on her stomach looking somewhat surprised. The spot is generally also off whatever blanket/mat I've put her on, and she's just hanging out on the dirty floor. I'd carry her around when I do errands, but I'm pretty sure I'd just wind up tearing my other labrum if I haven't already. I plan to put up videos on this blog someday of me doing stuff like rolling over and jumping up and down to see if it's just as cute. I'm guessing it isn't.

7:00 s goes to bed. She is cute. I head out into the yard to try and cure my rose bush, the last vestige of the previous owner in the backyard unless you count that ants that we disturbed with our landscaping that are now eating Borax and taking it back to the wife and kids. Aside: I also noticed about a million flying ants crawling around outside tonight, and I attempted to spray them with Windex, but it actually seemed to make them stronger. Cringing. Anyhow, I'm trying to fix this rose bush that has blackspot by spraying it with baking soda or something. These dirty hippie recipes for success never work, and I'm sure I'll just be pulling it out entirely next year after it whithers away.

General thoughts: s is getting big. I keep doing that thing that all parents do about "it's going to fast." But shi-, it's going fast. It's just that they change so rapidly that it becomes hard to imagine that only four months ago she was barely functional, and now she only jumps in her jumper for more than five minutes if she's receiving constant approval. Ie, she now has a personality and desires affirmation for things like jumping. This is strange for a parent because she could only worry about basic needs a very short time ago. Not much has changed for me in the last five months although I've really gotten good at not spitting up after dinner, but s has changed by leaps and bounds. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing for a person to witness. It's just a thing. I don't get a choice in the matter. The little urchin is going to keep growing up, like today when I was showing her flowers and we walked past a bush in the front yard and she grabbed on and pulled a branch out. It's weird that she can do that now, and good that it was a bush that I needed to trim anyway. She's a good kid.