As I mentioned in my last post, Cora has been very wakeful these past few nights. Teething, growing, sleeping through increased daylight hours, and just generally being a baby is hard sometimes. So, not only is she tired, cranky, and just generally more fragile, this morning she gave herself a paper cut in her eye. If that sentence doesn't give you the shivers, well then, you're much more hardy than I. We were in the middle of a drawing project (one where she asks me to draw things like dogs, cats, or the images on her puzzles), and she was so excited about the whole thing that she wildly waved a few pieces of paper around. While I was reaching out to take the paper away and warn her about hurting her eye, I saw the corner slice through the air and she collapsed into my chest, screaming.
Oh, it is so much easier to get hurt than to see your kids get hurt. And eyes are a big deal. I sat there holding her and being super calm while thinking about the blinding pain I would be going through if that had happened to me.
So we went to the doctor again. I am like a rotating door, just in and out of that place with one thing or another this season. It turns out she scraped the white of her eye and her cornea, but the good news is that it should heal in 24-48 hours. We have some antibiotic salve to help it heal. Her nose is stained yellow from the super galactic dye they used, and her eye oozed a lovely neon green liquid the color of antifreeze for a few hours afterward.
The thing is, you'd think I'd be at my wit's end--no sleep, frayed at the edges, very little writing, nothing all that grand or spectacular about much of anything, really. Except I just keep looking at this little person we created and thinking how interesting she is. She is opinionated and adamant and funny, she likes to make people laugh and she loves to spin and get really dizzy and fall down, she wants so much to do everything we do, like brush her teeth and her hair and cook and draw and run and sweep and climb stairs and play music and read and write. She wants to be in the middle of everything and if someone starts laughing about something she'll throw her head back and crinkle up her nose, open her mouth up really wide and just laugh and laugh, looking over at them to see if everything is still supposed to be funny. She'll say "yeah" with a great deal of understanding during the pauses in my conversation when I'm saying things she can't possibly comprehend. She is deeply, desperately in love with dogs and mentions them about, oh, every 45 seconds (that, I must admit, is a bit wearing...we're in the middle of say, eating or nursing or talking about something important like why wheels go round and round and she interrupts me to say "Woof, woof. Da."). She knows a fair number of words but the pronunciation is still a challenge; I've become one of those moms of a toddler who hears a single syllabic sound like "da" and says, depending on context, "oh yes, you see a dog!" or, "you would like to draw?" or "ok, you can get down now." Her most clear words are yeah, no, elbow, pasta, turtle, fish, apple sauce or apple juice, and opposites (this can either mean she wants to read Opposites by Eric Carle, or it can mean she is being an octopus when she's writhing on the kitchen floor pretending she has 8 appendages).
She turned 16 months on Tuesday (4/14). Tomorrow will be my 5-month anniversary of being with her full-time. I still need to iron out the wrinkles in a difficult schedule that allows for very little writing. I need to either accept that I'm not much of a late-night writer, or else I need to embrace caffeine and sleeping pills. Since both of those substances would only make me crazy, I need to be diligent about writing even on days when I just don't feel like I have anything interesting to say. I still battle wanderlust every single day but it is not for the kind of life that perhaps one might imagine I am craving...I very rarely wish I were getting ready for a day in the office, although that certainly does hit me--especially when I see women driving in their cars alone, drinking coffee and having long moments of solitude like the ones I used to enjoy when I drove across the 520 bridge to Kirkland. More, what I am craving is space and sun, blue sky and blue water. Big trees and gardens and beaches, golden grain, boulders, open kitchens and exposed wood walls, old-fashioned cook stoves and home cooked hearty vegetable sauces, tangy pine air and springy ground, and garden parties with interesting adults and spirited kids.
In a word, I want summer.
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