This has been a wonderful week. We've stayed busy with a bunch of fun activities, and we are both much more happy. Long live snow-free winters! (At least for us, maybe if we didn't live on a hill and we had 4-wheel drive we'd be fine.) We did something new every day, and that was good for both of us. The most delightful part is that Cora continues to communicate. She's beginning to try to parrot things, not a ton of words yet (and still only ones that I can understand, I think) but this week she's recognizably said shoes and cheese and bath, apples and bananas, wolves (and their requisite howls), birds (and their wings and song), outside, draw, book, pizza, and then yesterday we went through a list of things together until we found her preferred activity: going to the park to SWING. What I love the most is that moment when we realize that I understand her and she understands me and we lock eyes and start giggling. She is an adamant head shaker when she is letting me know what she does not does not does not want to do.
Yesterday we went to Gymboree for a tumble, then we went to the library for story time (she had the attention span to get through the songs, the stretching, and some of the sirens in the fireman story), then to the park for SWINGING and on the merry-go-round and jumping into my arms from this big rock sculpture garden at Dahl Field. We ate a big lunch and she napped about an hour and a half, and then went downstairs and worked on our super important cardboard box fort. I went to PCC the other day and asked if I could have their display box out front, one of those big octagonal boxes for apples and squash and such, and the guy gave it to me. He was exceptionally nice, took out the remaining oranges (there weren't a ton, otherwise I would have felt like a total ass), folded it up and put it in our car. It even has a ceiling with slots in it for mini-skylights. I added a door and windows. She has a little lounge in there, a pillow and blanket and a couple of books and a ukulele. It looks like a mini dorm room, like she could invite some friends over to her pad and light incense, put daisies in her hair and strum her guitar and read deep poetry and stuff.
Today we finally got out for a walk with our friends, and Cora said "Anna" all the way over to their house and back. It's been raining like crazy here. Normally I would have braved it and just gotten out anyway but the winds have been so strong that it has truly been the last thing I wanted to do. Yesterday afternoon we headed over the neighborhood community center and I saw this teenage guy walking away from the bus stop. It was pouring rain, like full-throttle windshield wiper rain. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, no coat, and was still trudging along with a pronounced strut, looked totally unfazed, and I was thinking that's what it's like to grow up in Seattle. Life as a child is covered with rain. It's all muddy fields and indoor pools, full-body rain suits and rubber boots, trudging along on a grey day with rain swimming down your pale face and still trying to look cool.
I finished my story yesterday. Or at least I finished the first draft. It still needs some major editing. It's 35 pages double-spaced and with some serious tightening I think I can trim it down a bit. We'll see. I plan to submit it someplace by the end of next week. I'm looking forward to starting the next one. I think it might start on an airplane and have a crossover with one of the characters in this story, but I'm not totally sure yet. That's one of the things I enjoyed the most about writing this one (even though it was a bit frustrating there for awhile)--I never knew how it was going to end until it did. I thought it was going to be one story and it turned into something else. It's gratifying when that happens, when it seems to take on a life of its own.
Speaking of which, I am going to go take another look at this draft and do a quick round of edits before Cora wakes up. Ah, napping. One of my friends gave me this ABC book when Cora was born called Awake to Nap by Nikki McClure, and it was written and illustrated during her son's naps. It only goes from A-M because it's as far as she got during that stage of motherhood. Pretty cute idea, and one I can relate to.
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