Our Friends on the Outside

Our friends C and J come over for dinner every week, usually on Thursday, when our shared box of CSA vegetables arrives. They are terrific people. Cooking and eating and sitting around the table with them is a deep and reliable source of pleasure. And there's something else, too.

One Thursday in May, C came over early to bake a birthday cake (their oven was broken). Ingrid had refused, in a dramatic and whiny way, to nap, and, in the middle of a long afternoon with an overtired girl, I was relieved to have another grownup in the house. Iris was napping, and Ingrid stood on the stool next to C as he mixed eggs and flour and sugar, coconut and pecans. I kept ducking into the living room to breathe air uninhabited by children, the way some punk would lean out the window to sneak a smoke.

But the few minutes of rest weren't the best part. The best part was what C said later, J nodding along, after both girls were in bed and all four of us were warm with wine and arugula and cake: If I lived with Ingrid, I’d do a lot more baking.

More baking? I didn't get it until he went on, She loves batter. It’s so much fun.

Oh my God, I thought. Fun. I’d forgotten.

Ingrid does love batter. She loves watching us mix things, loves getting her fingers in there, getting covered with it: cheeks, wrists, elbows, neck. She says, I love it! She mutters, sticky-tongued, smacking batter off of her fingers: Mmm. Tastes like whoop cream. Tastes like whoop cream.

And if you’ve had a good night’s sleep—and if you’re wearing a clean shirt, and if you’ve spent at least a few hours recently without anyone climbing up your torso or shrilly demanding your undivided attention—then apparently it’s easy to see what that girl on the stool with her arm in the bowl really is: a joy. A pure example of total sugar-coated delight. And funny, too.

Everyone talks about it taking a village, and about how we need the arms of friends to share the work of cooking and caring and carrying. These friends have definitely got arms. The four of us take turns chopping and grilling and stir frying, soothing and (this falls mostly to J on our dinner nights) imagining and playing—changing one pretend poopy diaper after another, inventing elaborate dances for each of Ingrid's unique and beloved stuffed animals.

As I think about that cake baking day, though, I realize that, often, even more than their arms, I need their eyes. Eyes that are fresh to all of this.

And being a mother—being embroiled, so often, in discipline or struggle or shoulder-to-the-wheel loneliness or just plain exhaustion—I can tell you how very, very rarely I have it in me to offer that to another mom. There is freshness in loving children but being childless. There is something we parents keep using up that these friends—without, I think, thinking about it very much—replenish.

I am sure there are times C and J would rather be visiting friends with less chaotic pre-dinner hours, cleaner place mats, more reliable short-term memories. Their lives, just like ours, are work. But the kind of energy they have left at the end of each day is often different from what we've got. It's the kind of energy that can stand to change a couple of pretend poopy diapers. The kind that can look at a sticky three-year-old and see fun.

We tell them we're glad they're around, and I think they believe us. But I'm afraid my absurd, sloppy gratitude can't ever quite make sense to them. Without experiencing it for myself, I don't know if I'd have ever believed that all a person needs to do to make my day or, hell, my whole week, is come over and bake a cake with my kid at three in the afternoon and then say they liked it. But it's true: that's all it takes. And these two lovely people do it over and over, and I'm so grateful.

Grappling

In Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, she describes working in the clothing department at Wal-Mart. All day, she's responsible for cleaning up the continually unfolding mess, sorting, folding, and hanging clothes that customers have removed from the racks. Of course, her job is never finished. There are always more t-shirts in the changing rooms, sweaters unfolded, jeans carried off but not purchased. And the customer—you know, the one she's "serving"?—the customer begins to look like the enemy in her Sisyphean slog toward making things neat. She cringes when she sees one coming. In a workplace with little freedom, flexibility, or opportunity for creativity, the customers aren't the point of her job; they're her opponents, existing only to set her even farther back on the unending road to ever feeling finished.

I'm horrified to realize how often, lately, I've thought of the little people in our house just that way. I crave a sense of completion. I crave the moment when everything is done and put away and quiet. And from that point of view, the people who poop and throw sweet potatoes and upend baskets of toys and need stories read and hair combed and medicines administered...they start to look, in my messed up, overtired mind, a lot like Barbara Ehrenreich's customers. "Please," I think, as I wipe one's nose while the other clambers up my shirt. "Can't you please stop needing things so that I can get on with..."

But get on with what, exactly?

Like everyone, I have a list of things I'd do with a quiet hour: sort old clothes, wrap wedding gift, vacuum stairs, shave legs. And beyond that: learn Spanish, run intervals, write poems. But is any of that enough to make up the life I really want?

Lately I've been in this little house of parenthood, pressing my face up against the glass, staring out at the free, free world. Why am I in here? Why?

This is nearly impossible to write about, because I fear I'm creating something my daughters will one day be able to read but not understand. Let me be clear: our children are fantastic and deeply loved. There is no chance I'd wish either of them away. I think you understand, though: I love my children fiercely. And sometimes I wish, equally fiercely, that I were not their mother.

Years ago, without children, dreaming of parenthood, I got a lot wrong. I missed, totally, how much I could sometimes not like it. But I was right (and I'd forgotten, until recently, that I'd even anticipated this) in looking forward to our child-raising years as a time of happy chaos. Of things being in disorder, always messy, a bit out of control, exhausting. I even craved the mess and rush, fearing, as I headed into fertility treatments, a constant life of dry, plain neatness.

I've come to know the chaos of my dreams well. The library books are overdue, the dishes aren't done, and when did I last have a haircut? I've been letting the chaos get me down so much, though, that I'd forgotten happy could come in the same phrase. That I wanted this. That, really thinking about the alternative, even knowing what I know now, I'd make the same choice again.

I have thought so often about the alternate universe in which A and I were not able to conceive and have children. I think that some people who've been through infertility experience it as a great magnifier of gratitude. But when I think, "What if we hadn't been able to have them?" I feel only a kind of rote gratitude, plus a heap of guilt for not liking it enough. And I forget that something came before the fear of not having this: the decision that we wanted it.

When I think, "What if we'd decided not to do this?", that's when I see that, however much I'd love to have more breaks from this life to do all of the necessary and fulfilling things on my list, the quiet and calm—the unending space and time for just me or even just A and me—wouldn't be enough. Wasn't, and still isn't—no matter how much I crave the better parts of it—what I want for my life, for our lives.

Last week I read The War of Art. It's about about what keeps us from doing the creative work we want to do, and one of its big themes is: Do your work. He means: You know what you're here to do. Don't waste time thinking about it, complaining about it, talking about it, or trying in a million ways to avoid it. You'll never get it done if you don't do it.

Somehow it helps me lose my awful attitude when I think of my kids as my work. Work in Pressfield's sense: what I'm here to do, what only I can do.

I've never quite been one to think of motherhood as my calling. And I have other work in this world, too—fitting that in is a whole other story. But, indisputably, for a good chunk of my days, the care and love and education of these two great girls is it.

Thinking of it this way quiets me, somehow. I am not here (it is not possible) to quell all of their needs and finally arrive at some nirvana of peaceful, completed family life. I am here to see what my family needs from me, and to do it. And to find enough respite from this work so that, during the times when it's mine, I can do it well, rather than pedaling fruitlessly toward its nonexistent end.

Whether this makes any sense or not, it's what I'm using today to claw my way out of the hole.

Second Hand

I listened to this story while running on Sunday morning, Mothers' Day. If you have time, take a listen (or, heck, go get Chris Offutt's Luck at the library and read it the old fashioned way).

A woman drives her boyfriend's eight-year-old daughter to a pawn shop. She doesn't know how to make her happy. The girl falls in love with a mountain bike that it turns out the woman can't afford, and she ends up trading the guy her prized ostrich-skin boots for the bike, then wedging the bike into the trunk of her old car and, lacking any rope, removing her bra from under her shirt and using it to tie the trunk closed. The last line of the story is something like I wonder if I would have made the same trade for my own daughter.

I am poorer than I want to be at knowing what a writer means, and before having kids I never would have interpreted it this way, but lately I feel like what happens in this story is, oh, pretty much exactly like being a mother. Don't you feel like you're driving home shoeless and braless, with someone in the back seat you hardly know but have cashed in something precious for, hoping like crazy that the trunk stays shut and the bike's not a lemon, that this moment of harmony can last, that what you've just done—the least you can do, all you can do—is somehow enough?

De-Escalation

To update you on a couple of loose threads:

She has not yet worn the underpants to day care. Several of you pointed out that the key thing will be the teachers' reaction, and I think that's right. And I know the teachers there will back up any girl's right to wear train undies, no special request required. She just hasn't chosen those on a day care day. Yet.

A head-in-the-sand approach is proving similarly effective with the baby squishing problem. I realized the other day (probably as a direct result of listing, in that post, all of the contortions that A and I have done in response to this behavior) that our response has been escalating as it's gone on, and that the goal of our response has been: Make it stop.

Not a bad goal, in theory, when the baby's rib cage is in constant danger of being crushed. But everything we've done with that end in mind has failed.

So now I'm looking at it this way: for whatever incomprehensible almost-three-year-old older-sister reason, Ingrid is sometimes just not able to control the impulse (desire?) to squeeze the bejeesus out of her baby sister. She is not going to stop it. She is not going to explain to us why she is doing it. So instead of getting our blood pressure all out of whack trying to get her to cut it out, we should be aiming to (1) make sure Ingrid knows it is not ok with us when she does it and (2) keep Iris safe.

So now Iris has a lot of play time in the crib, which she seems to love (she plays peekaboo with us through the bars and laughs her head off) and which keeps her away from the squish monster. When the two of them are close together and Ingrid begins to lose her gentleness, I say We don't do that, separate them, and ignore Ingrid in sort of a low-key way. No punishment, no long explanation, and no extra attention.

Is it working? I don't know. Iris is still alive, and I am less hoarse.

Between the Lines

This post gets at something I've been thinking about lately. The post is really about a miserable sleep situation, which hasn't exactly been on my mind, though we may be getting there. What I mean is how she describes her baby's crying:

I do believe that some crying could be endured. But my heart quails at this type. This is the type of crying you do while sitting on the floor of the bathroom after the IVF cycle has failed- the kind that takes over your whole body, with sob after sob. How can I bear to hear my baby crying that way?

First: Point taken. Hearing a baby cry like that is awful all by itself.

But also: Babies' (and toddlers'—er, preschoolers') displays of emotion push parents' buttons in very special ways, depending on who the parents are and where they've been. What Mare said was kind of a metaphor, but also kind of not. It was kind of like saying My baby's crying gets to me because it sounds like one of the worst moments of my life.

Lately, Ingrid's and my hardest times come when she wants something from me (Help me, Mama! Now! With both hands!) and, even after we've gotten through You need to ask nicely, I can't help. I'm holding the baby and/or flipping pancakes and/or brushing my teeth and/or Ingrid knows perfectly well how to put on her shoes so I'm not going to do it. I tell her that gently, and I tell her what I can do (in a second, with one hand, sing to her while she puts her own shoes on), and then her face breaks open and she wails as though I have just sawed off one of her fingers. And that's when I start to have to take deep breaths and leave the room to calm down.

Here's why those moments are the worst of my day: In those tantrums, I'm hearing something that's not there. I'm hearing You are not a good enough Mama. You are not giving me what I need. Not good enough! Not good enough Not good enough!

Sick and wrong, huh?

Because she's not saying that, of course, any more than Botany is staring at a negative pee stick. She's two. She's having some drama and some difficulty sharing me with Iris but she's not blaming me.

Anyway. This isn't the same as Mare's thing. Hers is a sort of compassion (maybe an excess, I don't know), and mine's more about, uh, me and my warped outlook on life.

But do you know what I mean? What do you hear that your child's not saying?

Span (Last)

Someone mentioned knitting, and that helps, too. It induces the kind of meditative attention that happens in nature. And it feels good to make something, even if it's just a wonky sweater or some weird scrap that's destined for the bottom of the toy bin. I spent some peaceful minutes in the past several evenings doing rows of seed stitch with scrap yarn. I like the nubbly feel of it and the sense that I'm pulling something along with me. Sitting and basically doing nothing, but leaving something behind, too.

Writing is important in the same way and more.It's a way of keeping track of where I've been. If there are words put down somewhere, typed quickly here or scrawled in a notebook with the idea of someday becoming poems, then I haven't just floated through the week without leaving any footprints. It seems to matter, even though it's hardly ever clear what on earth I've made.

Span (4)

One day last week we were in the usual start to the spiral: Iris was fussing, Ingrid was balking at getting dressed to leave the house. I couldn’t concentrate on one or the other, I was just trammelled by both.

I started to sing a song to calm Iris down: Tum bala, Tum bala, Tum balalaikaThen, hardly thinking about what I was doing, I changed the words to talk to Ingrid: Get your shoes, get your shoes, get your shoes, Ingrid. I don’t know that I expected results to this. But Iris quieted. Ingrid did a double-take when she heard the new words, and smiled, and kept listening. She found her shoes while I invented new verses, silly ones. She sung along.

Sound—which for days had felt like my enemy—was on our side. Calming Iris. Entertaining Ingrid. Smoothing the air so I could breathe it again. Connecting us.

It wasn't—by far—the first time I'd used singing to be heard, to soothe, to entertain. But it was the first time I noticed how much music does to get me through those moments.

And singing is the one thing I can do that sometimes meets all of our needs at once. I've done a a ton of singing since that day. Iris needs the tune, the rhythm. Ingrid needs the word play and the unexpected. I need to hear something orderly. And it feeds me, just a little, to be creative with words, even in that fleeting medium. (What a rush it is to rhyme Daddy with spaghetti. Huzzah!) I don't have much of a musical education, but as far as I'm concerned this is what music is for.

Span (3)

I’m reading Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods.

He talks about two kinds of attention: directed attention, and fascination. Directed attention is what we use up in our lives, focusing on work, solving problems, speaking and being spoken to. Fascination is a break from that. We are alert, but we are resting. This is what we find among the trees or walking through the desert. We are aware of our surroundings, but we emerge from it clear-headed instead of spent.

This makes complete, whole-body sense to me. In those bad moments, I am out of attention. I can’t focus because there’s too much happening, and because whatever part of me is in charge of maintaining focus is too pooped to go on.

I knew this instinctively, without having the words for it, before. I’d say I needed rest, and I didn’t (mostly) mean I want to be on the couch with my eyes closed, or staring at a flickering screen. I meant I need to do something restorative, something that replenishes what’s been used up. What would that be?

Louv's project is to show how important contact with nature is—for everyone, but especially for kids. So he writes a lot about how time in nature restores us. I can’t disagree. I’ve spent some joyful time in close contact with nature and come out as restored as I can imagine being. And my most frequent fantasy escape would certainly count as a natural place.

I will get us all outside more, and use some of my rest time, when I can, to be where things grow. And it helps, always, to have new words for a problem and a new kind of solution to look for.

But what, again, about 10:30 on a Tuesday morning? How can I sneak that kind of restoration into my life, into a house where the sound is already taking up all the space?

Where do you find it? What fills you up again?

Pain Management

I've been trying to think, lately (when I'm not busy slamming my fist onto the kitchen counter so hard it makes my arm tingle), about how I handle the stress of taking care of these two cuties, and how I could handle it better, i.e. without becoming so ridiculously impatient and angry so much of the time. Let me talk about this in a completely roundabout way:

....

After I posted Iris's birth story, Meika asked:

Was there a particular pain-control method you used? Did you do anything different than you had the first time around?

Before Ingrid was born, A and I attended Bradley Method classes, which I ended up feeling lukewarm about. The teacher was a pretty dogmatic Bradley Method believer. The right and proper way to get through a contraction was to lie on your side with your arms and legs in a specific position, relax completely, close your eyes, and stay quiet. Most of that (um, minus the "quiet" part) ended up being useful to me, but during the class it bothered me that it was presented as the only way.

The most useful part of the Bradley class, even on top of the inordinate amount of reading I did about birth, was the information about what to expect during labor and how to respond to various interventions that might be offered in the hospital. We got an earful about the untrustworthy medical profession, which I didn't exactly appreciate, but we also got a really good schooling about how x is likely to lead to y and z, so if you don't want z don't do x if you can help it. That, along with a terrific doula and a large amount of luck, is what I credit for my being able to pull off two drug-free hospital births.

What I ended up doing both times was a kind of modified Bradley pain control: as relaxed as possible, but also making a lot of noise.

I also loved the Birthing from Within book, which gives the advice: "Be curious." I tried to pay attention to the pain rather than attempt to block it out; notice where it was, how it felt, how it was changing. As labor wore on, this became more difficult impossible. But for much of labor it was a good technique for me because it matched my motivation for wanting to go drug-free in the first place: I wanted to know what it felt like to give birth.

Shortly before Ingrid was born, we watched the movie Touching the Void, and this was probably the most unusual part of my pain management plan. The film (and the book, which is awkwardly written but with such a devastating scene of manly sweetness at the end it's worth picking up) is about Joe Simpson, a mountain climber who made a three-day, five-mile trek out of a crevasse and across a glacier after being left for dead with a broken leg, no food, and practically no water. I know people do the impossible all the time in this world (i.e. give birth to babies and raise them to be well-adjusted adults), but this was such an extraordinary example of what can be endured if you're just willing to do it one step at a time, I asked A to remind me about it during labor, and he did, both times. Remember Joe Simpson, he'd breathe into my ear in the midst of a horrible contraction.

....

Answering Meika's question, I started to think that my daily "pain" (and maybe that shouldn't even be in quotes) is not so very different from the pain of labor. It's a natural part of having children. I deal with it, mostly, by the book (because, hey, books! I love them. Rules. I follow them), but with an unauthorized amount of noise (just ask A). And I would be well-advised to be more curious, to float above it more, and to remember Joe Simpson and take it one little delirious broken-legged step at a time.

Eye of the Mama

Yesterday I brought the girls by a coffee shop to kill some time before the end of the workday. I chose some snacks for Ingrid and me—a fruit leather, a banana, a cookie (guess who got the sugary one)— and ordered a cup of coffee. I had Iris in one arm, the diaper bag over my shoulder, and Ingrid wound around my legs.

I turned around to notice that the guy behind me was someone I sort of know—a friend of a friend of A's. He's a physician and lives somewhere sort of nearby, and we had a little chat about the neighborhood as I waited for my drink.

As the barista set my cup on the counter, the guy sprang into solicitous mode: Looks like you're going to need some help getting all this to your table! and picked up the snacks and cup to carry for me.

It was nice of him to offer the help, and I accepted it gratefully, if a little awkwardly. (If I didn't have to carry all that stuff, what would I do with my free hand and the extra three fingers on the hand holding Iris?)

But it made me realize how accustomed we parents are to doing the impossible, and how invisible (to us, I mean) our amazing feats can be. This guy, a doctor, thought it obvious I wouldn't be able to get myself to the table, but it hadn't even crossed my mind that this was anything more than a routine trip across a room. Carrying snacks, coffee and baby? No sweat, Dr. Helpful. Try getting them dressed to play in the snow. Try getting them both to sleep at once. Come over and help me carry laundry around the house any day of the week and gasp with awe as I tote laundry basket and baby down the basement stairs at once.

What do you do every day that your average childless doctor, physicist, sky diver, or literary hero would believe to be impossible?

Vacation

Some good friends are getting married this November and are planning a beach honeymoon in the Virgin Islands. Talking about this with them recently, I got a little misty-eyed ragingly jealous.

Our honeymoon, while lovely, was emphatically un-tropical: we went to Banff in early October and did a lot of hiking and gazing at the golden aspens. We just aren't (I thought, then) beach honeymoon sort of people. But, while most days I wouldn't trade either of our daughters for one, seven, or a thousand tropical vacations, did that conversation ever make me feel a pang of Now why in the hell didn't we do that while we could? I made a wistful comment or two and then spent the rest of the conversation drooling openly over my friends' travel guidebook.

Last week we mentioned to our soon-to-be-wed friends our Christmas plans: the four of us are going to Hawaii with my folks and my brother. This is a luxury, to be sure (bankrolled by my very generous parents), and something to look forward to—and then remember—for months and months. But I did feel just a slight a massive disconnect when our friends' reply to the news of our vacation plans was See! You can still go on tropical vacations with kids!

It's true: you can go just about anywhere you want with kids of any number and age. And in December we will have a great time splashing in the waves with Ingrid and watching Iris's chunky little suncreen-slathered body accumulate sand like a cinnamon-sugar doughnut. What our friend clearly, deeply did not get, though (and what I surely didn't get, myself, before our first vacation as parents) was that vacation with little ones, while refreshing and interesting in its own way, is just not restful. It is a change of scene, a chance to see and learn and teach new things, an opportunity to know each other differently. It isn't, however, a break.

We are on vacation this week and next. Not in the tropics, but visiting my parents in the misty-moisty pacific northwest. We all flew here together, then A left the next day for a five-day conference for work. There's been no break this week: jetlagged Ingrid up at 5:15 every day; Iris sleeping ok but nursing like a fiend; my saintly parents lending as many hands as they can but unable as I am to predict or calm the many tantrums each day. We've rushed through a zoo in the pouring rain with the nap clock ticking, attended a kickass library story hour, and thrown a truckload of rocks into Puget Sound, but for the most part, the past several days have felt suspiciously like everyday life, except with less sleep and better coffee.

A will be back tomorrow, and then we all (A, me, the kids, my brother, my folks, their cat) will drive to the coast, to a place I spent many a summer week as a kid. A great place, a place that I'm extra excited to go with Ingrid so grown up and aware and into exploring, because I can't wait to show it to her. We'll still be nursing and changing diapers and peeling apples and deciphering tantrums and orchestrating bedtimes and naptimes and meals, but I hope there'll be a little of the sublime in there too, as well as perhaps, maybe, a tiny bit more sleep.

Oh, and I don't think I'll have any internet access there at all. So leave me some uplifiting vacation comments to read when I get back.

Owwies

Ingrid has been cautious, always. A year ago, while other kids her age—newer to walking than she was—careened around, drawn to pointy corners and sharp edges, Ingrid took one slow step at a time. While other toddlers charged through the sand at the playground, Ingrid, intimidated by the uneven surface, sat still and examined the sand. She's still nothing like a daredevil; she hesitates, even at physical tasks I know she can do, and asks for help, and I remind her again and again to try on her own.

In the past month, though, she's accumulated a record number of injuries.

First came a goose egg earned from the corner of a dining table at a suburban Red Lobster during Great Grandma's birthday dinner. Then a scrape on the top of her big toe from tripping as she "ran laps" on the concrete path in our backyard. The same scrape, re-opened in an identical fall a day later, required a band-aid—something so new and alarming for Ingrid that A ended up wearing a band-aid on his own uninjured big toe for an evening to reassure her. And, most impressively, last weekend, a fat lip—with some blood, even—from banging her face on the edge of the bathroom counter when her step stool tipped over.

Last summer I know I'd have been alarmed by all the bumps and bruises she'd have gotten had she been more physically adventuresome. I am inclined to anxiety, especially when it comes to my darling's unblemished flesh. But now, somehow, the main thing I feel about this is a strange sort of pride. She is starting to push herself physically, figure out on her own what she can do without getting hurt, and I love watching that.

Several weeks ago we ate dinner out with A's mom and siblings at a lively restaurant. Near our table was a wide and fairly steep stone stairway. As the meal wound down, Ingrid started looking for fun outside the bounds of our table and found the stairs. For a good 15 minutes, she worked on climbing them—far from the railing, one step at a time, up and down. First she went up two steps and back to the bottom. Then up three and back down. And on like that.

Everyone else at the table—most loudly, my mother in law—sucked in their breath as they watched. The table hummed with variations on This is not going to end well. My brother in law, a rock climber and whitewater kayaker, perched on the edge of the chair closest to the stairway, ready to leap up and catch Ingrid if needed. My mother in law and sister in law huddled together, on occasion screening their view of Ingrid with their hands. A even said to me under his breath, Do you think this is ok?

And what I said was Yes. It did look scary. I can't say that my heart wasn't beating a little fast, and I can't tell you I couldn't feel the blood rushing through my veins just like in any other situation where physical harm to my daughter seems possible. But Ingrid was being, at the same time, characteristically methodical and newly brave, and I wanted to let her do that. It seemed very unlikely that she would fall. I was almost certain that if she did fall, she would not die from her injuries. I was even pretty sure that she wouldn't even need stiches.

I was riled up enough by the whole mothering-as-spectator-sport scene (the horrified glances went from Ingrid to me to Ingrid. Isn't she going to do something?) that I could not be articulate or graceful about explaining to the gawking in-laws that this was a good thing, a really good thing, and that by letting her do this I was not neglecting her, I was being a good mom, a really good mom. So I just sat there, fuming about the judgment implied by their horror, and also proud as could be of the little girl on the stairs learning what she could do.

And she didn't fall. She kept going up and down, arms out, adding one step up on each attempt, until she reached the landing eight steps up, then walked back down, grinning, unsupported.

On Saturday after Ingrid got the fat lip in the bathroom, I held her while she cried, and blotted at her lip with toilet paper, and then we went back downstairs to rejoin A and a few friends barbecuing in the backyard. Ingrid peered out the dining room window and called out to them in her most chipper little voice: I bonked myself right here, pointing to her lip, still oozing a little blood. I cried and cried!

It feels great that we are both learning at the same time that she can push herself physically, that she can get a little bump or bruise and end up ok.