Whitman

Raining in Marion

Raining. Again.

On plus side I slept until almost 8 when Grace crept into my room to ask if she and Whit could go downstairs and watch TV. And wonder of wonders, she knows how to turn it on herself. Somehow between that first TV watching episode and now the TV stopped working, but it gave me a few minutes alone in bed this am so I am not complaining.

My very anal daughter, who takes after her very anal mother, made her bed this morning (see above). She apparently has an instinctive aptitude for hospital corners. I am so proud. I cannot cope without making my bed in the morning: a well-made bed is the first step in an orderly life.

In a bit the three of us are going to go see Up. I’m looking forward to it and so are they. After that I’ll have to consider what to do with the yawning black hole of an afternoon in Marion in the rain.

Pirate hat & mardi gras beads

After receiving a pirate hat and two strands of beads at Margot’s third birthday party, Whit didn’t take them off all weekend. He SLEPT in his pirate hat. I went in to tuck him in, having put him to bed decidedly hat-free, and he was splayed on his back with the thing firmly on his head. Hilarious. With his standard sartorial elan, he added a bandana tied around his neck “like a cape” and a red fleece vest that had been his as a baby this morning. The fleece vest, size 12 months, was snug. He really made a statement at the playground.

As I was bathing Whit last night I noticed a rash creeping across his chin. I panicked. He had had Annie’s mac and cheese (something he’s had many, many times) and a lollipop (I could not really read the label, twisted as it was around the stem, but come on? Jolly Ranchers, with nuts?) and I can’t figure out what he reacted to. I ran out to get Benadryl and it calmed right down.

I was really anxious this time, much more so, frankly, than the last two ER visits. This despite the reaction being far milder. I just got myself thinking about the world being a fraught place for my little guy, about what it is that makes someone allergic. I feel the same way about allergies as I do about auto-immune diseases: there is something insidious about these reactions, where the body attacks itself. Can we ever understand why?

Of course I realize how tremendously minor Whit’s challenges are, how truly blessed I am that this is the thing I have to worry about right now. I know. I promise, I know. Still, for a moment, I thought: Crap. I’ve done it again. A fantastic mother three-peat.

Trucks, Christmas and a Wise Monk

Not a plot-driven thriller, this one. Still, Whit likes to read it every single night. So tonight we did. He can name each kind of truck and sometimes wants to do that, other times he wants me to read. Tonight, we lay on his robot sheets on his bottom bunk and I read. And by “read” I mean the two words per page, each of which accompanies a large color photo of a different kind of truck. I’m learning something myself! Or, I was the first 10 times I read it. On time 100, most of the learning has occured.

I had ordered the children some clothes from J Crew on sale, and today a pair of shorts arrived for Whit. They were khaki with red lobsters on them; he loved them, and thanked me. I told him I thought they would be excellent with a red tee shirt. He thought for a moment and then offered, “You know what else would be good? Red underwear with red lobsters on them. To go with the shorts. Yes, that’s what I want.”

Off I go to hunt for red-on-red lobster print boxers. Or not.

I am struggling today to stay in the moment. Well, I struggle every day, with varying degrees of awareness and angst. I guess today I’m really aware of it. Perhaps because I spent a while on the Zen Habits blog tonight, reading through the list of links about advice on happiness. I saw many quotes by Thich Nhat Hahn and considered that I ought to pull out his book again, given to me all of those years ago in college by Selden, my wonderful first therapist who altered my perspective permanently.

I realize it sounds almost comic for me to say I need to focus on mindfulness and in -the-momentness. I certainly do not live as though these things are priorities. But believe it or not I try, and tonight I read the whole My First Truck book without a single distraction, and then spent 20 minutes poring over I Spy Christmas with Grace (her, admittedly random, choice).

Today I’ll take my small triumphs. Reading the same truck names over and over is a kind of ritual of its own, calming in its tiny way. As is searching a page of random items for the third snowman. Small my triumphs are indeed, but today they are all I have.