Last night I dreamed I looked at my younger daughter and noticed her hair had grown long, her eyes were an emerald green instead of cobalt blue like they are now, and she was running and talking. My dream self panicked - omg, when did this happen? I missed so much all of a sudden she looks like Av and I can't tell them apart except one's a little shorter than the other!
It's not hard to guess the psychological origin of this dream. It captures how I feel on a daily basis. Yesterday I
was noticing El's hair starting to thicken a little and lengthen into tiny curls in the back. Someone had commented on her blue eyes and I tried to remember when Av's eyes had started to slowly change. I've been noticing how much more complex El's "language" is getting, how good she's getting at pulling herself up to standing, even taking a step or two now and then, holding onto the couch or table. Every day she changes. I wish I had time to write every day, but it's hard, as everyone knows. Taking care of kids is time-consuming. Sometimes something will happen in the middle of the day and I'll try to imprint it on my brain, try to start right away forming the sentences I will use to describe it, in an attempt to hold it in my memory. That's what this blog is really for, anyway - so that I won't forget. Because you do forget. And I'm not sure why it seems important to remember the details, but it does. Maybe because everybody loves to hear stories about themselves when they were kids. I mean, as long as those stories are mostly positive and not, "Remember when you were six and you wouldn't eat anything but boogers and cat food?" That might not be so nice to be reminded of. But just in case my memory is not the steel trap I wish it was, or God forbid I'm drooling in a wheelchair by the time my kids start wanting to hear this stuff, I'm putting down as much as I can. On the other hand, I guess you could argue that you can go overboard taking pictures and video and writing about the stuff you do - I mean when do you fit actual living into your schedule, right? And then later when you're looking at pictures and watching video and reading journal entries, you're sacrificing your valuable time remembering the past instead of doing stuff in the present.
I might be over-thinking this a tad.
After all, it's not every day your crawling baby says her first inappropriate word. Surely that ought to be recorded for all time in some public forum. Okay, sure, I'll tell the story, you don't have to beg. It was this past Saturday, and we were all bumbling around the house getting ready to go somewhere. I happened to be standing at the bottom of the staircase when El climbed up one step. This was the first time she had done this. GW was standing at the top and we caught each other's eye, both of our expressions saying "Oh, boy, here we go!" I said it out loud: "Oh, man, we've gotta go out and buy a gate
today!" We had already talked about doing it soon, but we'd thought we had more time. "Crap!" I muttered absent-mindedly. "Wap!" yelled the baby in exactly the same tone. We burst out laughing, of course, and El beamed, quite proud of herself.
Her babbles over the past week have been more multisyllabic, and are starting to sound like real words and phrases. Her favorites now are "Ooo-at!" which of course sounds like "Who dat?" and "Uh-dat!" and "Ooooooh, yuh!" Sometimes she belts them all out together in a long string. She does say "Uh, oh" although she doesn't necessarily associate it with something dropping or some other calamity, she just likes to say it. She does have "Bye-bye" down pat, though, and always accompanies it with her twisty wristy wave. Bye-bye is probably her official first word. She's growing up, already.
Even with Av, it can be hard to keep up with the changes. Once they go to school or somewhere and they're gone from you for a period of time during the day, being influenced by other people, things move impossibly fast. Av is a super senior at pre-school now, and it's like her second home. One of their teachers from last year showed up the other day to say hello, and she was mobbed by the kids like she was Madonna in 1988. I hadn't really thought about how attached they had become to her after just one school year - you forget what teachers meant to you when you were young. They're like aunts and uncles, really. Anyway on the way home from school that day, Teacher M was al Av talked about. So sweet, how big her heart is. I'm impressed by it almost on a daily basis, watching her with her little sis. Although it's obvious that in some ways it's been hard on Av, the baby coming, she always treats El so kindly. Sometimes Av is lonely and I feel terrible about that. Not guilty, exactly, but it's painful to see and I want to be able to do something about it. I'm never sure if there
isn't something I can do, some way I could be a better parent. There probably is. I know that someday I'll be apologizing to her for this year, the year Mom was so exhausted from taking care of our little baby that I missed out on a lot of play time and other stuff with my first baby. But that's the way it goes, and I know that every parent in this position feels exactly the same way, at least sometimes, and I know that most of the time everything turns out alright. Not to go all Hallmark, but the trick, I think, is gratitude. And boy, oh boy, am I grateful for these two girls.
