Deep sleep. Lucid dream.
Loud THUD! Wailing voice!
AWAKE,
UP,
RUN!
Terror, panic, fear, horror, OH NO!
Imbalanced rush up stairs, limbs flailing, half-awake, fully terrorized.
She on the floor screaming, crying!
Me, breathless, heart pounding!
Her fall, creating the terror of a live nightmare in me.
Listening, calming, soothing, back scratching.
All is well, go back… to sleep.
(posted by Matt)
Friday, March 27, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Maia's Floral Arrangement
Maia brought in some grass yesterday to put in this little vase. Today she decided to accent it with a dandelion.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Remembering Forward, Part I
My father once gave me this little piece of his old Visa Credit card after he had cut it up. It had this little holographic image of a bird on it. He thought that I would like it. And I did. For the longest time I kept it safely tucked away in the bottom of my blue and white pencil holder (where it sat nestled against the ends of mechanical pencils and pens, separated by a thin wall of plastic from the mini-paper clip drawer). It was something from him…
This morning I pulled a triangular tri-point highlighter (one of the three colors—green, yellow and red—at each of the triangle’s three corners) from my backpack and laid it on my desk. I was intending to neatly and safely file away the unused highlighter in that haphazard desk drawer filled with unused pens, pencils and paperclips when she came downstairs to say good morning. She picked up the triangle curiously. Almost as an afterthought I said, “You can have that if you want Maia.”
“I can?! Oh, thank you!”
Now I wish that I hadn’t selfishly shoved aside my first impulse to give it to her (I’ll use it someday) and had freely offered it to her to begin with. What would her reaction have been like then? Either way, it was something from her daddy, something that she could color with.
This morning I pulled a triangular tri-point highlighter (one of the three colors—green, yellow and red—at each of the triangle’s three corners) from my backpack and laid it on my desk. I was intending to neatly and safely file away the unused highlighter in that haphazard desk drawer filled with unused pens, pencils and paperclips when she came downstairs to say good morning. She picked up the triangle curiously. Almost as an afterthought I said, “You can have that if you want Maia.”
“I can?! Oh, thank you!”
Now I wish that I hadn’t selfishly shoved aside my first impulse to give it to her (I’ll use it someday) and had freely offered it to her to begin with. What would her reaction have been like then? Either way, it was something from her daddy, something that she could color with.
Remembering Forward, Part II
I had memorized the floorboard creeks at Red Station (the name we gave to our house) from those countless hours of walking Caden back and forth, back and forth through the living room, into the open walk-in kitchen and back again. It wasn’t until some 9 months later that these acid reflux-induced-cry-soothing-exercises came back to me. I was doing the walk in the hopes of memorizing shorter catechism questions 3 and 4. Already the nostalgia tears at my heart.
I consider our move from this place and I’m tormented. I hate change. But its not so much the moving from this place as it is the memory of all that has taken place here. I have memorized my daughter’s life in little bits of 0’s and 1’s. My mind extracts first the memories that I have memorized from the videos that I have watched of her. The first fruits of my memory are tarnished and scratched by simulacra. My heart breaks at the impending celebration of her 4th birthday. What will it do at 14? 24? But then the pain would never be so deep if I hadn’t earned such great joy at knowing how wonderfully she is becoming her own person.
Sometimes she speaks with the matter of factness and confidence of an adult—about the simplest things—and it kills me. Eye brows raised, head straight ahead, gaze angled to the left, hands motioning meaningfully, “Yeah, maybe we could just color in my new coloring book when I get up tomorrow(!)” The exclamation point in her voice is almost optional—“I’m kinda excited about this, but I’m not gonna let on too much to that fact—because I’m 3 ½ years old now…”. Who teaches a 3 ½ year old how to be sublime?
So even as we move from this place to another, it will crush us to leave behind the cocoon in which so much of our past life gestated and formed into something beautiful. In that departure, I’m not sure what is more painful: the pain of leaving behind the place where our children have lived the entirety of their lives or the pain of knowing that we have already left behind little pieces of Maia and Caden’s past. And that—before we know it—they will be moving out from us in order to go into their own places in this world.
I consider our move from this place and I’m tormented. I hate change. But its not so much the moving from this place as it is the memory of all that has taken place here. I have memorized my daughter’s life in little bits of 0’s and 1’s. My mind extracts first the memories that I have memorized from the videos that I have watched of her. The first fruits of my memory are tarnished and scratched by simulacra. My heart breaks at the impending celebration of her 4th birthday. What will it do at 14? 24? But then the pain would never be so deep if I hadn’t earned such great joy at knowing how wonderfully she is becoming her own person.
Sometimes she speaks with the matter of factness and confidence of an adult—about the simplest things—and it kills me. Eye brows raised, head straight ahead, gaze angled to the left, hands motioning meaningfully, “Yeah, maybe we could just color in my new coloring book when I get up tomorrow(!)” The exclamation point in her voice is almost optional—“I’m kinda excited about this, but I’m not gonna let on too much to that fact—because I’m 3 ½ years old now…”. Who teaches a 3 ½ year old how to be sublime?
So even as we move from this place to another, it will crush us to leave behind the cocoon in which so much of our past life gestated and formed into something beautiful. In that departure, I’m not sure what is more painful: the pain of leaving behind the place where our children have lived the entirety of their lives or the pain of knowing that we have already left behind little pieces of Maia and Caden’s past. And that—before we know it—they will be moving out from us in order to go into their own places in this world.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
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