ABOUT THAT JAUNTY POO ...
Edie.
Funny, I don’t like the name Aunt nor Auntie, but being one has been life’s biggest highlight in recent years. Cutiepiemuffinhead. Hey, Beau-fo. Funny Bunny. Snugglepuff. CUDDLE PUFF. I don’t know how these silly word pairings occur, but they do. Little Bobby-Do, floofy bum-bum, bit of sugar candy love! Nonsensical fluff that must try-try-try to capture a love words could never express, love that wants to leap outta me for her. Just throwing out words till the love is apparent and covers everything in smiles and warmth and future. So much love that fear dareth try to rise up and steal it away. An open heart shared fully risks the deepest wound. Good. That’s what gives it value. I love having another person around to pour love into.
I’m reminded of Bean when we were little and slept in our parents’ bed with our mom (our dad slept on the floor downstairs in the rec room for a variety of reasons). We each had a bedroom, but preferred to be piled in with the mom. Bean’s sweet baby hair was soft and dark and smelled so sweet. Edie’s little coconut head (as my dad calls it) is perfectly reminiscent of Bean’s and I’m reliving it in a sense, a delicious déjà vu.
She’s my best little buddy, laughter and squeals upon my arrival often times, and always, always continuous smiles, her bright eyes following me until she’s sure I’m sticking around for a while. Maybe she senses the sheer love and delight I have for her and she responds to it, reciprocal mirrors. Thrills me to have someone be so happy I’m around. The soul is healed by being with children said Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Wonderstruck, we’d just finished dancing cheek to cheek back in September-Octoberish. Just before she became an active smiler like Auntie. Aside: those teeth are the product of braces. “How can that be?” I asked my dentist last year. Without diligent efforts to maintain their new position via a retainer, they more often than not move back to their former position. Clearly, I no longer have the retainer, but I do have the mold taken of my mouth pre-orthodontics, and they’re an eerie match now. Wish the doc had applied a permanent brace to the back of my top teeth like he did the bottom. I very much like them in person, but frozen in photos, they sometimes taunt me.
Foam. For those first few months, there were constant inquiries by Bean and my Dad about why I hadn’t been pooped on by the baby yet. They’d been pooped on (albeit through a diaper), and had a go at cleaning up the resulting mess. I kept hearing talk of foam, and how when you heard the foam, you knew there’d been a deposit, and best get up and begin a withdrawal. Foam, not a sound I’d ever encountered in many hours of babysitting and nannying in years past. Figured my sister had simply pegged the act with the wrong descriptor despite knowing that it’s one of the excrement types listed on those fascinating poop-a-day type calendars found in the likes of Spencer’s stores. I was holding Edie on the couch, when she did a subtle little shimmy-shake, and with a jaunty little nod of her tiny head, FOAM rang out as though a microphone were in the room. I’d been foamed! Verb of the day! The poo had happened! This made my dad and sister unusually joyous, as I was a marked woman, and delight they did. And wipe, did I.
A portion of the lovely capitol up in Victoria, BC. Shan and I missed that particular tour.
Heading down to Olympia on Sunday with Shannon for a tour of the capitol as it’s been a while. That is, if the inevitable attendance of anarchists at tomorrow’s Women’s March manage to leave it intact. But not before I get in a few weekend workouts. I’ve given myself sixish months to get back in better shape.
I gained tons of weight in my earlyish twenties when I got tired of being ogled and manhandled on the daily bus commute and pushily asked for dates after repeatedly stating I was engaged. I found peace in the safety brought by an outer cushion of fat, and because a thing can begin for one reason, and continue for another, the fat stayed from bad food habits and squelched metabolism. My sister’s been so good to keep a catalog of horrendous photos she’s captured of me over the years. I’m so ashamed of them (and this is no place for shame) that it makes me laugh. Up and down, down and up in the numbers, lots of up. The problem’s always the ease and proximity of people found in eating out and about (where calories live)- not having to face the never-ending cycle of meal prep alone at home, despite loving to cook.
Life has passed along for so long now with just a good baseline, no motivation to be more, but I need to play my part if I ever want a melody on top.