Resolution

I resolve to be more reflective in 2014, and I suppose that means spending more time chatting here and leaving collections of thoughts that I can return to later, someday. It's been difficult to blog when I scarcely have time to dissertate—the very idea of writing a book-length project is leviathan. (There is this scene in Blackfish—have you seen it? you should see it—when a killer whale is resting on its trainer at the bottom of a 20-foot tank. It is mindbogglingly terrifying, and sometimes I feel like my dissertation is that orca. A creature I thought was my friend, but who really just wanted to swim me to the bottom of a tank so it could sit on me. Okay, but seriously, the SeaWorld trainer was way worse off than me—I'm glad I just have a metaphorical orca made of paper on top of me and not a real whale. That documentary made me pee my pants and I wasn't even pregnant.)

Here are some things on which I would like to briefly reflect, before I turn my mind over to other responsibilities.

The ChazMan is six months old. How this happened so quickly, I dare not ask. But here we are.

Our Bonnie Prince is a dapper little joy. He grins for all and is a complete dear to wake up to (three or more times per night). Despite my efforts to teach him to sit, he is much too active and impatient to reach diapers, wipes, and Hollie's toys to bother with any upright-balancing skills. Instead, he has been bobbing about on all fours for over a week now, and can manage to flop himself across an entire room in the time it takes me to walk to my bedroom for a hoodie.

He is decidedly pleasant in all his endeavors (except sleeping, of course, but then I wouldn't recognize him as my child if he did sleep well). He enjoys rice cereal and his few experimentations with sweet potatoes and squash. He did not feel like solid foods tonight, however, and when the spoon was brought toward his lips, he did not scream or cry or go tight-lipped. Instead, he just looked away and grunted. I thought it was a fluke at first, but sure enough, every time I tried to stick a spoonful of mush toward his mouth, he turned in just the same way and grunt-demanded that I quit it. I was astonished at how effectively he communicated, to be honest.

So that is our chubby Charlie dude. He is charming and delicious. He giggles a lot and is ticklish everywhere. He always watches The Walking Dead and Downton Abbey with me, with nary a complaint. And, like his sister was, he is six months old and totally toothless.

Holls is a two-year-old maniac. I wouldn't call the twos "terrible," but I would call them recklessly vibrant and indefatigable. So many emotions are new, and she seems to experience them each in an amplified form. It's like how baby rattlesnakes are extra dangerous because they can't control their venom when they strike—toddlers are like emotional little baby rattlesnakes. If they are happy, they are happy. If they are sad, they are sad. If they feel a desire for something, it is for real. It is the most real thing in the world.

This picture captures my daughter completely. She is dreamy-eyed and chocolate-goateed. She is rough-and-tumbly and rosy cheeked, and her hair is both beautifully blonde and hopelessly ratty. She is my love and my dear, and David and I can't help but fawn over her even when she is naughty. She is giddy and fearless.

Navigating these new emotions and explorations in what it means to be human is tricky, and my heart is touched by watching her care for and worry about people and things that she loves as often as I am irritated by her energetic shouts, her tireless "games" of trust-falling into my face, and her defiant "NO!" when I ask her to stop climbing on the bookshelves.

Snowbaby.

She sings everywhere and always. She sings church hymns, Yo Gabba Gabba songs, and plenty of old classics: "The ABCs," "Home on the Range," "Give Said the Little Stream," "My Favorite Things," "Yankee Doodle." She shocked David and I in the car one night when she busted out three entire (albeit muddled together) verses of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." Her favorite lullaby is "Asleep, Asleep" (by which she means "Away in a Manger"). She doesn't understand that Christmas is a separate season that ends with January 1, and we haven't wanted to correct her. When she prays, she always ends with, "In the name of Baby Jesus, Amen."

A rapscallion one moment; a porcelain doll the next. Don't let her charm you into thinking her innocent—she'll steal all of your M&Ms if you look away for a second.

We mix our own Playdoh colors here at the Grover household. I showed Hollie how to make clay rosebuds—Dave showed her how to make poop piles.

This is usually how I see my daughter—running at me with full speed and an impish grin.

She slides by herself these days, even on the big kid playgrounds. In spite of being amazingly clutzy (she runs into walls daily but never seems to get hurt), she's already quite a surprising athlete.

She loves to help in the kitchen, by which I mean she loves to sneak tastes of anything being prepared on the kitchen counters. No matter how often I warn her against raw flour, she'll still stick her finger in the bowl and eat some as soon as my back is turned. I usually give her two bowls and a handful of raisins, and she'll carefully transfer raisins from one bowl to the next with a teaspoon until suddenly the raisins are gone because they've all managed to end up in her mouth. She is still a sneak and a thief, and she has zero self-control when it comes to cookies and cupcakes. She remarked recently after baking a batch of cupcakes, "I'm going to lick it? I'm going to lick the cupcake and it will be PERFECT." When we told her no, she immediately burst into the most pitiful sobs I've ever heard (re: boundless emotions) and shouted, "I DON'T WANT TO NOT LICK THE CUPCAKE AND IT WILL BE PERFECT! I DON'T WANT TO NOT BE PERFECT WITH THE CUPCAKE AND THE HOLLIE AND MY CUPCAKE!" (She sometimes gets stuck this way, in songs and sentences. She hasn't quite mastered syntax or where a sentence ought to stop. It always breaks my heart in her earnestness to use her limited vocabulary to express feelings so deep and new and dear to her.)

It is fun to see Holls and Chaz grow interested in each other. I anticipate some brawls ahead, perhaps quite a lot of them. But in the meantime, it is astounding to watch them quietly play on the same rug, swapping toys on occasion. Charlie will play with two Little People princess dolls for a twenty-minute interval while Hollie shakes a baby elephant chime. They both fight over my faux-pearl necklace at church services each Sunday.

This isn't a well-taken picture, but I had to document a moment in which both of my babies were happily playing by themselves while I unloaded the dishwasher. It was an amazing moment in the Grover house.

More and more often, I am seeing these two like this. It always seems miraculous to me, that these two wild creatures know to be kind to each other, at least part of the time.

In spite of orca-dissertations weighing me down, these two kiddos keep me from drowning. You would think they would add to the weight, but it doesn't feel like that at all really. Though they do take all of our time, patience, energy, and creativity (not to mention our sleep), they are just as much our inspiration and motivation, our hope and our love.

So I guess that is what I am in the mood to reflect upon and record tonight. That's the thing about little kids that I always heard but never really believed: they grow too quickly. It's easy to complain about the young mom who is always posting pictures of her baby, but I understand now what it is to want to box up each little new face that changes from month to month, to secure our memories of these little people as the bright little stars that they are so that we can recall them later, in those moments when they are backtalking us in their tight pants and taking our car keys.

No one ever properly explained to me just how quickly time passes, or how small a decade of time really is after high school. It's a snap of two fingers. It's a quick succession of Hello Kitty backpacks to Star Wars lunchboxes to Trapper Keepers to canvas bookbags to leaving home. So for now, I think I'll just drink in my babies and let them stomp on my feet and barf on my shirt and trust-fall into my face as often as they please.