It’s near enough midnight & I’ve just set down my Kindle but not yet turned out the light. I’m in the back of the RV on the queen bed, but since we’re “camped” on the margins of a suburban street in Napa I’ve kept the slide-outs slid-in out of respect for our temporary neighbors & there’s no walking room around the bed. The bed is still functional, and the tightness of the space is even a bit inviting.
Cohen is sharing the bed with me tonight as Sharaun is still gone & he’s already deeply asleep, his breath coming in the loud and almost confident rhythm of a contended slumber. And taking my attention from my book I’m sitting here admiring my progeny.
His hair is so fair that little lengths of it catch the light and almost glow. His lips are slightly open and a little wet with drool. The skin on his arm has red creases and lines where he’s been lying on the wrinkled sheets and they’ve made an impression. He’s absolutely gone to sleep, I can pick up his arms or force open his little balled fists and he registers no awareness or disturbance. He’s out.
We made this little human! And look how big he’s getting! A little bigger every day! For years I changed his diapers and now he takes his own showers & does two-digit subtraction with “regrouping” (the fancy common-core word for what I learned as “borrowing”).
This process, this slow transforming of babies into adults, is incredibly fascinating. And on this trip I intend to immerse myself in study of it; to watch it in slow motion & thus influence & inform tiny little turnings I’d have otherwise missed entirely.
To stare at my sleeping children and simply enjoy their being.
Yeah. That’s good.
Also written on this day...
- better pinch yourself! - 2010
- stick to blocks - 2008
- wall to wall - 2005
- the groovy barn - 2004
- eminent domain - 2004
- tea with a lot of caffeine - 2003