Fog

Last week, when we walked out to the car in the morning, our street was covered in a thick fog. Finny looked out at it with a look of awe and said, “Oh, cloudy.”


“That’s fog,” I replied, “Can you say foggy?”

With a look of complete understanding, he replied, “Oh, foggy…ribbit, ribbit.”

(Image from http://www.stuffintheair.com/)

Linda McCartney Did a Lot of...Breastfeeding?

For me, one of life’s great mysteries has recently been solved: the origins of Linda McCartney’s crop-top haircut. I have always had a special admiration for Paul and Linda McCartney’s love story. I found it romantic and compelling and dreamy and always hoped that someday my husband and I would also sit in fields of daisies strumming our guitars in t-shirts and bellbottoms while our babies ran circles around us. But, always in the back of my mind was this nagging question: Why the mullet?


Now, I know. Surely it was not intentional. Linda McCartney was just breastfeeding. That’s all.

There are some quite wonderful side effects to pregnancy. The first being, of course, that the end result is a baby who will one day sing “Barbara Ann” to you at a moment’s notice from the backseat of the car. And there are some wonderful side effects of breastfeeding as well. One being that you can follow up a steak dinner with a large slice of double chocolate cake and then find the next day that you have actually dropped three pounds.

But there are some negative side effects to pregnancy and breastfeeding as well. One being the aforementioned Linda McCartney crop top, which takes nothing short of a decade to grow out (i.e. Linda and the 70’s). It seems that Linda, who was birthing three children in 70’s, finally said, “Oh, to heck with it!” and just embraced her new found hair growth with a full-on spiked mullet top. I, on the other hand, am a humble blogger, no Oscar winning rock star, so I have chosen to carefully conceal my Linda McCartney crop top with a small army of bobby pins every morning.

I have battled with my involuntary hair growth for the past year and a half trying an assortment of hair products, blow drying techniques and the old standby spit-and-press in desperate moments just to get these spiky bangs to lay down or my new-found sideburns to tuck back, and now after months and months of pinning and pulling, I am finally seeing some progress. I am finally seeing that the hair around the crown of my head may actually be longer than two inches again and I may soon be able to call home some of the troops of bobby pins, which have been stationed atop my head for far too long.

And then, of course, I realized, come January I will be breastfeeding again and once again I will endure endless months of hair loss followed by endless months of mullet-style re-growth. And at this realization, I could not help but sigh.

But on the flip side, I will have a baby after all. And someday that baby will sing “Barbara Ann” to me from the backseat of the car and perhaps maybe even in three-part harmony with me and his older brother. And maybe someday David and I will win an Oscar for our own co-written version of “Live and Let Die” and our children will sing back-up in clothes I’ve fashioned out of curtains. And after our shows, we can eat all the steak and chocolate cake we want and show up skinny the next day. And well, won’t that be something?

Okay, Lovely Linda, I get it now. The mullet was just you embracing your love for your babies. Now, all I need is a field of daisies and a few guitar lessons and David and I will be on our way to living the greatest love story of all time--my perfect, crop-top mullet being the cherry on top of it all. No bobby pins needed.

(Photo found on http://www.lindamccartney.net/.)

Just Watching Him Be Small

Today I took a nap with Finny. I should have been working on my copywriting assignment for Reach Magazine, which is due tomorrow. I should have been paying bills, which are coming due soon. I should have been vacuuming and mopping the floors. I should have been pulling the weeds. But, instead, I found myself lying perfectly still beside my sleeping toddler just watching him be small.


For two hours I lay beside him in perfect stillness. For some of it I read my book through the crack of sunlight coming in through the drawn shade, for some of it I slept, and for the rest of it I just stared at his lips and enjoyed the soft touch of his warm hands wrapped around my arm. I found myself just staring at his tiny elbow jutting out into the air beyond the blanket. I thought long and hard about that elbow and how tiny and soft and perfect it is. How someday that elbow will be much bigger and rougher, calloused by sun and age. How someday I will not be allowed to sleep beside him and stare at his grown-up elbow. And I smiled. I smiled because I was supposed to be doing so many things with his nap time today, but instead I lay still and burned his elbow into my memory.

As we lay there still just breathing in and out, suddenly the unexpected tapping of rain began to make its way across the roof growing from a light trot to a loud gallop. At this, Finny kicked his legs and tossed and moaned and I prayed that he stay asleep just a little while longer. Not because I needed to get just one more chore done, not because I needed to get just one more email read, but because I wanted more time to just be next to him, my perfect baby boy with the scabby knees and the sweaty head and the little, red lips.

Today I took a nap with Finny and I got a surprising amount of work done. I committed every soft inch of him to memory so that someday when he’s old and grown, I’ll have that moment when he let me lay so close to him I could feel his breath on my face, see his chest rise and fall, and wonder how one tiny elbow could fill me with such immeasurable joy.