Desmond 9 & 10

Goodbye fox. Goodbye stream. We are in our own (rented) house that is not nearly as good as our now lost potential house and I could. not. be. more. grateful. I feel like I've been holding my breath for eight weeks.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Susan and Mike for saving us at the last second there.

This new house is ugly. All the fixtures are gold or brass or brass-y and from 1990. ( The house was built in '95, but I'm guessing this stuff was out of date even then.) The tile is peach. Peach! The walls are pink. Pink! The realtor tried to get away with beige, but we all knew he was grasping at straws.

It's not actually nearly as ugly as all of those sentences strung together make it sound. The point is, though, that I do not give a goodgoddamn. I want to take this bloody ugly house with its kitchen and its space and its multiple rooms and welcome it into my marriage as a sister wife or brother husband or gender-ambiguous third spouse who makes people feel awkward when having to choose pronouns. We'll call it Sam.

I cannot even express to you the pure joy of sleeping in a bed that does not contain you, of opening windows and letting light into rooms, of not tripping over piles of things that have no other place to be.

Finally, a return to normalcy.

I missed a month. A month! I feel as if I actually missed a real live month. Of your life and mine. These past weeks have been among the hardest I can remember. I think I went a little wacko there for a little while. At least I now know that I am easily felled by seasonal affective disorder (among other things). No moving to Alaska for us.

I'm not going to say anything more about that, except that I wish people weren't so frequently exactly what I expect them to be. Somehow, though expected, it's always disappointing. You and your father are the one bright spot of the past two months. I could never get by without you.

You.

You are such a happy little monkey. And I mean monkey. You climb. Holy crap, you can get halfway up a baby gate. You do not like being caged. You have a face that you make when you're angry or when you think it might make people laugh (see above). You scrunch up your nose and eyes and purse your lips and breathe like a bull getting ready to charge. Classic.

You're eating pretty much anything, which is good because it slightly assuages my guilt about not making your food anymore when we moved. It's too hard to manage in a foreign kitchen. I have to be careful now not to fall into the kid food trap of chicken fingers and grilled cheese- you would eat nothing but Gerber veggie puffs if I let you. Those things are not a far cry at all from cheese doodles- even if the package DOES say vitamin-fortified.

At the Dermatologist's office on Monday- let me just take a second to declare that my warts (gross!) are officially vanquished!- Dr. Pascoe asked as he left the room, "Does yours really seem more like a toddler now?" He'd been moping all day, the nurse explained, because it was his son's first birthday and the man wanted his baby back. Time to have another one, I said, and then realized with horror that we are only two months away from that point.

No, you do not seem more like a toddler than a baby now, but what will the next two months bring? Will you be talking? Walking? Will my uterus start letting me know once again that's it's always ready to incubate? I hope not. It needs to wait about two more years for everyone else to be ready too. I fear that you've given it a taste of how good the results can be and now it won't ever stop. I'll end up like my mother- 50, incontinent from all the birthing, and wishing I weren't too old for more of it.

Speaking of grandma, today you are wearing an outfit that she gave you six months ago saying, "It'll be a long long time before this fits him." And here we are. Fuck. Hold on to babyhood just a little bit longer little one. Two months will go by very very fast.

Love,
Mom