Moments

Some wise people believe that there are no good days or bad days, just days comprised of good and bad moments.  I’m with the wise people on that.  Except for the occasional day in which something so monumentally good or monumentally terrible happens and renders everything else insignificant, a day is really a collection of a zillion moments which fall basically anywhere on the “Sweet < --- > Shit” continuum.  To wit: yesterday when arriving at Kindermusik, Ellen declared “I love you Mommy – you are the BEST mommy I have ever seen.”  Sweet.  Literally the very next moment, I was stripping Cecilia down and trying to figure out what to do with the pants, shirt, and blanket on which her diaper blew out.  Shit.

Here are a few more.  I guess most of them don’t qualify as “one moment events,” but they are all examples of the little things that make up my days. 

J  Rachel and Jim have discovered that their baby is a boy.  Ellen believes that her new cousin should be named Gaston, after the villain from Beauty and the Beast.  She’s stuck with that for a few weeks now, so I’m a bit concerned as to what she will say when Baby Hatten arrives and is actually named something else.  I don’t think Gaston is on the short list. 

J  Ellen has been very interested in Science.  Just “Science” in general.  “Mom, could you tell me about Science?  Are [dogs/clouds/reindeer/sunshine/boys and girls/any noun in the dictionary] Science?” she asks.  I usually defer to Dave since it’s actually his field, but if he’s not around, I have to explain something sort of easy like how rainbows are made, and why there are different seasons.  Usually she accepts whatever information I give her, and occasionally she says, “now I know SO MUCH about Science!  THANK YOU Mom!”  Also, the word “usually.”  She uses it often, and pronounces it “oo-sually.”  Good stuff. 

J  Cecilia is signing “more” and “all done” without a doubt.  She is very good at saying “Dada.”  If she doesn’t start working more diligently on “Mama,” soon I’ll be handing off clean-up of all Cecilia-related biohazards to Dave. 

J  Ellen loves to have Cecilia choose her underwear for her in the morning.  She just puts a whole pile of them in front of her and the winner is whichever pair Cecilia first picks up and starts brandishing like a white flag.  Actually, I think the protocol is something more closely resembling Ellen picking which pair she’d like to wear, making Cecilia “choose” again and again until she happens to pick up the pair Ellen had in mind, and then running to me wearing nothing but a smile and saying, “Mom, Cecilia picked the monkey ones special just for me!” 

J  In one of her most recent time-outs, I heard Ellen saying to herself “two T’s.  T-t-time out-t-t,” as she stared at the wall.  I had to remind myself to wait until she had served her time to praise her phonics skills. 

:) No extremely bad moments come to mind.  The diaper blow-out at Kindermusik was about it.  Yes, this means I am one lucky mom.