Here let's do this: let's see what pictures are on my phone and then what immediate thoughts are in my head. I'm letting perfection be the enemy of progress in just about every realm of my life right now and I'm trying to actively work against that. (Thank you to everyone on Instagram who reminded me of that phrase, by the way. That was driving me nuts.) So here are some unedited everyday iphone shots from the last few days.
And here are some accompanying thoughts for the night, presented to you in a similarly rough and unvarnished manner, as it is late and we have had a long and busy day:
Olive does solids now I guess. If you can consider apple sauce to be a solid? It's not a liquid, anyway, so that's a big step up. Yesterday she tried to dive from my arms onto a hot pizza sitting on a hot pizza stove on the top of a hot oven, and I told that while indeed she could one day eat pizza, she would have to start with a puree. Or a puff. Or a chunk. Just SOMETHING other than mom. Then I sat her down and offered her some apple sauce on that very nice wooden spoon of hers, and she reached out and took the spoon and put it in her mouth. Just like that. Then she took two more bites.
The face she made was hilarious. It's face the lights up the heart of every parent that's ever fed their child for the first time, ever since the first cave person put a bite of mammoth mash on a stick and wobbled it into the waiting mouth of their cave baby. Half 'I'm game for this!' and half "what the fuuuuuu.....?"
But right after she took the bite something unexpected happened. I wanted to take the bite back! She totally called my bluff- I don't actually want her to be eating like a big kid yet. Oh shit! Turn this ship around! I can't! There's no going back now!
Yes, I'm ambivalent about the applesauce but it's more than that- it's the fact that she's sitting and crawling and now climbing and standing without me. And I realize that my level of bias makes me an unreliable narrator here folks but she seems freakishly strong. It just seems to be all happening at once. At the beginning of the week she still wasn't sitting up very well and now it's Friday and she's climbing up the furniture.
When she was first born and I was feeding her, I kept thinking that there was water dripping down my face but it was only her- her hands reaching out and touching me, her fingers and her skin were so pure and soft that when they grazed my cheek they felt like water drops. Now she has ear wax and wakes up from her naps all sweaty and loopy looking.
The weird thing is, I have this dichotomy going inside my head. On the one hand I realize that Olive is just another baby like all the millions of cherished and beloved babies out there in the world, that she's going to grow up to be another person on this planet, no different and absolutely no more special than anyone else. I know that. But on the other hand I also know -with equal certainty- that she is simply the most glorious and magnificent thing to ever happen and everything that is unfixed in the universe will orbit her in big starry loops for every moment of her life.
I imagine that's how you feel about your children, too. That's how the cavepeople felt as they lovingly mashed up their mammoth meat and double checked it for gristle and sinew.
It doesn't make any sense at all, and yet it works. Olive is a particle and a wave, impossible, but still lighting up my every day.