The Offbeat One.

Ok, not that all of my blog posts are necessarily "on" beat, but this one is more offbeat than usual. The difference is that I usually work hard to organize and structure my thoughts into a story, or an essay, or one of my favorites - a photoessay. And this particular Sunday evening finds me with swirling thoughts and half-uploaded photo batches and weird dreams and football games I can happily ignore in favor of getting some work done. Maybe lack of structure is my structure today.

So first of all, this guy turned seven months today:



His current loves include sitting independently, lunging forward in the first signs of crawling, grabbing the spoon from me so that he can feed himself (shown above and below), then wanting me to feed him anyway(?), eating broccoli, gagging on broccoli, eating broccoli some more, eating cheese, nursing, eating his sister's forehead, more nursing, sprawled out naps, and the syllables "da, ba, ma, ga, wa" and his newest discovery - "la la!" And smiling 'til it makes my face hurt just to see.


He's a big talker and can already string words together with recognition. We are hopeful he'll be as verbal as early as Scarlet and it's not because of intelligence. Since he's our second, we're aware that 99.9999% of kids are all caught up with each other by grade school. It's more that she was always so good at telling us what she wanted/needed and that made for a happier kid and happier parents. So of course we want that again. We don't push it as it's his natural inclination. A couple of other offbeat things about him are that like Scarlet, he can stay very still and isn't always trying to throw himself off things or mess with everything. He's much more into fine motor skills, like feeding himself and picking up the smallest piece of lint off the floor! He's not trying to crawl much more than an occasional lunge, but it's early yet.



I had to add a photo of Scarlet meditating on her first Capri Sun. Not a great parenting moment, for sure, but I suppose it was inevitable? She was impressed. She also dragged her dear friend Laz down into the sugary juice depths.




Oh yeah. He looks very cute when he sits in the bath, but it makes hair rinsing more difficult.



And now for a subject change that I'd usually save for a separate blog post, and I'd usually even choose its own title and score, I had the strangest dream the other night. Actually, it wasn't at all strange. Not for me. It was epic. And I wish I could have seen it through until whatever its end would be, but Des woke me up! My heart was all pounding..

..for a long time after. Even now!

So I titled it "The Greatest Love Story Never Told" right when I woke up. It was a dream about two "soulmates," or if you hate that term like I'm not sure if I do, two people truly, madly and genuinely in love. But they were only kids, really! 18 or 19. They broke up, naturally, but it wasn't because of normal things like fear or cheating or fading chemistry or those voices in our heads that can so easily talk ourselves out of a relationship. No, there were some dark and sinister global reasons. A little sci/fi and fantasy. They were separated by The Nothing. The Darkness. The Perfect Storm. Something.

It was like a light switch. The world turned dark, temporarily, and so did their hearts. Once it faded, because it did fade, they lived their whole lives with other spouses. The man's wife lived a very jealous existence because she knew for their whole marriage that he was really in love with the girl he had lost. These lesser lives played out until they were old and sick. They found each other in very old age and approached God or a God-like being and asked to see a vision of what they could have accomplished together, for themselves and for the greater good of the world. The God-like being asked the woman to produce a number from her head that he had slipped into her mind the night she had met her "soulmate" back when she was 18. She remembered it: 3072767. He then raised his hands in blessing over their heads. Then came their vision of the other life. The woman dying peacefully at 100. The man by her side.

The man said, "What's the point of knowing all of this and seeing this vision? What's even the point of having lived this, if we know that all stories carry such sorrow and that all stories end?"

And the woman said, "It's the living it, the way you want to live it. The years play out long, or at least long enough. And you relish them. And that's the point."

And the God-like being clapped his hands and sent them hurtling back in time..somewhere..at some time.

..cause Des woke me up then! Which really sucked. It's like when my mom got all the way to the end of The Color Purple right to when Celie and Nettie were about to be reunited after like 40+ years, AND Celie is about to meet her own kids. My mom only heard "NETTIE!!" and then the screen went black because the VCR hadn't taped the very end:



(If that doesn't give you chills, I probably don't want to know you)

And I heard my mom scream, "Nooooo!" Or some form of expletive.

It was like that, but not quite. My mom did eventually see the end and I've had to make up my dream end in my head.


And that, my friends, is my offbeat post about nothing and everything.