well, ok. one of my favorite pictures ever. because there's this other one too...
two recent faves of the littlest. he dressed himself for his cousin's party up top. and below is yesterday, walking through the city, autumn colors everywhere. love this guy.
isabel
my friend said to me yesterday that someone she loves is a disaster. and i thought to myself, maybe we are all just tiny disasters. floating around in our little worlds. colliding with other tiny disasters. like people with saturn rings around them. with all our shit and baggage and self doubt and fears and insecurities just constantly orbiting around us. there are days i can feel the rings of these orbits so tight around my body. paralyzing. it's all so much bigger than we are. so we struggle in our own selfish ways to make sense of this life we are given. to create beauty in it. to obsess over it. what are we meant to do with this, our blip in time.
leo was sick a month ago. two weeks in a row. a high fever out of nowhere. i've never been very good at sleeping with my kids, though i had always dreamed i'd be that mom. small boy wanted our bed most of the time, and he wasn't hard to say yes to.
as i lay there, with his small and scalding body against me, i traced his features with my fingers. just as i had when he was fresh. when i would stare at him, obsessively, for hours. while he nursed, while he slept. i'm so fascinated by birth, creation and where these little souls come from and how they find us and why, or why not. i struggle with what the focus is. with the range of emotions and situations motherhood drags me through in a day. when i'm bedraggled and run down and can't stand another minute, and he opens his bedroom door for the 12th time, and i yell at him to go to bed. and as i walk out he cries "i just wanted to snuggle!" and you think, great. is life just about shutting them down, moving to the next thing. going down to the couch to wallow in the remains of the day and the anxiety of facing the next. he's 3. he wants to snuggle. so.what. just do it. because these are supposedly the beautiful moments, right? the ones we drag ourselves through every day for. just hoping to get that heart pounding feeling you get when your child sinks into you and falls asleep, or jumps into your lap with a book or holds your face in his young and innocent little hands and says he just wants to look at your beautiful eyes. the deep love of a child and the innocence with which they display it. when he holds my face in his hands, i feel my heart skip a beat. i close my eyes and make a wish. that some day, even when his hands are much bigger and rougher and i'm smaller and older, that he still look at me like this. and just wish to look at his mother's beautiful eyes.
these pictures are far from perfect, whatever perfect is. he's dirty and has ear wax and crummy fingernails. and every detail of it is important. to me.
these confused and emotional thoughts brought to you by : MORE RAIN IN NEW ENGLAND!!! YAY!!! (do they have a font for sarcasm yet?)
isabel
you get what you get and you don't get upset. i just wanted one good photo of small boy with his newest do. he gave me two frames. not quite what i was expecting.
isabel
sometimes, the to do list is so long that not even one thing gets done. there are *so* many awesome images i want to share, words i want to write. and when i sit, and stare at the screen, something inevitably comes up. moved myself into the "office" that used to the be the nursery, Which meant the downfall of the crib and of a few tears. but at least it has a door! and windows! which are really only worth anything if the sun is shining, which it is not. for now. i'm checking one thing off. for months, nah, years, i've driven past this stretch of the charles river. awesome playgrounds and gorgeous foliage. and so when jack learned, officially, how to ride his bike a few weeks back we thought this would be a great place to take him. this was also the day i decided i need a bike because turns out this mama is not made for runnin' after a bike. this was also when new england thought it was summer.
small note * there is a photo in there of a woman, and it looks like a bunch of people huddled, filming something. we were asked to step in after she saw me shoot this. the big kid was too shy so, the husband, the small boy and i were interviewed by a fire safety puppet. our 15 minutes of fame is dropping in elementary school VCRs. fire safety video. good stuff.
-isabel