Learning, always.
* When the sun rises with us in the morning, we get up on the balls of our feet. We are happy in a different kind of way than on foggy mornings. I smile at the sky and get to work. All through the day, the sky is blue— in the cold morning, the warm afternoon, all the way until the pink creeps across the sky and changes to a deep blue, then deeper blue, then the raw umber of night.
* I’ve been teaching Isaac to go to sleep by himself. I started nursing him to sleep after he was sick in the hospital, when we got home and he was buffeted by other viruses for three more weeks. It was easier to nurse him to sleep. It has become less easy these days, as he smacks and twists and bites and plays. It’s not easy to teach him, but we’ve done it, and we’ve had two full night’s sleep, which made me feel like I could run ten miles. The only thing is that I’ve successfully taught him another bad habit— falling asleep in his crib with my hand on his back. When I take it off, he reaches up and puts it carefully back on. Ah well, we’ll tackle that one next.
* Speaking of teaching, I love teaching kids to read. Now it’s Solo’s turn, and we sit with our heads together, pointing at letters, making the sounds. He has a short threshold of focus—we go until he starts making nonsense words instead of the normal sounds. He’s always been my touchiest learner (he would prefer to teach) but he’s speeding up and blooming and it’s the coolest thing. When we learn together he always does well for the rest of the day— building with Lego or drawing instead of doing headstands accidentally too close to other people or teasing people or asking for one snack after the other. He has a brain like Kai’s— it has to be full of something beneficial or it is full of naughtiness.
* I’m getting ready to go be in the garden for a while now, there is a lot of weeding to do and I haven’t been all that great at gardening for the last few months— I never seem to find the time, it is always time to start the next meal or put the baby to sleep. But I’m reminding myself, like with so many other things, that twenty minutes at a time is a start, that twenty minutes gets things done, and that a life of twenty minutes of gardening at a time makes a gardener, a life of twenty minutes of painting at a time makes an artist.