Start here.

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Juno, age 1 and a half, has confidence in her convictions.

That’s a euphemism. More plainly, she knows what she wants. Even more specifically, she knows what she doesn’t want.

I suppose we lacked a little foresight giving her a name that literally includes the word “no” in it, because she’s so proficient with it. Like a burgeoning mastermind, she’s experimenting with pitch to see which version of “no” achieves the ideal outcome. When her drawn out, vocal fry, plaintive, “noooooooooo” mostly succeeded at making us laugh, she changed tactics. Right now she’s really vibing with the whole body, staccato, “No! No! No!”s whenever we approach her with a hair brush. She’ll pitch her body —off your lap, off the couch, off a cliff if needs be—if you so much as have a secretive hair elastic between your fingers.

Maybe It’s Not the Moment to Slip into my Itty Bitty Box.

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Maybe it’s not the moment to slip into my itty bitty box.

If you read my last post, you know that I’m currently grappling with the intellectual quandary of my own voice. It’s not that I don’t have things to say; it’s just that there are so many of me saying the same thing, and how valuable is that? Or how valuable is one voice with imperfect knowledge? How valuable is one with a spotted record?

The Boiling Point

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Hudson woke up with a 104 degree fever this morning. It doesn’t need a metaphor, it is what it is. Hot, unblemished baby skin.
But for me, every degree above 98 felt like a degree above boiling point. I was boiling water, splashing through the lid of a pot and landing with a sizzle-crash onto the stove.

It Isn’t Quite Fear

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There’s a large, rather alarming red stain on the sidewalk outside my apartment. After several moments of examination, a few oregano flecks told its story. What is now a sidewalk stain was once a jar of tomato sauce, perched too precariously in an overfull bag of unperishables, moved with haste from car to front door.