dear bee // 29.

Dear Bee,

You are wildly mobile these days, pausing for nothing and everything all at once. I’ve had my suspicions for a few months now that you’re going to be a very active baby, and this week God delivered a notarized letter of confirmation when you began an official attempt to move the furniture around our living room. I used to do this, too (although certainly not at eight months), so I think God and my mother are in cohorts together and this is a twisted form of karmic interior design.

Change of subject, but when you have babies, I hope puffs still exist. Puffs are these tiny bits of cereal that melt in your mouth and were manufactured specifically for anxiety-ridden parents like myself and your father – parents who brush up on their Heimlich skills routinely as if the ritual itself will ward off lodged bananas or near-digested rocks. Sometimes before I feed you, I chant “5 back slaps, 5 chest thrusts” subconsciously, like this old song about the fifty states I learned in elementary school. It’s illogical and weird and I sometimes have to stop myself from saying it in public if I’m giving you a snack.

But for all of the suffering and crippling fear that feeding solids brings, the reward is far greater if for no other reason than the high entertainment value that arrives with this stage. Feeding you solids, Bee, is like scoring two front row tickets to David Copperfield. It goes like this: I offer you two pieces of cereal and you pick one up with the palm of your chubby hand, balancing it between the wrinkled folds of your skin. You stare at this foreign object with a puzzled brow – entering into a deep and complicated relationship with the cereal. And somewhere between the tray and your mouth, it disappears into thin air, never to be found again – until I change your diaper moments later and there are three pieces of cereal and a hairbrush lodged in your pants.

You are a Power Napper, fighting sleep regularly until you collapse from exhaustion, only to bounce up twenty minutes later like a caffeinated weeble. I’m certain the energy you contain inside your wriggly body could power a small country or at the very least a blender.

And that’s what you are, sweet Bee. You’re a blender of the strangest kind. Our lives are toppling over, mixing experience with newness and young with old, blending the ingredients of ourselves into the delicious concoction that is a family. The flavor is never quite perfect – sometimes bitter and often salty – but it’s sweet and refreshing and forever nourishing because it’s ours.

Cheers.

XO,
Mama

  • Caffeinated weeble! I love it! I have an almost 8 mo and that’s so apt! Very fitting simile, indeed.

  • This (like all the other letters) is so sweet!

    Bee pushing furniture reminds me of my mother’s coffee which still bears the teeth marks from when i used it as a mid century modern teether as I learned to pull myself up, push it toward the sofa, and walk around and around and around it!

    My sister is having her first baby in August. I told her about this site and she’s happily bookmarked it in lieu of the baby overload blogs that seem to outnumber the sensible ones 100:1! (Thanks for being a reminder to savor the simple/lovely parts of motherhood and babies–even when it gets slightly overwhelming, Erin!)

    • Ha – omg Karen; this made me laugh so hard – “midcentury modern teether!”

      And thank you for your kind compliment! That truly means a lot to me!

  • Puffs rock! Forrest can pick them up pretty well and feed himself, but he often has one in the other hand that he forgets and ends up feeding to the dog when it drops thru the leg hole of the high chair. He also likes the mum mums but I have to give him small pieces because he stuffs the entire thing in his mouth. And only 3 cheerios at once for the same reason. = )

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