Here’s the shortest version of Saskia and my road trip to visit the new baby nephew: he is adorable.
Of course he is. Here’s Caleb, seven weeks old.
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And his big brother, Ian, is still the prince.
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We brought the brothers a special gift: the rocking horse given to us by cousins as a “brothers’ gift” when Lucien was born and there were two round-headed creatures, one still toddly and waddly and the other squishy and smaller. We adored and ignored our second guy and kept our greatest anxieties and energies fixed squarely upon our firstborn. It was all small people all the time and it didn’t seem like parenthood could be anything but that.
Around 2:30 in the afternoon on his day off from Paintbox Theatre Ezekiel called. A few choice sentences from him in no particular order and without my responses: “Where are you? Will you bring me bean sprout salad? I want to see the babies; babies are cute. Chinese is silly. Sleep is silly. What’s there to eat?”
I said stuff like, “I probably won’t bring you bean sprout salad from Jamaica Plain,” and, “It’d be good if you ate something before Chinese. The babies are really cute.” Oh, and, “You promised to start cleaning up after you got all those boxes of books on Saturday.”
Like that happened. Harumph.
Sunday, Ezekiel visited with our friend, Henry, who is Ian’s age minus a month.
It’s astonishing that the small thing becomes the big thing that much is for sure.
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Are families way more complicated than to be in awe about how they grow? They are like weeds, these children: even if you don’t do much to stop ‘em, they climb up toward the sun and every which way else too. Families are much more complicated, yes.
The mature moment of the day really occurred throughout our visit: Saskia loved her small cousins. She didn’t get upset when I held Caleb. In fact, I don’t think she noticed; she was too busy playing with Ian’s toys. She was kind and big cousinly to Ian. She is so routinely the smallest one that it was pretty wonderful seeing her be the biggest—and seeing her rise to the occasion.
She must have been so proud of herself that she chatted to me the entire way home—till 9:00 PM and then she kept chattering until after ten. In case you’re counting up her sleep; she napped a grand total of 40 minutes en route to JP. Talk about complicated—or talk about f*&^ed, take your pick.
