Last Friday night, Kendrick and Indy and I were sitting down to dinner, and I picked up a card that had arrived from Kendrick's aunt and uncle, expecting it to be a "congrats on your new baby" card, and:
Nope.
An anniversary card.
For an anniversary that happened a good two weeks ago, and which did not occur to either of us even a little bit. I mean, not even a whisper of "oh, right: fairly significant annual event on the horizon" entered either of our brains for even a single second.
A few weeks ago, the front panel fell off of one of the drawers in our apartment in San Jose. (I know, this doesn't sound like the start of a very good story. Stay with me, here.) This front panel falling off required me to call the apartment building's landlord, and…you know how some people can best be described as "characters"? This guy. He fixed the drawer in about thirty seconds, and then spent the next hour and a half standing in the doorway of my apartment telling me stories ("Just one more! Promise!") about his Renaissance Faire adventures, with full-on accent and dramatic reenactments and wild gesticulating.
When he finally left, he bowed practically to the floor and called me "my lady" with absolutely no hint of irony.
I loved him.
Well, there are lots of "best things." Newborns are pretty wonderful. And extremely cute.
But you know how everyone (myself included) sort of panics going into parenthood? Envisioning sleepless nights and disastrous days of diapers and spills and no showers ever again, ever? At the very beginning, at least, it's not actually like that. And sure, I've done this once before, but still: I'd totally forgotten what it's like for the first couple of weeks after you bring a new baby home. In the days leading up to Goldie's birth I stockpiled food and prepped posts and cleared out my schedule as if I wasn't going to have a single second to breathe, let alone function like an actual human being until, like, 2018…but that brings me to that fantastic thing about newborns:
They sleep.
Like, all the time. So much that you wish they'd wake up, because they're adorable and you miss them.
A couple of days after we brought Goldie home from the hospital, I was sitting on the couch feeding her and my son announced that he wanted to go kick a soccer ball outside. "Why don't we wait for Mommy?" Kendrick asked him. "She wants to come too."
"Mommy doesn't like to go outside," Indy said, and my heart broke.
That quickly - in just days - I had gone from being my son's primary playmate and general partner in crime to the "un-fun" parent, the one who "didn't want" to run and kick balls, or go swimming, or play hide-and-go-seek.
