peevish mama

A few weeks ago Doctor Dash was reading through some of the earlier nuggets in this blog and he told me that he loved remembering the stuff I had written about. It was a curious statement to me because I’ve only been doing this for a couple years. How much could he have forgotten? The truth is, we forget a lot. We forget most of the little details – the favorite t-shirts, the silly stories, the chatter after the tooth fairy visits, the white lies, the fights, the tears, the giant mosquito bites. We forget the minutiae, and without the minutiae, our memories are flat, colorless, or worse yet, not there at all. I can’t figure out any rhyme or reason to what sticks. And the firsts with our firsts tend to be clearer than the firsts with our seconds and thirds. I can’t remember Supergirl’s first steps, but I remember Saint James’ like they were yesterday. And I actually do remember Devil Baby’s, but that’s just because we were hoping and praying that she would be soothed by her new found locomotion, that some of the energy she spent screaming at us would be redirected to moving her chunky little legs.

This blog started out as a way for me to slow down time, to take notice of the quotidian, to be present. It is only now, after the passage of a couple years, that we’ve discovered that it also helps us remember. I don’t go back and read, but you’d better believe that someday I will. And I think that my kids will too. So, with that in mind, some minutiae:

Supergirl finally lost some teeth. We seem to spawn late teeth getters, hence late teeth losers. With each baby, we would wonder, gazing at their gummy drooly mouths, whether they would ever get teeth. As Saint James’ and Supergirl’s first birthdays approached (yes, we even kinda freaked the second time around), Doctor Dash took to the internet and I put my ear to the ground. I sorely regretted it when my neighbor, in her Texas drawl, said “Well, ah don’t know, but mah cousin had needle teeth.” NEEDLE TEETH! I gasped. I love their tenacious baby teeth, but my kids hate it. In kindergarten and first grade when their classmates are spitting out teeth left and right, my children frustratedly wiggle their tiny pearlies, hoping in vain for some movement. Supergirl was literally one of the last three kids in her grade to lose a tooth. (It’s incredible that I even know this, but I do. How many times did I invoke those other two names in an attempt to cheer her up about her stubborn baby teeth?) We went to Michigan and she managed to lose three teeth in two days, maximizing the attention as Supergirl is wont to do. Her big teeth are already growing in. Her face will change. I only wish she could keep that little Jack-o-lantern smile for a while longer, because as far as I’m concerned, those big chompers are a one way ticket to big kidhood.

When I started this post it was a nothing kind of afternoon. The kids were dressed for soccer with some time to kill and in the rarest and loveliest of moments had started playing a peaceful game of chess, unbidden by me. This is the kind of thing that would make me roll my eyes if I were reading it, so I’ll assure you that they aren’t usually this highbrow and civilized. Normally when they’re bored they turn on the T.V., play Wii, google Justin Bieber or fight. Supergirl also has this move where she lies on the ground and whines about how bored she is while using her legs to spin herself around like a clock hand. But just this once, on a muggy afternoon, with a basket of folded laundry lurking in the corner, they played chess. I grabbed my camera and just like that, minutiae became memory.