(little) grrrl meets world

Emma this week

Watching Blue’s Clues:

Practicing her softball arm:

Emma the caring mama:

(that’s creepy baby crying in the background)

Power to the little people!

Power to the little people!, originally uploaded by becky b..

Can you believe this girl will be two in just 4 months?!

First Thai food

Today Emma shared with me the leftovers from my date last night — pad Thai. It was a hit! So watch out, Daddy, Emma and mama have a taste for exotic foods!

Cousin watch

…counting down the minutes until Emma’s first cousin (on my side, anyway) makes his appearance!

I’ve been reading over the archives from when I went in to have Emma, and my heart just hurts that I’m not able to be there with my little sister for her big moment as a mama!

Stay tuned.

EDIT: He’s here! Check out Diva’s blog for the story and pictures.

Happy birthday, Uncle Tim!

Uncle Tim and Emma, originally uploaded by becky b..

love,

Emma

Putting the babies to bed

[These days CNN is pretty much a fixture in our house after 5pm, hence Wolf in the background]

Emma, this week:

What she said:

From the fifties and early sixties, I remember a cycle. It began when I had picked up a book or began trying to write a letter, or even found myself on the telephone with someone toward whom my voice betrayed eagerness, a rush of sympathetic energy. The child (or children) might be absorbed in busyness, in his own dreamworld; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for help, punch at the typewriter keys. And I would feel his wants at such a moment as fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself. My anger would rise; I would feel the futility of any attempt to salvage myself, and also the inequality between us: my needs always balanced against those of a child, and always losing.

I could love so much better, I told myself, after even a quarter-hour of selfishness, of peace, of detachment from my children. A few minutes! But it was as if an invisible thread would pull taut between us and break, to the child’s sense of inconsolable abandonment, if I moved — not even physically, but in spirit — into a realm beyond our tightly circumscribed life together. It was as if my placenta had begun to refuse him oxygen. Like so many women, I waited with impatience when their father would return from work, when for an hour or two at least the circle drawn between mother and children would grow looser, the intensity between us slacken because there was another adult in the house.

From Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
by Adrienne Rich