Moments

Friday I had an almost perfect moment and I just wanted to share & record it.

I took Noah down to the playground at Silverbirch Ave & the beach.  This is a particularly nice playground on hot days because the whole thing is shaded by trees, and it is lakeside, so it gets a breeze off the lake.  It sits on a rise over the canoe club boathouse. Also, being in the Beaches, it’s quite easy to park a little north and get a decaff organic free trade coffee and a blue cheese and walnut muffin on the way, which I just happened to do.

Noah made a beeline for the sandbox, which has a bunch of big trucks in it left by people decluttering their homes, some of them the fantastic Tonka sort with the sharp rusty metal edges and levers that really work.  He and I filled buckets of sand and talked truck “dat?” “that’s an axle.” “dat?” “that’s a blade” Dat? “That’s a…. engine thingy.” And then some other little kids were playing and he went to parallel dig with them and I sat on the edge of the sandbox and drank my coffee and looked out over the water and watched a flock of geese land and swim about.

It was absolutely joyful. This is what the part-time work is all about. Because on the weekends that playground is mayhem.

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Leonard Cohen has an exhibit of his visual art and some scribblings in town (through to June 10) and we are so going, at least once.

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I’m packing up another wave of outgrown clothes, carefully folding, boxing, and labelling. Right now, thanks to hand-me-downs, I have clothing from newborn to 3X in my house, as if I’m running a little consignment shop. I actually have had to buy shelves to put the boxes on.

Each time I put a piece of clothing in the box I turned the question of another child over in mind (yes, I know I called a moratorium).  I think it would make my life a lot harder for a few years, especially given Carl’s work schedule, and I really am not sure about the stress of that.  And yet there was nothing in me that wanted to give that clothing away or wasn’t picturing taking it out again for another baby. 

Friday may have had a lot to do with this.

I still miss Emily though. I have a box down there labelled girl clothes, too.  It’s funny how I just get more and more pissed off that she doesn’t get to do these things, that I don’t get to know her the way I get to know Noah.  Some of the sharpness passes but the dull edge sometimes gets hammered home awfully hard.