Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

Although, lately, I’ve been mostly leaving stuff alone and just puttering around here, on this site. I am not sure if that is a good or a bad thing. A good thing at the moment, I think – but a bad thing in the long run if it means that I’ve just lost interest in doing things, creating, visiting friends, making new ones, and participating,  yeah? Though, as soon as I started typing on other blogs again I got into a mess (which was necessary, I think, to provide support for some women of color in hostile spaces, but still… )

The combination ennui/foxhole burrowing, even online, is related to my home situation no doubt – I simply have no place to sit and think, to work without constant fear of interruption, or anywhere where I can just close the door and *be*.  As I’ve moaned about before. I used to want to create something new at least every other day – even if I did not act on it. Now, I find myself simply not interested… though I can feel slight movement in that direction whenever I think I’ll have my life back ”soon” – but now I ruthlessly tamp it down, knowing that most likely it will amount to nothing. It’s possible that the situation will be changing soon, maybe as soon as next week, as my daughter has found an apartment for herself and the children - though I doubt a forest of wood would be enough to knock on for having typed that out loud. And, of course, it has not been all bad.

I realized the other day that I have never really been in close proximity to small people, day in and day out. I mean, I had my own daughter but I worked outside the home while she was growing up and after my divorce I was the only provider so I worked even more, and no doubt I missed some stuff. Also, she was an only child so I didn’t get the benefit of seeing the different personalities emerging in different kids of the same family. If that makes any sense.

Now, though, with the two small people in the house today, and having more time to just observe, I find it endlessly fascinating to see how different the two children are in personality, as well as how alike. The 5 year-old is thin as a rail, always moving around, always wanting to do something, always needs people around, seeks outside stimulus and is very anxious for approval. He’s also frightened of bugs and just about every other thing that moves. He talks a mile a minute, loves reading (or being read to, rather)  and big words – I really don’t know where he picks them up from; some from me, sure, but he says stuff that I know I’ve never said to him. He has a wild imagination and lies quite a lot (“We went to the zoo and I fell in the water and went swimming with the giraffes, then the giraffe bit my ankle and I tried to go into the bathroom to look at it and change my clothes, but there was a lady in there having a baby!” is the story he told me last year about his school trip to the zoo. Goddes know where he got all *that* from.)

The 2 year-old is chubby, laid back, laughs at danger, stomps bugs or grabs them in his hand, will occupy himself for hours playing with his toys, if there is no one around to play with him. He  talks a lot, but not very clearly, though mostly we as family can understand him (I’m glad we got rid of cable and, thus, his favorite show, SpongeBob SquarePants, because the child was starting to sound just like Patrick the starfish – which, I guess, is better than sounding like SpongeBob, but, well… you know.) He can count to 20, though, something he apparently learned from Sesame Street and Dora. I think his imagination must also be fairly vivid because right in the middle of doing something (or nothing) his eyes will get big and anxious and if I am sitting down he’ll pull my hands away from whatever I am doing so he can clamber up in my lap to be comforted or feel safe or something.

So, I find these children amazing, sometimes, even if they annoy me often, and I figure I may as well hold on to the experiences, write about them whenever, use them in stories when the time comes and whatever else. Kids do, as they say, grow up so fast and it’s not likely I’ll have another opportunity to interact with small ones in such a close setting once these are back home.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 7:32 pm and is filed under bellybutton bedazzlement, grandma blogging, journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.