Happy 2013!

Happy new year! After a long and varied trip for the holidays, I write to you from my living room, which is full of my formerly splendid and fragrant Christmas tree, still ornamented, however now a loosely held together collection of angry, droopy, barely-green strawlike bits after I left town for 10 days and did not arrange for it to be watered.

Also, the living room is full of thousands of tiny Legos, for the most part arranged into tableaus (ahem, tableaux) of police with fancy vehicles catching bad guys sporting all different sorts of hair, as well as some plastic safari animals that I bought yesterday in the hopes of making a diorama of the African plains with my soon-to-be 4 year old, because the weather is cold and will be cold for the foreseeable future and projects! We need projects!

We also have a large cage in here, either to cage the baby in away from the tiny Legos, or to cage the Legos in away from the tiny baby, and it’s hard to figure out just how to do it. Mostly we have to watch her.

Yesterday, she did not eat a small refrigerator magnet, but only because her hero of a brother moved it out of her reach. I dreamed last night that she ate some coins, and that was probably not a dream that portended prosperity, but rather one that expressed anxiety over caring adequately for her busy, bouncing, beautiful, increasingly exploratory self.

She does not have the same relationship to the word “no” or more specifically, our preferred phrase “not for babies” that her brother did. If I say no, she will smile big and wag her little head back and forth, an exaggerated imitation of my no, as if to riffle the small flat raft of yellow hair atop it. Then she will cheerfully resume doing whatever it was she set out to do that provoked the no. Like licking the bottom of a shoe. As in:

No!

Big smile,

Head shake,

Lick.

Repeat

Etc.

Soon, the baby will turn one. I have not posted about how she started to eat actual food, more than six months ago, and how she is a natural born eater, whose favorite foods are breakfast sausages and huge quantities of soup. (Have you ever tried to feed soup to a baby? Put it on your bucket list. Or, put a bucket under the baby.) I have not recorded how she expresses excitement, like when she sees a cat, for instance, by throwing one arm up into the air and attempting to trumpet like an elephant. Or about how she got me up every two hours for the better part of a year, because when that is happening, the getting up, it is like stepping on a one of those cartoon hoes, and getting thwacked in the forehead with the handle, and your eyes turn into x’s, and your relationships turn into x’s, and things like blogging and personal hygiene and the ability to be civil whisper drily away like leaves of a coniferous tree that one has neglected to water for the better part of a fortnight. It leads one to do things like misspell the word “from” on the Christmas present tags, or record one’s son’s name as HERNY in places where the judging eyes of others will see it.

I have three posts I have not posted because, they are written, but then, I forgot that I wrote them.

One is about chicken and how I figured out the best way ever to roast a chicken. I’ll clue you in on that, don’t worry. Another is about how no one lets me sleep, and hopefully I just complained about that enough. Another is about some boys dancing on the subway.

I just wanted to check in and say hello, and Happy New Year, mine seems pretty happy so far and I hope yours is as well, and can someone help me shove this tree out of the window?