Mark Twain!

Summer is almost over and my little Bean approaches the two year mark. Makes me wanna shout "Mark Twain!" just for the sake of where we live and where she is. We have been to France and Florida and will probably head to Philadelphia before the year is out. A very alliterative travel year. As she grows and develops, I get to watch her personality unfold more and more each day. I still marvel every day that I made a person. I still look at pregnant women with awe and respect -"Oh, you're making one too." The day to day process of just keeping her alive, which is how I looked at her infancy through the first year, is over and now I have to take a harder look and figure out how to make her into a whole being, well-balanced, compassionate, intelligent and of course, fun.

Because at her age, with her personality flexing and growing like a tomato vine in June, she is the most fun thing I've ever been around. She laughs at anything and like most children, it's a highly contagious sound. Music, water, champagne - all the metaphors are accurate and you want to hear it again and again. I'm hoping that in addition to a few lessons about danger when she gets too near knives and high places, right now we can just concentrate on having fun, learning how to share and draw with crayons and run fast and wash our hands and get dirty. Everything she touches, views, and experiences is for her a new way to have fun and it's written all over her face as it's happening, as she's experiencing it. There is no hopeful tomorrow, or sorrowed past. It's all right here, right now and let's have the most fun doing it. In fact, let's sing while we're doing it. Loudly.

So what I'm saying in an obvious, connect the dots kinda way, is the lesson is mine too. As usual, I am learning more from this child, than I feel like I am teaching her. How to be present, how to have fun doing nothing and everything, and how to forget about the past and not worry about the future. My own little pint-sized Eckhart Tolle with diapers and an attitude extolling the power of now before she can form a complete sentence.

It's a self-indulgent post this one - well, aren't they all? But there's a line in the movie The Natural where Robert Redford, says to his old lover, "God, I love baseball." It's after so many rotten things have happened to him and he's almost to old to be a player anymore. But he says it so convincingly, so simply, so beautifully, that you see how all the bad things can fall away and you have just this pure, unpolluted love of the game. That's how I feel about motherhood two years down the line. I don't think about the infertility or the adoption or the wacky pregnancy diagnoses anymore. I just love being a mother. Mark Twain!