“Maria, what is it you can’t face?”

When Isaac was a baby — a real, bona fide baby and not the skinny toddler he is now — we used to try to comfort him on long car rides by singing what became known as the “Isaac Song.” It didn’t always work, but it had the advantage of being easy to remember, even for Rowan, as it went something like this (in the key of C major):

Isaac Isaac Isaac
E E E F E D

Isaac Isaac Isaac
D D D E D C

Isaac Isaac Isaac
E E E F E D

Isaac Isaac Isaac
D D D E D C

(Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse!)

Anyway, as he exits babyhood, Isaac seems to have outgrown Isaac Song, and so we are currently trolling around for replacements.

Which got me to thinking about the summer of 1993, when I backpacked around Europe with my friend Julie, and we met this girl named Joanna Rainbow. She had a last name, too, and I just found it in the back of my diary from that trip so now I can Facebook her — but I will refrain from posting it here.

One of the best things about Joanna was that she was about as obsessed with The Sound of Music as Julie and I were. (Although I do remember Julie gazing wistfully at yet another panoramic view of the Alps and asking, “Would you really want to climb every mountain?”) And, since we met Joanna in Salzburg, Austria — otherwise known as Sound of Music mecca — she was the perfect companion for the SOM bus tour. The gazebo! The gazebo!

Another thing about Joanna was the story of how her parents met. Apparently, her mother and father were each married to other people, and the two couples were best friends. Such best friends, in fact, that the four of them decided to take a trip to Hawaii together. On the plane, each of the women sat with the man she was not married to. And at the end of the flight, without anybody saying a word to anybody, each of the newly configured couples stayed in their new configurations, all the way to their hotel rooms, throughout the stay in Hawaii, and beyond to divorce and remarriage. I don’t remember whether they all had children before or after that fateful trip, or whether Joanna’s parents actually gave her the name Rainbow or she just added that on later in life, but – oh, those crazy Californicators.

And what does all this have to do with the Isaac song? Well, the thing is, I probably wouldn’t remember anything about Joanna today if not for her family car song, which she sang for me and Julie, which we didn’t stop singing for the entire continental tour, which I still find myself randomly humming today. I remember her telling us about how she and her brother would fight “like chickens” in the backseat of the car, but that the bickering could always be brought to a halt by the following ditty:

Mother-fucking, titty-sucking, two-bomb bitch
C C E G CC E G A- A- C

Father-fucking, titty-sucking, two-bomb bitch
C C E G CC E G A- A- C

La la la la la la la
G G A A F F G

Fill your ass with spaghetti.
G G F D D E C

The real genius in the song is that, with every repetition, you had to fill your ass with something else, like paper clips or turtledoves or bright copper kettles and whiskers on kittens. “It was just such a caring, sharing, kind of song,” I remember Joanna saying. She described how her mother and father would beam at their respective lines, about hours of bliss passing by as they sang and sang, about the creativity, the sharing.

And now, as I look for a new car song, I'm thinking, “Heeeyyyyyyy...”

Pineapple weed

“Look,” Rowan says, dropping to his knees on the sidewalk: “pineapple weed.”

He plucks a sprig of the ubiquitous small plant that grows through cracks in the summer pavements: green stalk and leaves, topped with a golden helmet of a blossom. It’s never occurred to me to look at it.

“If you rub the yellow part with your finger and smell it, it smells like pineapple,” he says, and does, holding his thumbnail to my nose. And he’s right: there it is, the smell of pineapple, lingering on his fingers. (Later, on a walk around the block to clear my head, I perform the same magic trick for Rachel. She is suitably impressed.)

I hold onto this moment — this moment of my son teaching me something interesting, something I don’t know already, something quirky and cool; this example of his ability to pay attention — and return to it a few days later as I sulk in the corner of the kids’ pool at the Sports Complex, fed up with Rowan’s refusal to go to his swimming lesson, at his ability to confound me in public, at the fact that he has deprived me of a much-needed half-hour swim.

It’s only later that I realize that he doesn’t actually get the concepts of “late” and “on time,” that much of him believes that the lesson will be there when he is done in the kiddie pool. “But I just got in,” he keeps saying. “I’m not ready to get out yet.”

He knows so much. Like the pig Olivia, he is good at lots of things, including — especially — wearing people out. Without even really trying, he has started to read. Recently, he showed a friend of ours how to work a program on her Mac. But there’s still so much to learn, like how to dunk your head underwater without the water going up your nose, or that Isaac will hand him almost anything if he only asks nicely.

“You’re having a hard time listening when I ask you to do something these days,” I said to him a few bedtimes ago.

“Yes,” he said, after a pensive silence. “Yes, I am having a hard time with that.” He placed his palm on my cheek.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, after another moment. “Because my body doesn’t know so much things yet. My brain doesn’t know so much things yet.”

Mine neither, I think. But you’re teaching me.

My mothers went to the Winnipeg folk Festival and all I got was this hippie relic of a T-shirt

Ye gods, people, you have no idea how much shorter an eight-hour drive is with no children in the back seat. The whole way to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Rachel and I kept marveling at how easy this was: no backseat DJing from the three-year-old dictator, no “Are we there yet?”s, no placating a restless Isaac with chunks of Arrowroot cookie and half-grapes, passed into the backseat at regular intervals. No doling out points for every “motorcycle-go!” passed on the highway. No ending the last leg of every driving interval with a screaming baby whose limits had been pushed past breaking point. No skulking around the sleeping children in a hotel room at 7:30 p.m., only to be wakened by the very same children at 4:34 a.m. So not like last year.

Just me and my girl, on the road with grown-up music and coffee and the cell phone I finally acquiesced to. And oh my God, it was sweet.

Those of you with small children who have not yet gone away for a few days with your partner: do it. If you can swing it at all, do it. Leave them with a trusted somebody and hightail it out of town. It barely matters where. I mean, the Folk Festival was fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but the real highlight of the weekend was not being responsible for anyone else’s needs. From Friday morning — a getaway marred only by Rowan’s sudden tears and pleas for us to stay (he was fine, fine, five minutes later, as we confirmed by said cell phone) — until Monday evening, I did not have to worry about anyone else eating, sleeping, sharing, peeing, hurting, running off, waking up, being bored, throwing sand, or otherwise Behaving or Needing or just plain Existing under my jurisdiction. We travelled with three other sets of parents of relatively small children, none of whom had ever left their kids behind either, and we all walked around with slightly goofy, dazed expressions on our faces. We half-declared a moratorium on conversations that began with, “If the kids were here...,” but eventually gave up. It was just too much fun to gloat.

Even the camping — such as it was, what with nice flat fields of open grass and cooking facilities and bathrooms nearby — was magical. I slept, uninterrupted, under a duvet on our air mattress, until whatever time I chose to wake up in the morning. Our second morning there, Rachel brought a steaming mug of tea to me as a 10:30 wake-up call. And I remembered what it was like to be pampered, how easy it was to be romantic, when not pulled in two directions at once, not mentally mapping out the morning, the hour, how to entice children from Point A to Point B.

And the people! The beautiful people everywhere, eating the beautiful food that we simply bought when we were hungry, washed down by the microbrews in the beer tent when we had a hankering. The baked goods! (Rachel would like me to mention for the record that we ate fried dough in four different forms.) The swimming, the conversations, reading large chunks of my novel, the setting up of camp chairs and hanging out for hours on end in ways that we haven’t hung out in far, far too long.

And, uh, the music. “What did you see?” my sister-in-law asked when we got back. “I don’t actually know,” I admitted. Because, sacrilegious as it sounds to the hard-core festivalgoers, I didn’t really care all that much, at least after k.d. lang cancelled and we missed Elvis Costello and Martha Wainwright on the Wednesday night. Neko Case was pretty rockin’, as was a UK band called Bellowhead. I liked Iron and Wine, and I kind of thought Steven Page was a bit pathetic, what with singing all the old Barenaked Ladies songs he wrote, thank you very much.

But really? As long as it wasn’t Raffi, I wasn’t complaining.

Rejected

Hey, how would you like an organic blueberry-banana smoothie, garnished with a fresh-picked strawberry, still warm from the fields? Because I have two, right here, that my children Are Not Drinking.

The little one, just woken from a nap and therefore in the state of mind I refer to as Everything You Do Is Wrong, screeched, “No strawberry! No strawberry! No moothie! Don’t want! Take it away! Away!”

“Why did you put the strawberry there?” was what the big one wanted to know. “For decoration,” I explained. He picked it up by the stem and examined it gingerly, as though it might explode, and remarked, “You forgot to cut the top off.” He briefly considered lobbing the offending berry into the smoothie glass, but reconsidered this action when I barked, “Don’t even think about it, mister!” Instead, he plunked it down on the table, took a couple of sips of the smoothie, and then forgot about it until he realized it could be used as a delaying tactic at bedtime. At which point he desired it passionately.

But, you know? It didn’t bother me. Even as I was pouring drinks and slicing strawberries and arranging everything just so, I knew that my kids probably wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my efforts at plating. I was doing it for me. And now, for you. Because you? You appreciate things.

Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

In the latest round of our ongoing game of musical beds, Rowan has spent the past few nights on an air mattress (yes, that air mattress) in our room, while Auntie Kathryn occupies the “blue” room he usually sleeps in.

It’s quite sweet, really, to peer over the side of the bed and see a small person, tucked up in the little nest we’ve created by the window. Twice now, he has climbed into our bed from his during the wee hours of the night, and — because I don’t seem able to sleep with his elbow in my solar plexus — I have decamped for the spare bed in what is currently Isaac’s room or gently but insistently escorted Rowan back into his own bed.

But not before reveling for at least a few moments in the glory of his almost-tiny body snuggled between the two of ours, the quiet intimacy of three bodies in the sleep-heavy night, lying under the blades of the slowly oscillating ceiling fan.

When Rowan was a newborn, a young baby, he loved the light fixture above our bed. He lay on his back between me and Rachel, cooing and kicking at the round white bulb. If we turned it on, his whole body wriggled in paroxysms of joy. He spent a lot of time in those early months lying between us, talking to the ceiling. But, back then, awash in a tsunami of sleep deprivation and consequent anxiety, I did not revel. I worried. I angsted. I fretted that we were doing everything wrong, that we were somehow harming him even as he lay happy next to me, that he would never sleep and that I wouldn’t, either. I wondered why all the other new parents I know didn’t seem to be slowly going insane, desperate with the knowledge that they had made a huge, irrevocable, mistake.

One early January morning, lying next to my nursing baby, Rachel spooning him from the other side, a tiny voice managed to work its way through the fretting. “You all look so beautiful,” it said, and for the first time I imagined what we must look like to the outside world: three tired bodies, two parents surrounding a breast-feeding child, warm under a nest of feather duvets and receiving blankets. And I realized in that moment that we did look beautiful, but that — more importantly — we also looked just fine, like we were handling things, like we were okay. Good, even. And I realized that, in fact, that all the other parents I saw with their babies must have had moments of sheer terror and desperation, too. Which, somehow, helped make things feel a bit less scary.

I hung onto that moment for a long time, reminding myself that we were okay. Which we were, all along, even if it took months more to relax into. Which is why, even as he wakes me from deep sleep, even as he jams his toes between my legs to warm them up and asks me to fetch him some water, I revel in my son’s — and now my sons’ — occasional presence in my bed. I revel that they can be there and it is at worst a mild disruption, not cause for despair. I revel in the heads heavy on my shoulder even as my arm falls asleep. And then I fall asleep, or I move them, or move me, and the night continues.

This morning at about 4 AM, I coughed, as quietly as I could, into my pillow.

“Mom!” came a voice from the side of our bed.

“Yes?”

“You woke me up!”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

And it was.

Bad babies

Look! It’s Friday afternoon! The sun is shining, I have a head cold to go with my bronchitis, a cherished friend is coming in for the weekend, and — yay! — I don’t have to write a new blog entry, because the following story, about how we found out that Rowan was a boy, just appeared in the wonderful magazine Brain, Child’s “Backtalk” section. Have a great weekend.

“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound technician asked at my 18-week prenatal appointment.

“Yes,” I said, “but instead of telling me, can you just show me the anatomy on the screen so I can see for my—”

“It’s a boy,” she said.

O-kay. Moving right along, the technician did the anatomical scan. She kept trying to get good pictures of the baby’s various parts, but he (now that I knew he was a he) wasn’t in the right position. She tsk-tsked a few times over the uncooperative fetus, and then said, “What a bad baby.”

I was stunned. My partner was stunned. Who calls a baby — an unborn baby, no less — “bad”?

“A very bad baby,” she said again, as she tried to get a picture of his femur or something. And then, just in case we missed it, again: “Very, very bad.” I guess she’d skipped the sensitivity training day.

She sent me off to the washroom to pee and drink some water, to try to get my bad baby moving so that she could get the pictures she needed. I sat on the toilet, reeling, awash in my first moment of parental protectiveness. Who the hell was this woman? And how dare she call my baby “bad”?

I emerged from the washroom. “So,” the technician asked, wand in hand, “did you tell this bad baby to cooperate?”

“No,” I said, sweetly as I could. “I told him not to be scared of the mean lady.”

If I never play this game again...

... it will be too soon. Fortunately for me, I may never have to. Rowan has decided that I “play too slowly,” and now helpfully takes not only all of his turns, but all of mine as well, all the while narrating the game like a sportscaster on speed: “Okay, my turn: three! One, two, three! I’m on 37! Mom, I’m higher than you! Okay, mom, your turn: six! One, two, three, four, five, six! Mom! Look! You got a ladder! You go up, up, up, up, up — Mom! You’re on 84! Good job! But watch out, because if you get a three next time, you go down that big ladder. Okay, my turn: three again! One, two, three — oh no! I skated on thin ice! I go down a ladder! You’re winning, Mom! Okay, your turn: four! One, two, three, four! You missed the big ladder! Good job!”

And so on, and so on, and so on. This is a parenting strategy I like to refer to as Everybody Gets Most of What They Want, Most of the Time. Rowan gets to play his game, at the warp speed he prefers, and I get to murmur excited noises while reading the New York Times Sunday Styles section (which, in Thunder Bay, is generally delivered on Mondays, sometimes Tuesdays). In which, this week, I learned that, “Relationships between gay and straight men aren’t always easy, but stereotypes are falling.”

Oooh. Apparently, in the big city of New York, the gays and hets have tentatively figured out how to maybe be friends. At least, the guys — no mention of women. Whatever, I’m thinking: just move to a small town and you’ll have no choice.

Case in point: it was just Pride weekend. At least, it is places where they have Pride. Also known as places that are Not Here. All I wanted on Saturday was to take my children to the post–Dyke March beer garden. I wasn’t even envisioning idyllic: I would have settled for whining, demanding, overheated children in a beer garden in the middle of a city without garbage collection. Seriously, I would have. And then I read a whole bunch of blogs about moms who took their whining, demanding, overheated children to Pride, and I still wanted to be there.

My friend Tara, one half of the only other two-mom household I’m aware of in this fine city, suggested we try to create some kind of kid-focused Pride event. We discussed the idea, but the discussion kinda stalled around the question, “And which queer parents would we invite?” We scratched our heads for a while. “Well, there’s you...” she said, and trailed off. I thought of the woman at Rowan’s school with the rainbow sticker on her car: Rachel, excited, struck up a conversation with her one day, but we never got her name. There’s the woman who came up to me in the Scandinavian Home Restaurant in the winter because she recognized me from this blog — Pam! If you’re reading this: send up a flare! Jeez, if you made out with your same-sex roommate in college one drunken night and now live in Thunder Bay, send up a flare! — and then there’s, um … well. All the parents we usually hang out with. Our friends. Fine, fine, fabulous people, all of them. And all straight, as far as I can tell.

That's the thing about small places. You get to be friends with fabulous people, even when they are Heterosexual and you are Homosexual, because That’s How Things Work. In Toronto, I could surround myself with people just like me: I can, off the top of my head, for example, think of at least five other same-sex, interfaith couples with two kids, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of queer motherhood. Not to mention the dozens upon dozens of queer non-parents who are mainstays in the lives of so many of the gaybies (and their parents) in their midst.

And while I longed to be with all of them this weekend, I consoled myself with the fact that the community we have built and are building here is pretty damn lovable. And if we had stayed in Toronto, never moved to Somewhere Without Pride, I wouldn’t have known that. It’s not perfect, but neither is Toronto (even when the city workers are picking up garbage): I still long for more queer culture — not to mention more cafés, more art galleries, more patios, more walkable neighbourhoods — but it’s pretty damn good, from our mini Pride Sunday brunch with godmothers Judy and Jill to the community pizza potluck in the park that evening, where children danced in circles around giant cottonwood trees. Both versions my life — the urban and the small-town — have their ups and downs, but in the end, I suppose, Everybody Gets Most of What They Want, Most of the Time.

Marlo and me

One of my less marketable skills is the uncanny ability to create new lyrics to pre-existing songs. It came in quite handy at summer camp, where I never tired of making up team songs to the Fame theme song or “I’d like to Teach the World to Sing,” or, on one memorable occasion, George Michael’s “Faith.”

Today, I find I find that the same skill serves me quite well as a parent. Rachel just stares at me and shakes her head as I come up with nifty little rhyming ditties about brushing teeth and putting toys away, all set to Sound of Music and Beatles melodies. But the kids like it, and I swear it keeps my mind younger. Never mind that I can’t remember anything that happened last week.

So when I read Lesbian Dad’s recent “Baba’s Day” post, wherein they take their kids to a Pride-sponsored screening of Free to Be You and Me — in San Francisco’s Castro, no less — I was, in addition to being insanely jealous, also immediately taken back in time to my seventh-grade production of FTB. It was 1983. I was in a class of ten girls, with my first teacher who went by “Ms.” and didn’t shave her armpits. You could say it was my feminist awakening. While I could relate to the relevance of “William’s Doll,” I also felt that it needed a girl-specific corollary. A couple of classmates and I got together, and “Gillian’s Ball” was born.

Without further ado:

Gillian’s ball

When my friend Gillian was five years old
She wanted a ball to bounce and throw.
“A ball,” said Gillian, “is something that
“I could use to learn to bat.
“A ball to catch and throw all day —
“Baseball and football I could play!
“And when it’s time to go to bed,
I’d put my ball away,” my friend Jill said.

[CHORUS] A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!
“Don’t be a tomboy,” her best friend said.

Why should a girl want to play with a ball?
“That stuff’s for boys,” said her cousin Meg.
“Don’t be a jerk,” said her older brother.
“I know what to do,” to her father said her mother.

So her mother bought her a Barbie doll,
A baking set, and that’s not all:
Some knitting needles, a crayon set,
A baby doll that really wet.

And Jill loved all of her new games,
Enjoyed them all but all the same,
When Jilly’s mother praised her skill,
“Can I please have a ball now?” said my friend Jill.

A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!
A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!

Then Gillian’s grandma arrived one day
And wanted to know what she liked to play.
And Jill said, “Barbie’s my favorite game.
“I like to play, but all the same,
“I’d give up all of my new toys
“to go play baseball with the boys.”

“How very wise,” her grandma said.
Said Jill: “but everyone says this instead:

A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!
A ball! A ball! Gillian wants a ball!

So Gillian’s grandma, as I’ve been told
bought Gillian a ball to bounce and throw.
When Gillian’s mother began to frown
Grandma smiled and calmed her down, explaining:

“Gillian wants a ball
“So when she’s on a Little League team,
“She’ll know how to bat and to run and to throw,
“And to field left and right and to pitch high and low.
“And maybe one day, Gillian will score the winning run!”

Gillian has a ball! Gillian has a ball!
'Cause she’s gonna play baseball and have a lot... of... fun!


Okay, I admit that I got just a wee bit choked up writing that down.

Yes, of course I remember all the lyrics, another slightly more marketable skill being a semi-photographic memory, especially for Trivia Relating to My Own Life, particularly the preteen years. Actually, I can quote the entire FTB soundtrack from memory (not to mention The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof) and, yes, I do, whenever we put the CD on, inspiring yet more eye-rolling from Rachel. I’m always up for a resounding chorus of “Housework.” My version, however, is inspired not so much by Carol Channing’s rendition as by the Russian-accented version of my seventh grade classmate, Lina, who had recently immigrated from the USSR: “You KNOW, there are TYMZZZES when you HAPPEN to be, just SEE-TING there, KWI-etly, watching TEE-VEE...”

It only just occurred to me now that maybe William grew up to have three kids with his husband, Steve, and that Gillian was a budding baby-dyke who’d grow up to be a human-rights lawyer and pitch for her Rainbow-league softball team. You never know — but you know they were free to do whatever made them happy. Whether you’re in San Francisco or northern Ontario or anywhere in between or beyond, Happy Pride!

And your mothers wear army boots

When I went to pick up Rowan at school today, the JKs were playing outside in the big kids’ playground. Rowan looked up from the slide, gave me a huge grin, and yelled, “Susan! What are you doing here!”

His teacher looked at me in mock horror. Instead of commenting on his amazing people skills, though, she said, “‘Susan?’”

“That’s what he calls me,” I said.

“Not ‘Mom’?”

“No,” I said. “Not ‘Mom.’”

“Why?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “maybe if you had two of them, you would find more sensible things to call them, too.”

“Good point,” she said.

Because I am not Rowan, I did not answer, “I know it’s a good point.” But I thought it.

Two-year-old

Dear Isaac,

You turned two this month, and I have devoted no small amount of time into figuring out how to bottle you, to preserve the essence of you at what I can only imagine is peak cute. I keep thinking the formula is nearly perfect, and then, every time I test it out, the Oompa Loompa turns into a huge blueberry and rolls away.

But first it wakes me up at 5:17 in the morning and demands a muffin and a glass of milk.

So I guess that you are going to keep on growing in the way that you have for the past two years, and I will just have to trust in the photographs and videos and, yes, this blog, to remember what you were like RIGHT NOW, barely 20 pounds soaking wet, in your goofy little frog hat that shades you so nicely from the sun.

I will have to remember your uncanny ability to wedge yourself so precisely into the space next to my body, and your almost palpable satisfaction at doing so with both white fuzzy security blankets in your arms and your thumb in your mouth. We spend lots of time like that on the couch, where we read, over and over again, books about trucks and about dogs, and you still get mad when the back cover of the board book will not open, and you try to pry apart the layers of cardboard in an effort to squeeze out just one more little bit of story. But you’re learning to flip the book back to the beginning and begin again. And each time we see that dump truck or the “six quiet dogs,” it’s just as thrilling as the last time.

For your birthday, we are buying you some leverage with your older brother in the form of two particularly coveted Sodor Railway trains. That brother of yours, one of his favorite questions is, “How come Isaac always wants to do what I want to do?” He sounds a bit put out by the whole younger sibling thing, and to some extent, he is. After all, one of your favorite phrases in relation to him is, “Coming too.” But I’ll tell you both a secret: pretty much just as much of the time, he wants to do what you’re doing, too. The two of you will disappear upstairs or into the basement for half an hour or more at a time, and your other mother and I are learning to back off just a bit when the two of you play. Because, when we do, when there’s no authority figure to provoke, your older brother becomes protective, solicitous of your toddler needs, nurturing. Many times, we’ll hear a bump, and then your cry, and then his voice, asking if you’re okay, if you want a hug or your blanket or some water. And, more often than not, you’re fine, trusting in him to make things better. He likes to lie down with you while you nap, swearing up and down that of course he will not talk and he will go to sleep. And then the two of you giggle and wrestle and natter and mess around until we finally have to escort him, protesting, from the room.

You doubled your lifespan over the past 365 days, and will double it again and again and again and still be younger than me. During that time, you learned how to walk and to talk, to feed yourself, what the telephone is for and how to climb into your own car seat. You paint, you sing, you dance, you sweep the floor. At playgroup the other day, you planted your first red runner bean. You like to mix up batches of pretend oatmeal in the sandbox and serve them to anyone who’s hungry. You are enamored of tea parties, a particular stuffed doggy, and the cats, even though the big one occasionally lets you know when to cut it out with the poking her with pens and paper clips. You have an uncanny ear for motorcycles and ambulances, and like to imitate a truck backing up, beep-beep-beeping as you shuffle carefully backwards.

You are a second child, who knows of things like ice cream and Pokémon well before your older brother ever did. When you wake up from your nap hysterical and inconsolable, your other mother and I feel bad for you but we do not worry, we do not feel desperate and wonder what we did wrong. You have grown up, thus far, not under the weight of our anxiety but rather our bemusement. Has that made a difference to your personality? Is that why you have the sense of humour you do, screwing up your face into coy little grimaces, pursing those rosebud lips into your series of funny faces? Rowan likes to get you to perform your tricks like a trained seal at a party: “Isaac, do baby laughing!” he’ll say, and you will oblige by breaking out in a series of jolly guffaws. “Isaac, do baby crying!” he’ll say, and you’ll wah-wah-wah for the audience.

And even though you’re two now, we still do think of you as a baby, our tiny, smiley little guy. You made a spectacular entry into the world, and I often find myself in the bathroom, marveling at the spot of linoleum right near the cupboard where the doula laid you carefully onto a towel before rushing off to grab some piece of equipment or other. Your other mother was on the phone, paging the midwife, who was parking her car in our driveway. Your big brother, seven months older than you are now, was asleep in his bed, barely 20 feet away. Time slowed down then for me, so that the entire world consisted of our two bodies, still joined, and the maybe six square feet of bathroom floor we occupied, me on my knees and breathless and thrilled at the turn of events that let me have you at home instead of the euphemistically named Regional Health Sciences Centre. I’d spent the day in labour, breathing through contractions and thinking about what it meant to open, to make that kind of room within myself and without, imagining you as my partner in this process and working with me to get you here, each of us trusting in the other’s instincts and decisions.

Even your 5 a.m. wakeup calls will eventually cease. On my mornings to get up with you, you eat your snack and then we cuddle up in your big brother’s abandoned bed for 45 minutes or so. You start off a foot or so away from me and slowly inch your way closer until we are spooning, me breathing in the scent of your strawberry-blond hair, nuzzling your skin, holding your tiny body close to mine for as long as I can until you turn over and sit up and say, “Go downstairs.” And I sigh and heave my weary body up and say, “Okay.” And you reach out your arms and say, “Coming too.” And we go downstairs together and squeeze out just a little bit more of the story.

Happy birthday, baby.