i'm no superman

Now we are making our second revolution around the calendar. This weekend Anna will experience her second Mother’s Day, and I’ll bet that this time she’ll sleep through the night. Don’t ask me what I got her yet, because I. . . am. . . uh. . . keeping it a secret.

Speaking of Mother’s Day. . . In all the gratitude that I spread across the universe in the previous couple of blogs, I failed to show much appreciation for Ben’s third mother: his all-day-long enthusiastic, gracious, marvelous, stunning mother Melinda who makes sure our Benjamin is very well taken care of every other Friday so that her co-worker and friend, Anna, can catch a sleep break between consecutive nights on at the hospital. I don’t think she knows the degree to which her Benny-sitting efforts have helped the sanity level in our household, and I don’t think we could ever thank her enough. Please, please, please have a happy Mother’s Day, Melinda – and thank you for helping us mold our little boy into something wonderful.

So. . . besides drooling and babbling so much I don’t know whether to wipe his face or stuff the soaked towel in his mouth, Ben is doing just fine. He is pushing a couple more teeth through his gums, hence the drooling, bringing the total to 14 or so chompers. Recently his favorite activities have included: talking on his pretend phone (which he holds backwards), making little Indian sounds with his hand over his mouth (excuse me, little Native-American sounds), making be-de-be-de-be-de sounds with his fingers on his lips, throwing things (I’m starting to realize the imprudence of teaching him to throw a baseball), walking (or falling down, depending on how you see the water glass), standing atop any stationary object he can climb onto, and of course, wide-mouthed laughing (that’s just a given at this point). Anna and I are enjoying the added freedom that comes with his sense of independence, though I am now beginning to understand why our parents all struggled with the duality of letting their children go, while at the same time praying for the day that they would all just please leave.

And the other night I had a terrifically vivid dream that Anna gave birth to a baby girl that we named Elise. I also dreamed that I missed the delivery because I was flying above the roof of an abandoned building using a pair of plastic oars for wings. I consulted a dream dictionary (which Anna bought me when we were juniors in high school) and to the best of my deciphering abilities this means that I am trying to escape the peak of a life-wasted by bringing a new life into my own, but in my panic I have missed the dawn of that new life, my own cheap attempts to breakout the very reason for my renewed heartache. But because the dream seemed to me a happy dream (I love flying!), I just figured it meant that Anna was pregnant with a baby girl (no, she is not) and I am Superman (no, I am not). I just wonder what the deal is with the plastic oars. . .