Blog On (,) Baby

Hazy day, befogged by too little sleep, a universal song-- new mothering.

I have less than I like of golden rest, but certainly I thank the Wren for occasionally being a late bird. She grunts through the night and avoids waging war with squawk assaults unless soundest sleep keeps me deep. Then she rouses the roost and raises the roof.

If the nurse can be trusted (because some can't be, you know), Susannah gained almost a pound and a half in ten days. Is that even possible? I am a supreme dumpling maker. Soon, she'll have fluffy legs instead of chicken sticks**, and I'll accept the blue ribbon with a bashful smile. (**I love this stage, though, when the area from her ankle to beyond her knee has the same circumference. I should take a picture before I plump them up...)

Two sisters give her kisses and squeezes by the baker's dozen, and life as five seems like an always-been. Learning to live as five has been much easier than learning to be three, or even four. Susannah came home, and within days, it seemed as if she'd never been anywhere else. Having already been accustomed to sharing time with two girls, adding a third hasn't greatly changed our days. And nights? Interrupted rest due to her belly's rumbles isn't all that different from interrupted rest due to her jigging within. And so life goes.

Abruptly shifting topics, we went to the circus last week!
(...which calls for at least three exclamation points.)

! ! !

Boy, do I love circuses! At 2 and 1/2 weeks old, this was Susannah's very first. She exhibited a disappointing lack of interest, as if she couldn't care less about where we were as long as she was fed, but Millie and Annika's glee (not to mention my own) more than made up for her lack.

John asked me to pick him up early on Friday and mentioned a surprise. I thought we'd just go for a drive somewhere, so I left the camera behind, hence the lacking snapshots of the razzle and dazzle. It's just as well. There's something about trying to capture just how much one is enjoying a moment that diminishes the enjoyment of the moment a bit. (We did, however, buy a junky disposable camera so that we could document Millie, Annika, and I riding an elephant; said picture will ponderously clump on over to shotsnaps after we develop it.)

Now's as good a time as any to mention that Millie is clairvoyant. Before we left the house, she said, "I think the surprise is an elephant." Not wanting her to be disappointed by our "drive somewhere," I told her it most definitely was not an elephant. She replied, "I'm sure it's an elephant. And maybe tigers. I think the surprise is tigers and an elephant." I think that children must have an extra sense-- a circus sense. They can taste circuses in the air without being told a word. I'm a bit sad that, despite my true-blue love of The Big Show, I seem to have misplaced my circus sense. (A "drive somewhere"... What was I thinking?)

Abruptly switching topics, John and I are on the move toward a move. Think of us as we tally up the pros and cons of living in Big Sky Country, Nanticoke, Scotland, Virginia, and anyplace a job appears. We are even thinking about moving before a library job appears. As John said last night when discussing moving to a place that has no present librarian openings, "Librarians have to die at some point." And until that point, jobs in burger joints abound...

I must be off. The girls are abed (save the smallest one), and now's my time to fulfil duties of thank-you noting and mopping. I leave you with abundant and strangely similar pictures of a small, wrinkled face along with some sister double features and some snapshots from the pre-Berry backlog.