Hello, Pushkin

It's another blog blast Friday with the Parent Bloggers and Light Iris. The topic this time around: where does the time go?

God, I wish I knew.

Lately, Mae and I putter through the days, going to the park, eating lunch, getting groceries, going for a nap, taking a bath... Every now and then we'll do something special. Like, yesterday, we went to the petting zoo. We visited with the cows, saw the fattest pig, walked underneath the trees that were dropping fluffy white seed pods. It was all very dream-like. But then, so is every day, even if we don't "do" anything. Since Mae was born, I feel like I've been living in a bit of a time warp. The first three months of her life lasted about twenty years, for example... and the past two have lasted six seconds.

Yesterday on the phone my little brother asked, with what sounded like pity, aren't you bored yet? To which I replied, "God, no."

I guess I can see how our life might look a little boring from the outside. I'm not sealing deals or meeting deadlines. There's nowhere we especially have to be, and - with the exception of a few loads of a laundry; a little grocery shopping - there's nothing we especially have to get done. If you stripped our schedule down to its basics, it'd go something like this:

• Mae gets up.
  
• Mae eats.
  
• Mae plays / We do errands.
  
• Mae goes back to sleep.
  
• Repeat.
  
• Repeat.
  
• Repeat.
  

But you'd be missing the hundreds of details, which are what really make it magic. Like under the category of "Mae gets up" alone you could add so many subheadings...

Mae Gets Up

• Mae rocks on her hands and knees in the crib while telling an unintelligible story.
  
• Mae roars when I come in.
  
• I get a hug.
  
• Diaper change during which Mae pulls herself to standing, wiggles all around, takes ten wipes out of the box while I'm not looking and tries to eat them.
  
• Face wash torture.
  
• Tooth brushing torture.
  
• Getting-dressed torture.
  
• We go downstairs.
  
• We stop in the hallway to admire the kitty.
  
• We stop on the stairs to admire the banister.
  
• We stop to wave at our reflections in the mirror while saying things like "Who's that pretty baby? Oh, that's Mae. Mae is a pretty baby. Wave hello to Mae. Oh, hello pretty baby."
  
• We go to the mailbox to see what's there.
  
• We look at all the pictures in the pizza fliers.
  
• We stop to pick a flower from the bush and Mae tries to eat it.
  
• We go inside and stop by the mirror to wave at ourselves one more time.
  
• and on
  
• and on
  
• and on...
  

That probably still doesn't sound so exciting from the outside... but what I can't quite put into words is the almost unbearable sweetness of it all; her sticky little hand on my cheek; the way it feels to be greeted by her two-toothed smile.

Our time goes to just being together, I guess. To just slowing down and looking at everything, and learning about everything, because everything in the world is brand-new to Mae and, somehow, that makes it seem brand new to me as well. And when you're coming at it from that perspective, doing nothing much can take a very long time.