dual personalities

Hello from daughter #2! I am here to provide a fun little update (and perhaps some grumblings and thoughts, too). You might have heard that sweet Katiebelle started walking this weekend.

After taking a couple of tentative steps here and there, she was off to the races with a short trip down a hallway on Friday night. By Saturday, she was walking everywhere. Though still a bit wobbly, Katie goes for it with gusto and is pretty fearless. She wants to walk around every corner of the house, in the parking lot, at the playground — anything goes.

We haven’t quite mastered stairs, but not for lack of trying.

Unfortunately, learning to walk has been a big milestone among many setbacks — Katie’s first ear infection, an RSV diagnosis, and a big molar coming in (with several other teeth on the way). No one has gotten much sleep for a couple of weeks now, and Katie is in and out of daycare. I can tell Katie has been feeling bad because sometimes she doesn’t even finish her banana (“NAAA”) at snack time. Quelle horror.

But we trudge along and I try to embrace the extra time hanging out with the babe. It’s been a busy time at work with the semester starting, so Katie visited my office over the weekend to watch DN help me get a few things set up. Lots of new doors to open — fascinating!

I hadn’t realized that it was a move-in weekend, so we had to navigate the traffic jam of SUVs filled with laundry baskets, mini fridges, and angst. It was a lot, and I’m sure people were confused by the presence of a toddler. Katie was equally wary of them, but here she is, ready for Intro to Literature:

I, for one, have been trying to get myself back in the mood to read something good. My mother very kindly sent me some of the Christian Romance novels from my teenage reading years — as a joke, she insisted, but I couldn’t help but skim one. (OK, I legit read it.)

It was, ahem, not good.

I always turn back to the nineteenth century when I need to read something that will get me to snap out of it. Self-reliance, anyone?

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But Emerson can be a little much. I always remember the anecdote I learned in a college class, that Emerson would invite Margaret Fuller over for dinner and then walk and talk with her — not his wife — after the meal. When he journaled about his wife’s unhappiness with this recurring scenario, he said something like, “Well, Margaret has things to teach me! There is nothing left to learn from my wife.” Well then.

So I have been thinking of re-reading The Blithedale Romance, the novel of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s that I have read the least number of times. Something about Hawthorne always soothes me, because he wasn’t such a genius as his Concord contemporaries, but he’s still so, so good. I always think he would understand my less-intellectual moments. (Maybe he’d even understand reading a Christian Romance novel once in a while!) He loved his wife and his children dearly.

Maybe by the time I blog next I’ll have actually finished a book. For now, a plan. And until then, a gif: