Long Day

Today began at 6:45 AM, waking up next to Jess at the apartment in Squirrel Hill. I could get used to seeing her first thing in the morning - having a warm arm wrapped around you as you drift into consciousness is a lovely way to enter a day.

We had offered to babysit for my sister on Thursday night so she and her husband could have a few hours to themselves. I don't get to help her much, so when Jessie volunteered us, I was happy to have a chance to help. It turns out my little niece was really sick and couldn't go to daycare today, so Anna asked after babysitting on Thursday if Jess would come back at 7:30 AM and babysit this morning. Not wanting her to be there alone, I came along (okay, she threatened violence if I didn't), and we had another adventure with my 11-month-old niece, Mariah.



I know, she's painfully cute. Don't look too long or your eyes will start to go mushy. She makes the best facial expressions, too - she has eyes that really look at things. Sounds funny to say it that way, but you can almost watch the billions of synapses fire as she learns how to work the world. The only stressful thing was that, as a sick baby, she was nigh inconsolable all night and much of the morning, so her usually happy disposition was sadly missing. When you're sick, nobody but mom will do - it was traumatic trying to be the surrogates. I've gotten a lot better with kids in the past couple of years but babies still scare the shit out of me. I'm so afraid I'm going to do something wrong, miss some crucial signal. I wouldn't want to babysit alone. Thank goodness Jess was there - she's been babysitting since 6th-grade, so she had a measured calm about it that was reassuring. The cutest moment ever was when she sang Mariah to sleep. It was one of those perfect moments: soft, pink light through the windowblinds, the subtle wind from a fan, her beautiful, lilting voice. I found myself swaying back and forth, my eyelids heavy, my breathing slowed. If I had a blanket, I might just have zonked out, too. Lullaby's are serious magic.

The most fun, of course, was trying to give Mariah her medicine when she woke up. I'm about as clumsy as it gets with a syringe. I have ragtime thumbs, i.e. it either all squirts out or none of it. Poor Mariah - it took a couple of tries and a lot of tag-team holding to get her to swallow a tsp. of Motrin. I think the experience gave me a chance to taste parenthood, and I'm definitely a decade away from kids of my own. It's strange, though - I find myself thinking about things like, "I want my parents to be alive to know my kids," and "I don't want to be old when they're young." You really do change in your mid-20s. Weird.

I went with Jess' fam up to the West End Overlook, an incredible vantage of Pittsburgh. It was evening. A low, purple dusk set upon the skyscrapers, their distant lights twinkling in the waning summer air. We were there for some free concert, but we missed most of it, so instead I enjoyed the view. We then took a car tour of the southwest of Pittsburgh, through Crafton/Ingram where my Aunt Irene lives, down to the infamous Broadhead Manor apartments where lots of people got murdered in the 70s and 80s. I didn't know that Pittsburgh had Projects - that was an unwelcome revelation. So many dark corners of the world.

Sleep well, loves. Catch you soon.

-M