walking and caulking

Claire made it across the room on Monday, and since then has been pushing herself a little further every day. Her dedication is a wonder to behold. She staggers a ways, looks up to make sure we are watching, grins all over her face and claps her little fat starfish hands together. Ham.

Robert and Gayu gave her a tractor-trailer for Christmas, with Old Macdonald the farmer and a horse and pig and cow and sheep and chicken. As Jeremy points out, she’s eaten all of these now, except the horse. I have to stop myself naming the horse Boxer and the pig Snowball.

It’s a fabulous toy, but the most surprising thing is that she plays with it the way Jeremy would, not the way I would. I used to line my toy animals up in order of height; later, they’d form parliaments and stage debates. Her chief interest in the animals is flinging them aside, or in more benevolent moods, handing them up to me. The tractor, on the other hand, is a source of continual delight. She loves its heft and growl, and keeps inspecting it to find out what makes it go.

The other news, such as it is, is 987 Alabama’s advanced state of decrepitude. We woke this morning to a cheery cascade of water down the window behind my iMac. My business-sized envelopes and old Linux laptop were already soaked. After several increasingly clipped and precise phone calls, the building manager deigned to send his amiable handypersons around. They looked at the damage, said “Oh yeah, the whole frame is rotted through, see,” and then they just sealed it along the bottom.

We’ll see how well that works out.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.