And then, when I was putting her to bed last night, she asked if she could marry me when she grows up. Yup, she is delightful. She is raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. I think she is even schnitzel with noodles. I want to kiss her and snuggle her and dunk her in my coffee and eat her up.
Except:
Dearest Viva has brought home some life-force-draining-bug from preschool with her, and it has felled us all. By this I mean that despite having loads of plans for the Memorial Day weekend, at which we would celebrate birthdays and housewarmings and barbecues with a variety of delightful friends we haven't seen in ages, we spent the entire weekend in the apartment, sniffling, coughing, sometimes getting along, and sometimes making each other miserable. I kept Viva home from school today (in this! My last week of non-employment, which was to be a Me-Fest for the ages! A 4-day week of reflection, and shopping, and getting a facial!), and since she got up at 6:45 AM, by 10 AM I was hustling her out of the house. My favorite libraries open at 10 AM...on Wednesdays. Today, they open at 12:30. We actually drove to THREE LIBRARIES that were closed. At the second one, Viva burst into tears in the parking lot, but by the third, she was stoic. She just looked at me with resignation from the back seat.
"Don't worry," I said, buckling myself back in. "I know the library closest to our house [i.e., the one with the worst selection of books to choose from] is open early on Tuesdays," and it was, and even if it hadn't been, I think it might have opened as we were driving toward it, purely from the irresistible strength of my will.
We found books, old favorites and new, and we read for a little while there in the kids' room at the library, and then I suggested we go home and have lunch, and we got back to the car at 12:08 and I realized I was parked in a "NO PARKING TUESDAYS NOON TO 2 PM STREET CLEANING" zone, and yet miraculously managed to avoid getting a ticket. I have had really good parking karma lately, praise all that is holy.
So we went home and I made lunch and tried not to bother Sweet William, who was sealed in the bedroom taking a nap on his lunch hour, and Viva and I read books sitting on the floor and eating a picnic lunch of salami sandwiches and tortilla chips and blueberries and strawberries, and then I read some of her books to her a second time, and gave her a smoothie with some Children's Tylenol Cough and Cold in it, and surprise, surprise: she won't nap.
I fell asleep on her bed, waiting for her to fall asleep, and I was rudely awakened by her crawling on top of me, hitting me several times with a pillow (which I ignored), and then jamming her pointy little elbow in my ribs with all of her 29.5 pounds behind it (which I couldn't ignore, because, hello? OUCH.).
"I'm not tired!" she said. "I don't want to take a nap!"
I don't want to marry her so much today.
P.S. She has interrupted me at least 512 times in the creation of this post. No exaggeration.
P.P.S. Wanted to write part of my post today about this entry on Girl Bomb, but don't have time. "Is your work done yet?" Viva says. Must go, but here is an excerpt, because it encapsulates a lot of what has been going on in my head lately:
When I was young, I wanted to write so brilliantly, so originally; I wanted to find words that had never been combined, wanted to fit them to ideas so beautiful and profound that your life would change just reading them -- the world would be illuminated from within by possibility and hope, and you would be awash in feelings of triumph and peace. I wanted to write in undiscovered colors, beyond blue and orange and pink; I wanted to create something that had never existed before, something necessary, something lacking.
Lately I've had trouble composing an email, writing a blog post, opening the pages I've been working on. None of it is good enough, it's all just noise, just me wanting to hear my own voice. Say something smart, I beg myself. Say something meaningful. Say something that will help other people live their lives, and be happy.
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