Keeping It Real

Amid all the cuteness and sweetness of the month, the psychic pressure of one moment this afternoon almost made me leave my body for an instant. Gillian was wriggling anxiously, beseeching me with distressed eyes and starting to wail; Allison Clare was beginning to sob in her high chair that she wanted to get down or have more juice (impossible, since she had thrown her cup overboard to who knows where); and I was frantically trying to finish comments on student presentation drafts fast enough to get the three of us out of the house and up to campus before the department secretary left for the day so that I could make copies of the flyers for tomorrow's senior capstone seminar panels and then go grocery shopping before dinnertime. Couple all of that with: I haven't slept for more than a few hours at a stretch in three months (not that anybody's counting), I pulled a muscle in my shoulder two nights ago, and the air conditioning was broken so it was rapidly becoming sweltering in the kitchen. Breathe, Tara, breathe.

Thankfully, this moment--and the others that have been like it--didn't last too long. When I came home, Sam had installed a window air-conditioner. Allison Clare gave me a hug while I was sitting on the floor, and then pulled back, ran across the floor and said, "Run and hug!" and came flying across the room to leap into my arms (repeat several times, with giggles and her saying, to herself apparently, "Silly Munchkin" at the end). Gilly fell asleep on her side at first with her fat cheeks pooching down onto the bed in a little puddle of chubbiness, and all was right with the world. For a few minutes, at least.