by Melissa on November 23, 2010
It’s been a while since I’ve written. (Blame the novel. Or don’t blame the novel, just read it when it’s finished.) A lot has happened. Lily is speaking in three-word sentences — “Jake eat pasta” is a common one; “Man is gone?” a particularly clever way of saying she can’t find the man in the picture; and “Mommy do it” a highly recurrent theme. Jake is displaying a sense of imagination — largely centered around a superhero he has named “Sportsman” — that blows me away.
But one thing that hasn’t happened, though I’ve been expecting it for a while, is Lily hitting her Daddy Phase. Until this morning.
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by Melissa on October 4, 2010
I feel, at the outset, that I should be clear this story has nothing to do with my second child, despite being about Second Child Syndrome. Or, at least, nothing directly.
But I do feel, rightly or wrongly, that my ability to walk away from my not-yet-four-year-old as he played with the toy train set in Barnes & Noble to check out the Mo Willems selections an aisle away stems directly from the fact that I have a second child and have been practicing such cavalier parenting for nearly nineteen months now.
Which doesn’t make me feel any better about the big, silent tears streaking Jake’s cheeks when I found him wandering around the escalators in search of his absent mother ten minutes later.
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