Good Morning, Moon

James and I are up alone this morning, sitting on the sofa. I've been reading, and he's been rearranging stacks of books, pretending to nurse his stuffed kitty, filling and emptying a packing envelope with puzzle pieces, etc. The sky has lightened, but it's still early morning dusk, and James, who has paused in his labors a moment to stand on the sofa looking out the window, notices a faint fingernail sliver.
"Love moon," he says. I start to nurse him, and he pauses every minute or two to look out the window again and make his report. "Moon still there!"
I woke up this morning on the wrong side of bed, thinking angrily about a lot of unsolvable problems.  I wanted to be alone for half an hour before the boys got up, so I could keep on thinking angrily without distraction. I don't mean to suggest that angry thinking isn't a worthwhile pursuit, within reason, but the combination of a very small child and astronomy does make it dwindle down into something pretty small and postponeable.

Do you really want to know?

Henry would like us to have more children. He brings it up several times a week. I think he thinks a baby would give more scope for his kindness than his 2-year-old brother seems to, and he is at least theoretically interested in developing his kindness chops. I have explained to him that we are unlikely to have a third child, and that the five or six more he wants are definitely out of the question.

So yesterday he came up with this modest proposal."Every time you get too old to have another baby, we can get another mama to make a brother for me. How do you like that idea, Mama?"

A few things about James

1. James has started saying his own name. He pronounces it "Wame." The other day Henry (or Ha, as James calls him) was chiding him for making a mess. "Bad Wame," agreed James, making my heart ache.

2. He comes capering out of the bathroom after his bath each night exclaiming "Nakey! Nakey! Nakey!" If pushed, he will add, "Hay clo" (hate clothes).

3. Although James has very little interest in movies or TV, he has spent enough time watching his brother watch to pick up a thing or two. He now delights in prancing back and forth across the room singing "Hot dog! Hot dog! Hot dig [gity] dog! Mi[ckey] Mou[se] Clu[b] Hou[se]!" To my great surprise, this, along with Henry's passion for the program, has for the first time ever softened my heart toward Walt Disney.

What not to read

So, suppose you have your third cold of the young year, your period is about to start, and you have spent the previous night waking up every 45 minutes wondering if you are going to throw up, then have spent the morning holding your 4-year-old's head over the sink while he unambiguously does--you! with your vomiting phobia!--but then, surprisingly, everyone turns out to be in a mellow and easygoing mood and you find you have both the time and the inclination to start reading a novel. Your excellent husband, say, has given you a gift subscription to the Persephone book-of-the-month program, and the satiny gray paperbacks have begun piling up faster than you can get to them (because you have been devoting your precious reading time to books with interchangeable titles and subtitles like "Becoming the Parent You Want to Be" and "How to Stop Yelling"). Being realistic, you pick out one of the slimmer volumes, with a whimsical horsehead endpaper and something about princes in the title--sort of makes you think of Kate Middleton and the lighter side of Trollope, exactly the sort of escapist British fizz to hit the spot, as you lie curled up at the foot of the bed where the baby is napping,  a toy helicopter at your feet, and the pessimistic stainless steel bowl left over from last night gaping at your head.

And then you read this:

"But what's the use of spring to me, thought Patricia. It'll be light after tea and, as I go down to the garden to eat the eggs, a blackbird will sing in the holly; the chestnuts will flower in Christ Church meadow, and Magdalen will have her fritilleries, but I'll have a beastly dental plate... I'm old... Hugh's old. God! what a struggle it's been, she thought, remembering monthly nurses, sticking-out teeth, tempers, nametapes, rows about dirty necks, rows about tidying up the nursery; and now that I've finished with it, she thought, now that they're grown-up, wash themselves, feed themselves, don't quarrel any more or drop egg down their fronts, now that my work's done, I've just got to grow old and feeble and ugly..."

Yah, that hits the spot, all right. 

It's Princes in the Land, by Joanna Cannan, in case you want to make sure you don't read it when you are recovering from the stomach flu. 

The letters of H. Patrick Thomas McCobb, vol. I

Peter and I have taken a big step. We've started having a babysitter spend three hours with the boys most Sunday afternoons. We're not going on "dates" or anything like that; Peter spends his time in the workshop whittling a sarcophagus head, while I go on long walks and think about the novel I would write if I ever write a novel. Not romantic, but restorative, which is where we're at right now, as they say.
We're delighted with Sophie, and after her first stint, Henry dictated a letter to her that mostly consisted of the single-word sentence "Love" repeated over and over, with any leftover space filled in with hearts. He was so pleased with the reception this letter got that he cooked up a scheme this week to dictate to Sophie a letter for her mother.
Here is how it went:

Dear Jana,
Hello. Nice to meet you. From Patrick Thomas McCobb.* And from Sophia [Redacted Redacted]. We are at Henry and James's house. They are eating a snack. And we are inside because it is rainy. We wish it was summer so we could make a garden and go swimming. I don't know how to swim. I need swimming lessons. The problem with a big hole is that you'll get muddy. We like summer so we can dig holes in the ground. Dear Jana, I wonder what your whole name is. You know your whole name? 
Love, Henry and James. Goodbye.

*Apparently Henry told Sophie that this is his real name. Henry is just a nickname.

The bleak midwinter, with anecdotes

At bedtime the other night:
Henry: James is cute, Mama.
Me: Yes, he is.
Henry: I'm cute, too.
Me: Yes, you are.
Henry: You're not cute. Daddy's not cute.
Me: No, we're not.
Henry: You're not like us.

***

James has developed a little shtick that is somewhere between fantasy play and an extended joke. It involves a little gray stuffed cat that he has grown attached to. "MY kitty-kitty," he says. When he wants to nurse, he says, "Kitty nuh (nurse)" and holds the toy to my chest before he takes a turn. This tickles him greatly. But last night, he didn't have the cat at hand. "Meow," he said. "Kitty nuh." He started to nurse, then pulled away to say again, "Meow," to make sure I got it.

***

We are sick again. Peter and I were knocked off our feet for the better part of a week, and James is awake 10 or more times each night, coughing. We were sick this time last year too, for weeks. I used to love winter, but right now, it feels like little more than a season of sickness and sorrow. I'm looking forward to spring, and also to one day loving winter again.

Fun with language acquisition

James is learning new words all the time, so he is full of surprises. Take yesterday, when I was reading one of his current favorite books, Each Peach Pear Plum, in which the reader hunts for hidden nursery rhyme characters. He found Mother Hubbard, who is bending over in her cottage kitchen so only her fairly voluminous backside is in view.
"Dere-ya-go, Mama!" crowed James. "Butthole!"