If You’re Asian in the Kitchen, What Are You in the Bathroom?

The punchline to that joke, by the way, is “European.” You can’t see me, but right now I’m laughing like the Three Stooges. AS WE SPEAK. I can also guarantee a full-bellied laugh from any six-year-old you tell that joke to, or your money back.

The title has precisely zero relevance to this blog post. I just happened to remember that joke the other night as my entire family piled into the bathroom while I was in the shower. I’m pretty sure every mother knows what I mean. The bathroom is actually not the most ideal room in our house to have family time. I know it has good seating arrangements (insert joke about a throne here), great lighting, and is basically a sauna when the shower is on, plus you can have meaningful conversations due to the lack of media distractions…oh, who am I kidding, the bathroom is the perfect place to hang out. Bring in the Monopoly, fellas, and let’s make it a Hasbro game night.

Okay, other than that little tangent, the rest of this post will not be about bathroom humor. (Aw, man!)

What it will be about, on the other hand, is fawning over my children. And I know you all just come here for that. (I know my demographic…Mom.)

While both my children are equally stupefyingly mesmerizing and growing exponentially more so every minute, this particular post is dedicated to my little Bean who will be eight months old tomorrow. Eight months! Say what?!

Say What?!

She’s got the sprout of a tooth about to break the surface, she’s almost crawling (right now it’s more like lurching, and it is hilarious), she can feed herself chunks of banana and gourmet puffs of air, she gives kisses and tries to share her pacifier, and I swear she tried to say “mama” when I asked her to. (I said, “Can you say, ‘mama’?” and immediately after she said, “Ah-Ah.” You be the judge. Actually, you’re not the judge, I am, and I’m sticking to my story.)

She’s delicious and irresistible and sometimes in the mornings, I wake her up before she’s fully gotten her nap out because I want to kiss the soft skin of her cheek and hold her tightly against my chest and inhale the fuzzy sweetness of her hair and I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to listen to her squeaky voice and watch her navigate a piece of food into her mouth and feel her minuscule fingers on my face and I want everyone in the city to experience her, too. I want to watch her roll from one end of the room to the other and back again, having foregone crawling this long because rolling is a much more efficient means of transportation. I want the evenings to stretch out into infinity, as Bug and Bean and I stretch out on Bug’s bed for his bedtime story, Beanie constantly reaching for the book, her turn to read. And even though I’m getting more rest these days, I sometimes miss those nighttime hours when it was just Bean and me, quietly lulling one another back to sleep.

Seven months old for another 16 hours-ish

Instead, every month sneaks up on me, and even though I tried to get my fill of my children on any given day, or even wished a day would hurry up and end already so we could start all over after a good night’s rest, I am still surprised, every time, at how much Time has really passed.

It gets old, I know, being caught unawares as each monthly milestone comes and goes, surprised that the 5th comes immediately after the 4th every single time. Thanks for bearing with me as I stare open-mouthed at the calendar on a weekly basis, wondering how she’s gotten this far this fast.

And now you’ll have to excuse me; I need to go snuggle my seven-month-old before she’s my eight-month-old.