Tonight

Shadden and Daddy are out playing basketball with a new hoop Daddy just had to get Shadden for his birthday-or prebirthday.  Kealana comes inside unwillingly explaining to me, "BabBall" there is a basketball and BaBa and she wants to play too.  She always wants to do what BaBa is doing.  The fact that she has the double syllable and I can understand when she says, "tractor" at age 14 months is just a peek preview for the massive weight of influence her big brother will have upon her life.

I kiss her cold hands and warm them up on my neck and breathe warm air and more kisses onto them.  She loves this and asks me for more spoon feeding me the Mother medicine of joyfully complying, a sweet shared gratitude, one of those treasured divine gifts God exacts upon parents.

I tell her we'll warm up in a nice hot bath and load it up with bubbles as she helps me peel off her layers.  She wants me to keep the water running so she can dangle her hands in the waterfall.  I laugh as she repeatedly asks me to pour soap into her hands and rubs it all over her own cute tummy, sides, and arms.  The same game we have played for the last two months.  It's those small motions that mean so much when first and second and zillionth witnessed, because it is the flower opening before my very eyes.  Growth can be so beautiful.  She tells me when she is finished motioning to her towel and I wrap her up grabbing under her outstretched arms to that soft little middle.  How many times have I wrapped this and brother ducky?  The after bath smell and hair and yellow duckyhead still tingles my heart like the newness of morning seeing my darling afresh in the smallness she carries that my everyday eyes sometimes forget.

We diaper up and she puts her hands into "Tiny Tim" gesture so I sing Tiny Tim, and lead into our other favorites, Twinkle Twinkle, Patty Cake, Open Shut Them.  I wonder to myself when she soon will be able to mutter the words along with the motions she is copying just like her BaBa who can do all the songs we have sung all by himself for her amusement.