Day 1102 (Y3D8)

Dear mommy,

We are really enjoying school and without swim lessons now, we can thoroughly enjoy soccer shots, endangered animal learning and still run around like crazy girls before falling asleep.  Tonight Ms. Stancey came to take care of us while mema, auntie jess and daddy went for a run.

We have really been enjoying the counting/search book that our friend LL and her parents got for us.  We fight over who gets to find monkeys, bunnies, seals and wormies.  Thanks LL!

Daddy was very moved by a recent article in the New Yorker about Edward Hirsch called A masterpiece of sorrow, a contemplative look at a contemplative man facing loss.  Daddy has been poring through the literature of loss, perhaps as a way of coping, but looking for insight in a process so incomprehensible as to render his search into a wholly real simulacrum of some kafka-esque character.  Still he found some delicious nuggets including, from the upcoming elegiac Gabriel:

I did not know the work of mourning 

Is like carrying a bag of cement

Up a mountain at night

The mountaintop is not in sight

Because there is no mountaintop

Poor Sisyphus grief

I did not know I would struggle

Through a ragged underbrush

Without an upward path

...

Look closely and you will see

Almost everyone carrying bags

Of cement on their shoulders

That’s why it takes courage

To get out of bed in the morning

And climb into the day.

We thought we would share that with you!  We love you and miss you mommy!

here is our day:

Friends from around the world:

Amazing Picture of mommy from 1998.  Thanks aunt mandy!