April 3, 2016

Nothing particularly exciting about a round world

It has been weeks and weeks since I’d had a night’s sleep uninterrupted, which is part of the reason I was feeling awful last night, nursing the sore throat that seems to have been my companion forever. We’d had a busy day yesterday going to see Alligator Pie at the Toronto Symphony (having won tickets in the silent auction at Harriet’s school last June), which was brilliant fun, but I was ready for bed not long after the children were. (So tired. Yesterday I read Sarah’s Instagram post about sleeping for nine hours, and I really could have cried.)

And then…she slept. Seriously. The disturber of sleep actually slept, which doesn’t mean she didn’t wake briefly at 12:13 and again at 6:30 (asking for a tissue?), but otherwise…and we were none of us roused until 8:00. Which, seeing as I went to bed at 11pm means that I (mostly) slept for nine hours too.

And so began the greatest day, because how could such a thing not follow the miracle of nine hours sleep? Although all that sleep had left me fuzzy and totally stupid, so I was foreseeing a day of naps. Until, I left the house at 9am to take Harriet to swimming lessons, and was as invigorated by the horrible cold as I was made furious by it. (Winter in April sucks balls, it does.) But then I was awake, and there was that, and Harriet actually passed her swimming course for the first time in a million years, which was another miracle. And then there we were at 10:15 and we had no plans, not a one. Iris has stopped napping, which made the day open even wider. Plus I’d already read most of the paper (behind which I sometimes hide from my children for entire weekend mornings), so the possibilities seemed endless. And naturally, those possibilities included scones.

Many hands… making scones.

Blueberry scones, which we baked, and ate after lunch while we played Clue. And then I spent an hour or so doing work, putting up the new 49th Shelf page for this week (and its beautiful!).  Then because we have to leave the house at some point because if we don’t, everybody goes bananas and also because our library books were due, we braved the cold and trekked to Lillian H. Smith down on College. At which we found the very best books, and (another miracle!) Harriet even got an Avengers comic she hadn’t read yet. (My best books of this library haul so far are The Cats of Mrs. Calamari and What Pete Ate, by Maira Kalman, which is so so good.)

The miracles didn’t stop there though. For dinner, I made black bean corn fritters from our Anna Jones cookbook, which were guaranteed to make the children cry, I thought (because once I’d even made them cry with tuna casserole), and while Iris just ate spoonfuls of ketchup, Harriet ate three fritters and proclaimed them quite tasty even though they contained spinach. I nearly died.

And then we were finished dinner, and dessert was pears that were delectable and perfect, and Stuart’s day suffered a blip in loveliness because he had to give Iris a bath and she wouldn’t stop screaming, but Harriet and I read library books, and then Iris was calmed down and clean, and we brushed teeth, and sat down to read stories—I picked the terrifically gruesome The Juniper Tree from the Grimms books, and we had to trust it would all work out like in the last fairy tale we read where somebody got decapitated (and it did). Then we read poems from Alligator Pie and another chapter from Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and that was the last we heard of our kids.

Miracles continued: I drew a bath and it was perfect temperature, and I stayed in for ages and ages and it never got cold, and I managed to finish reading Escape Plans, by Teri Vlassopoulos, which I thought was wonderful and can’t wait to tell you all about. And now I here I am and I should have been sensible again and gone to bed, but I wanted to write all this down, to add to my collection (“Albert collected good days the way other people collected coins, or sets of postcards.”– Behind the Scenes at the Museum). Remarkable, really, none of it at all, but that’s just the point, I think, of small miracles.

It’s like Edmund said in Voyage of the Dawn Treader tonight: “There’s nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you’re there.” But sometimes it’s nice to stop and take notice.