a wondrously regular day

You know that feeling, when you are in poorly-lit, faintly depressing grocery store and you have picked the wrong line yet again, and the demoralized checker is operating in a fog, and a slow-moving woman in front of you is sorting through an impossibly fat envelope of coupons, and it seems as if the very effort required to remain standing and upright is more than you can muster? And all those People and Woman's Day magazines whose headlines you are scanning as you begin to teeter (Angelina Jolie has too many kids! Fat free cupcake recipe inside!) make the whole thing surreal and you grip your cart for support and start seriously considering the candy?

This morning with Gabriel at our sunny and cheerful Trader Joe's reversed whatever damage those sorts of shopping trips have done to me over the years. He makes me laugh. We both were feeling giddy and silly, so I indulged all kinds of antics with the little kid-sized grocery cart. I probably crossed a line when I tickled him as our very nice checker unloaded all the frozen berries and cereal and cheese and apples. He shrieked a little too loud in his adorable, unhinged way.

I put him down to pay and when I looked, there he was, cracking himself up with a stray paper bag.

Oh, it was so funny! Where's Gabriel? THERE HE IS!!! Hilarious, I tell you!

And as I was writing this, I looked over to the coffee table and saw a sweet remnant of our evening that I cannot resist showing you:

We learned all about what being a Title 1 school means, and I signed up to volunteer with the PTA, and we got to sit at little tables in the kindergarten classroom and watch Miss Burns use the Smart Board to show us all about field trips and the school library. But mostly I watched Frances sitting on the rug with her new friends, specifically two little boys named Quadir and Anthony. Gabriel joined them, looking right at home. I could not stop grinning as I looked over at Mike.

We're doing this thing. It's happening. We have a kid who writes her name on a blank name tag passed to her at Back To School Night in the elementary school gym. (By the way, doesn't it look fantastic? She has effortlessly captured something in her writing that indie rock boys from my youth attempted to replicate in the hopes of indicating their own authenticity.)

Well. Well well. Friends, I am feeling the flip side of the disorientation Frances endured yesterday morning. I am looking around and feeling grateful, elated, awed by how all this came to be.

How did we get here, anyway? Tonight, while the children sleep and Mike talks Pascal in seminar, it all feels strange and wonderful to me.