Missing my baby daughter

Cary and Dean left this morning, and as usual, took their sweet time going down the front stairs, stopping to play with the toys on the porch, touch the pumpkin, meddle with the fall decorations, refuse to have their hands held, etc.

The good news is, all that dawdling gave Clair time to limp-crawl all the way over to the front door, where she got to laugh and shriek, as she watched her big brothers go.

When Sara joined her at the door, I had to break out the iPhone and snap a pic:

Everybody altogether now: Awwwwww!

I love this picture because I have lately been feeling quite sad about how little time I get to spend with my baby daughter. It's the same ole story of being a working Mom and too busy, blah blah blah, but it's made worse by the fact that I have TWO very demanding 2-year-olds who completely set the agenda for what little time I do have in the mornings and evenings. To be honest, most of the one-on-one time I get with Clair is when I'm feeding her at night, just before she drifts off to sleep. It's sweet time, for sure, but it sucks that it's so short.

So looking at this reminds me that -- although she will all-too-soon join the boys on the way out the door every morning -- for now, she is on the inside of this screen door.

And therefore, for a little while longer, she is still my baby. And I WILL find more time for her. I will.

Parenting poetry

Lester and I love to learn. In fact, one of the things I love most about my husband is that he tries to learn something new everyday. He reads three different newspapers, pretty much cover to cover (Washington Post, New York Times, Baltimore Sun) and sends me articles he thinks would interest me. Later, when we have time (ha!) we talk about them. It's like newspaper-club, instead of bookclub. And it's really how I stay up-to-date on most of the world's news.

So when we learned that a few top colleges (Princeton, Stanford, U of Michigan and Penn) joined to create an online university that offers courses for free, we jumped at the chance to be a part of it.
 
Through Coursera, you get the chance to study from great professors through video lectures, and collaboration with thousands of others who have signed up. For FREE. How cool is that?


So we, both being writers (at one time in our lives anyway), signed up for a 10-week course on Modern and Contemporary Poetry, by a Penn professor. We'll look at such writers as William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Gertrude Stein, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. And we'll get to write some poetry of our own.

It starts in September. I'm excited!! Did I mention this is all FREE?

Anyway, to practice, I thought I'd write a little pedestrian piece of poetry about how quickly my boys are growing up and away from me. I never was much of a poet, truthfully. But maybe this class will help me get better.

Storm Door

Music blares from cars outside; children hang, shriek and laugh.

My boys are rapt. 

All I want to do is keep them safe, innocent

With me.

How long will this storm door hold them?