The best kind of job

These days my life is charmingly low-key. I know that I have a toddler and a newborn, so technically life shouldn’t be so low-key. My days revolve around nap schedules and scheduling park play dates, a far cry from my fall schedule with papers to grade and essays to edit and weekend marathon training. I know that I am insanely lucky to be blessed with not one, but two amazingly calm and peaceful baby girls. Perhaps this is my reward for making it through nine grueling months of all-day nausea and endless nights of insomnia or maybe my payback will come when the girls rebel at sixteen, dying their hair purple and slamming their bedroom doors. But, this new momma of two is somehow clocking in 6 hours of consistent nightly sleep before the first feeding (and then another three or four hours…please don’t hate me.)

On Saturday, the weather was cool and overcast and with the threat of rain for the upcoming week, we decided to make it an outdoor kind of day with a trip to the farmer’s market and to the park. (It pains me a bit to admit that I feel that I have arrived at middle-aged suburbia where we watched a mid-morning little league game of COMPLETE STRANGERS. Eh, it’s baseball; we had fun nonetheless.) Daisy circled the park on her new trike, Casey chased squirrels and Lily napped against my chest in a makeshift sling. It was then, watching my loves, that I realized with startling clarity just how much I love motherhood.

Later that afternoon Daisy and I went outside to plant a few herbs in the garden. After losing interest in planting the mint, she begged me to blow bubbles. At first, I feigned interest wanting to finish before it got too late, but after watching her face light up with each bubble she “caught” my heart skipped a beat. I sat down, and for thirty minutes I blew bubble after bubble watching her squeal with delight, running to catch the bubbles and watching them with the upmost fascination. A few minutes later, she reached over for an unprompted hug, kiss and a “thank-you momma” making my heart melt before shouting “more bubbles momma, MORE BUBBLES!”

And I thought back to all that time I’d spent as a teenager, wondering what career I wanted to have come sharply into focus: the kind of job where I spent my afternoons naming zoo animals in French, nursing babies, and blowing bubbles. You don’t know it then, of course, or at least you aren’t really able to explain it. But, it’s the perfect job for me, I’m telling you.