Dispatches from the Big Person Who Carries Everything.

We fell in a pond. For real. We’ve ‘fallen’ into ponds up to our kneecaps before, but this time we topple-crash-plunged into one. I was balancing on the bank and Aaron had his arms coiled around my leg so that he could lean out over the water… and he leaned too far. Before I knew what had happened, I was lying on my back in water up to my chin, my arms somehow already hoisting Aaron (who had been totally submerged) out without any conscious instruction from my brain. No harm done, but we were unbelievably muddy. He was really mad at me at first, forgetting that it was his lunge that landed us in the water. I apologized and his anger wore off in minutes. By the time we walked back home, he was laughing and saying, “I didn’t g’spect that to happen!” Our quest for dry clothes was thwarted by the discovery that the garage door opener, which had been in my pocket, no longer worked—we were locked out. We called my brother from the neighbor’s house and he brought me dry clothes and somehow managed to fix the garage door opener (I had tried airing out the battery and replacing it, but that garage door opener required a man’s attention, apparently, since he did the same thing I had done and it worked). We hosed off most of the mud and then Aaron took a long bubble bath and we played sharks and pirates. After awhile, the blue plastic shark (voice by Sarah, a monotone modeled after Martin the Martian) decided he wanted to gobble up Aaron’s feet instead of Duplo pirates. This was very funny. “Pirates! Yuck. Pirates taste like Tupperware. Urgh. But you! You taste like all the yummy things you ate today… like Mac n’ Cheese. And Cocoa Puffs. And strawberry popsicles.”

Did you know a blue whale is longer than a tennis court?




At some point, I stopped being The Little Person Who Does Everything and became The Big Person Who Carries Everything instead. Aaron and I ran around in the sun all day and my big purse dragged with Juicy Juice boxes, garage door openers, fresh size 3T Iron Man underpants, Ritz crackers and Cheerios in small baggies, Aveeno Baby sunscreen, library books, AND irregular leaves, seed pods, Queen Anne’s Lace heads, stand-out rocks, rusty nails picked up on the playground by Aaron The Living/Breathing Metal Detector. I came home to find a willow twig stuffed in the back pocket of my jean shorts, and I sure didn’t plant that there. I don’t mind, exactly, but it makes me feel old every time Aaron presses something into my hands and says “You carry it!” before he runs off to do something more fun that requires two hands and a light, free body.