44

 I'm waiting by the door for you to come home from school, which has become my habit since the fall. I don't always know that I am doing it, but then I find myself skulking around there, peering out the door looking for the car.

We have a new SUV, which you think we got for you because it is a big red truck (your very favorite), but which we actually got for you so it was easier to get you in and out, and will be easier to carry grandparents and your expanding array of stuff as you get bigger and bigger and bigger. Today I am 44 years old. This day last year we were freshly hiding out in a pandemic and also you ate your very first avocado puree. The pictures of you show you smiling, covered in green goo, and then trying to share it with Milo. You are still my little baby. Now you are almost a boy, and you run and play and investigate and take things apart and continue to stubbornly refuse to speak only in zombie grunts even though we can tell that you understand virtually everything that is said to you. I have to watch myself and try to stop swearing so much. Mama cusses like a sailor, Succotash.

My parents arrive next week, and they will be seeing you for the first time since we left Texas last March, and fled straight into pandemic. There's a scene in the 1993 film Jurassic Park - a classic now - in which a girl and her brother are in an SUV that's attacked by a Tyrannasaurus, and their car gets flung into a tree, and then they have to escape the SUV and it starts to fall down the tree after them, and they have to climb quickly and with focus down the tree to escape, and it's just one thing after another after another and when the girl finally gets out of the tree and is safe on the ground she throws her head back and screams at the top of her lungs. I remarked to your dad that I suspect I will do something similar, when I get the vaccine finally, whenever that should be, after coping with my head down and keeping you safe and growing and cared for and doing my job after this year is over.