ARCHIVE FOR Writing the Family

Help, my three-year-old yells, tugging on my leg. There’s a monster under there!

 

Under where? I say.

 

And then she falls to the ground laughing, having made yet another unsuspecting adult say underwear aloud.

 

Underwear is a big deal to my three-year-old – a source of both great silliness and pride – which strikes me as fascinating, given how often I have panicked dreams of standing in front of a small audience only to realize that I’d forgotten to wear pants.

It was one of those unseasonably warm evenings earlier this fall when I bit into a beet and my front tooth came loose. It was a false crown to begin with but I’d had it for so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t real.

 

My dentist replaced it with a temporary cap that turned out to be even more temporary than expected, and no matter how firmly he cemented it in place it kept coming loose.

By the time I’d get my poems back…I could see them in a new way, maybe like children getting off the bus from their first day of school.   – Kay Ryan

           

Sometimes, when we pick our poems up, they come sprinting into our arms and we can’t tell if they are overjoyed to see us or if we are rescuing them from the cruelties of the playground.

It was hot and muggy.

 

My five-year-old suggested that we cool off by heading to the library. And though I worried that she was beginning to think of our local branch not as a space filled with passports to wonders and miracles, as Libba Bray writes, but as that place with central air, I was desperate for AC.

 

Luckily, not only was the library air-conditioned, but it happened to be hosting a live animal program for kids – and maybe I was just trying to justify our outing in my mind but I couldn’t help but …

My two-year-old’s favorite word these days is doo-doo.

 

She’ll tell friendly store clerks that that is her name.

 

She’ll cry for us in middle of the night. I hongry, she’ll say when we get to her crib. What do you want to eat? we’ll ask. Doo-doo, she’ll say, before dropping back to sleep.