C&D made the cover of Wired today. Really, it came that way from the post office. The special cover was the result of a custom-printing promo from Wired and Xerox that tied in with a writeup about hyperlocality. About 5,000 subscribers received issues custom-printed with images that those subscribers submitted in the spring. The photo is from a few weeks after my surgery. Yes, David’s eye has some yellow on it–he had been playing with an Easter lily from a bouquet the church had delivered and got dabbed by some pollen.

I had been waiting for this issue for weeks. Nice that it arrived today.

And more of today’s news:

June 26th. Today we are eight. Eight years of marriage, eight years of being a “we,” not just a “you” and a “me.” We ate dinner at home, then sat with C&D while we talked (their gift to us). There were no dinners, no flowers, just an appreciation of what we are: eight.

In San Antonio they would have called the water hotline on me. This morning I ran the water from the faucet for C&D. They took turns holding the hose while they filled the water table, emptied it, filled buckets, emptied them, filled shovels, emptied them, and filled everything up again. I listened to their playing (very, very quietly, as busy, busy toddlers play) while I sorted clothes for the consignment store. The store accepts winter consignments next week and I am happy to have the too-small clothes out of my closet. They played for an hour. I know, bad me, I shouldn’t have had the water running so long. After all, I did work for the Conservation Resources department at the San Antonio Water System one summer. And I figured I had just wasted like 1,000,000 gallons of water. But did you catch the part where I wrote, “quietly?” Yeah. Maybe I wasn’t so wasteful, after all.

I Stink. After lunch David sat in his chair and recited his garbage truck book almost in its entirely, exactly as I read it to him. As he told the story he smiled, and when he bumped over words that he didn’t really know, he happily just kept right on going. “Dual op” became “doob op” and “gobs and gobs of gum” became “gobble gobble gum.” But no matter to somebody who doesn’t even know what “dual op” and “gobs and gobs” mean, anyway. In reciting embraced and then danced over the rhythm of the story, taking special pleasure in the words “dirty diapers,” “kitty litter,” and his favorite alliteration in the book, “puppy poo.” Here’s another alliteration for you, David: cool kid.

This evening, nothing could have made me feel prouder. To keep C&D feeling safe and cuddled, while out and about in the great wide world we carried C&D in wraps and mei tais and used the stroller only when I was alone, or when they wanted the view. Now they’re big enough to walk on their own beside us, and we haven’t worn them in a long time. Today when C&D were playing with their “babies,” I offered them each a kid-size sling. To my wonder, they knew exactly what to do.