Iris has kind of been the Big News around here the past 10 days so it’s easy to overlook what the other Souders kid is doing in that span. Stuff like: eliminating somewhere other than inside his diaper. Mastering the scoot bike. Skinning his elbow and not crying. Playing alone in his room for half an hour. Buying, and wearing — at his own insistence — a backpack, and shoes with laces. Taking showers not baths. Learning his first mildly colorful song (“I’m Popeye the sailor man/I live in a garbage can/I eat all the worms/and spit out the germs”). Swearing (“oh Geez!”)

He also insists I dress like him (same color shirts, mostly) which, I must say, has actually improved my sartorial presentation.

That’s just in the last two weeks. Maybe it’s the lack of one-on-one Mommy time; maybe I’m just a lazy parent who wants to make his son carry his own backpack; maybe it’s having a little sister; maybe it’s just his brain hit a sudden maturation phase coincidentally at the moment of Iris’ birth. I dunno.

Tantrums of course have taken a sharp upswing too, but I’m impressed at his occasional rationality. Sometimes we can actually reason him out of a tantrum. Not often, but it happens.

Parents with older kids always say crap like “pay close attention to the first years, they go so fast.” Those parents are right. A month ago we had a toddler and in a few more months we’ll have a preschooler. Our nights of cuddling at bedtime are limited.

Orion’s been home sick a few times lately. Because my work schedule is more flexible I’m the one who gets to stay home with him. It’s easy for me to get a little tired of this, especially as Jenny has parent conferences right now so I’m doing extra-long childcare shifts (15 hrs.) with a (slightly) sick kid, and no car.

I lack Jenny’s talent for getting Orion to fall back asleep at naptime so I generally wind up holding him and rocking in the chair while he falls asleep ... and then sitting motionless for [X] minutes while he finishes his nap. Well when this happened about an hour into O’s nap yesterday, [X] turned out to be about 180. That’s a long time to sit pretty much unmoving, upright, with 25 pounds of kid sleeping on your lap. It could get a little boring.

But when this happened yesterday I had the good fortune to receive, at that exact moment, a memory transmitted backward in time from myself in ten or twenty years. Holding my napping toddler son while my legs fall asleep seems painfully boring at the moment it’s happening, but apparently it’ll become one of my favorite memories. And someday I’ll wish more than I can imagine right now to relive that feeling for even a few minutes.

• dig
• dada
• mama
• big
• baby
• mine
• banana
• apple
• cheese
• more
• mouth
• eye
• that
• up
• down
• dog
• ball
• bubble
• no
• Bob [the Builder]
• duck
• owie
• uh oh
• hi
• bye

animal and machine sounds:

• dog panting
• cat meow
• sheep baaa
• cow moo
• duck quack
• pig snort
• fish gulp
• horse gallop
• lion roar
• peacock yelp
• bird caw
• car/motorcycle vroom
• airplane/ helicopter zoom
• beep beep

In most ways, it was like a dozen or a hundred Sundays of our lives before.

I woke up early and mowed the lawn. Then I cleaned the house: kitchen, bathrooms, sweep and mop; vacuum the stairs.

We went swimming in the morning, Jenny with her Master’s Group, myself in a lane nearby. I splashed out early to lift weights. While I was standing poolside a woman in the pool asked, “Is that your wife, the really really pregnant one?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, she’s amazing.” Eight-plus months pregnant and she lapped the others in her group.

We stopped at the grocery on the way home. I saw several former coworkers in the parking lot — they were waiting for a bus for a winery tour — and reintroduced Jenny. One of them said: “My God, you’re about to pop!” “Well, we’re a week away from our due date, so not quite yet.”

That afternoon I took a short randonee out Skyline to Rocky Point Road, returning through Hillsboro on Walker Road. Jenny and Michelle went shopping, I think.

I remember ascending the stairs to our bedroom that evening. The swimming, the weightlifting, the lawnmowing, the cleaning, the groceries, the 60 mile bike ride: typical Sunday stuff. But tiring. Climbing those steps took a lot of effort. I willed myself up to bed, thinking, “please don’t let that baby come tonight.” I barely had the energy to make it to bed; I couldn’t imagine having to get up and help bring a person into the world.

That person had other ideas.