Dear Reese,
We go to the library this morning and enjoy the children’s room to ourselves for forty minutes. You do laps exploring all the toys and I clean up the train table and build tracks from scratch. I’m engrossed and ridiculously proud of how I manage to connect the pieces. Your Uncle Wes and I used to play with Thomas the Tank Engine trains all the time as kids. If we had a chest of tracks, I could do this all day. (We do still, in the barn at the cottage — someday we’ll pull them out.)
It’s a rainy afternoon. MorMor pulls out boxes of stamps and scrapbooks she made for me and Wes. There’s a picture of me at 12 months in mine, and MorMor remarks that you look like me. She’s not wrong.
She also finds a story that Wes wrote as a young kid that has us laughing. “Thunderbolt Johnny”, I think it was called. It reads like a D&D adventure with Wes’s classic wit that you’ll come to know.
One funny thing you do today — on your butt on the kitchen floor, you spin in circles, around and around, making yourself dizzy (or maybe just making us dizzy watching you).
After dinner, I pull you around the cottage on a beach towel. First, you’re in a cardboard box on top of the towel, but we lose the box along the way. You lie flat on your stomach instead. You rest your head while I pull you around like you’re getting a massage.
This evening, when I read you a story, you stop me by saying and signing “all done” and then put your hand on the side of your head and tilt it, signing that you want to sleep. I dutifully obey, and you go happily, easily to bed.
All of this communication is a gift.
Love,
Mama