Berries, bones, and birch bark

Rabbit, rabbit. I had a lengthy and productive day. It consistently primarily of childcare and errands.

With the exception of two discrete hours about twelve hours apart, I've been awake for something over thirty-six hours now. My mother hurt her shoulder last night and temporarily disabled her left arm, so I spent the day in Lexington, providing emergency help with my nearly year-old niece. Charlotte's parents both work full day schedules, so she gets handed off to her grandmother at six in the morning. So at six in the morning, I was awake. And by seven o'clock, I was in my parents' kitchen, helping persuade puréed prunes into a cranky baby. (She ate every spoonful my mother offered her once I started pretending to threaten her prunes: I lurked and meowed and batted with a paw and pretended to nip at the spoon as it went by and all of a sudden she became very protective and ate every bite. It was both adorable and incredible. We have determined the Prune Cat stands in the same relationship to unwanted stewed fruit as the Zucchini Bird to childhood summer squash—it really shouldn't work, but psychology is amazing.) I carried Charlotte. I rocked her. I changed her. I put her in and out of her crib. I watched her play with colored plastic rings and bowls and followed her as she scooted across the floor with lizardlike speed and and told her to be gentle with the jade plant and the Christmas cactus. I watched her stand unaided, twice, for about ten to fifteen seconds before she had to grab for the nearest furniture. I sang to her. My mother read to her, so that I could get some of my non-child-related work done. And I did about five loads of laundry, which was also unrelated to Charlotte, but extremely domestic.

Later in the afternoon, there were trips to: the bank, the post office, two different grocery stores, a deli, a pharmacy; and several calls to doctors. Around five in the evening, I fell over stunned for an hour and dreamed of a cathedral haunted by foxes. There appeared to be about eight of them, but the rest were all reflections of the central pair; one looked like a dark, sauntering man and the other like a pale-haired woman in a billow of bright, bell-like skirts, but the reflections were changeable and so I have no reason to believe the originals were not also. At one point a giraffe went slowly through the nave with a fox's head on the end of its long, shadow-branching neck, like a paper mask on a puppet, and that was so surreal, it woke me up if the text from derspatchel didn't. I had re-read Laurence Yep's The Ghost Fox (1994) before falling asleep, but its foxes are nothing like that. I finished the laundry and came home to have dinner with my husband and the cats who had missed me so much that Hestia came up purring as I opened my computer.

(Reminder! runedrum's Storyfox: A Database of Vulpine Science Fiction and Fantasy is still going strong! Catalogue your fox poems, stories, novels, comics, films, and other brush-tailed narratives. Chances are a really awesome thesis will result.)

It turns out that if I'm awake for enough of the day, I actually eat more than one meal and some rice cakes. More days should begin with making a goat cheddar omelet, feature a salad with artichokes, mushrooms, and feta around the midpoint, and end with splitting the last of the homemade apple pie. Could totally skip the part where the cats destroy eight out of the dozen eggs that Rob painstakingly hard-boiled, along with our largest glass baking dish, but I suppose technically they never will be able to do that again, linear time being currently as it is. Also, they have lost counter privileges forever.

I like my niece.