Jessica Ashley facebook twitter babble voices pinterest is a single mama in the city, super-savvy editor, writer, video host and shameless shoe whore.
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Thursday
Feb032011

How has it already been one year?

May-June 2010 2843 In a family that's tightly bound in laughing together, complaining about each other, over-analyzing everyone, that has been through a lot, it can be hard to consider what life will be like with one more person in the mix.

And then that person is born, and it's hard to imagine how we all were before him. 

He's a year old today, Sweet Baby J, with big brown eyes just like the ones staring out at me from my own boy, but with expressions and shrugs and determination and an energy and a way about him all his own. His sturdy body and round head and whisps of hair remind me so much of my brother as a toddler, calling up memories of our childhood that I didn't even know were stored away. But how he moves and coos and catches on quickly makes his unique mark on the family.

We visited him last week to celebrate his birthday a bit early and Christmas a bit late, to watch him lunge toward the sole candle on his cake and climb over the plastic play fort my parents sent to him, to delight over his fake sneezes and sing-song "LOVE! YOU!" echoed back over and over until he found a new and more exciting way to make us laugh.

With him, Lil E is learning how to share time and attention, toys and his grandparents, my lap and his schedule. With him, I am making promises to take these boys to their first Bieber concert, to keep secrets, to send gifts only a faraway aunt would dare buy. With him, I am watching my mother reminisce about my brother as a baby, my father become even more himself as a grandfather, my brother find his way as a father.

J-e

The circle is stretching. Sometimes that's uncomfortable and uncertain. But at the center, a baby boy has made his way in to meet us, on the verge of walking, already talking, warm and funny and bright and opinionated and bringing us so much. How does time go by and love grow so fast?

Happy birthday, Sweet Baby J! Here's to many more candles on many more cakes for many, many years to come.

 

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Wednesday
Feb022011

Someone Else's Words Wednesday: What you say before it all turns to nasty gray slush

Angel The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. 

 

You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different,

 

and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? 

 

 

 

~J.B. Priestley

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Wednesday
Feb022011

The weather's great. Wish you were here

Blizzard3
This child, who I never thought would know the meaning of the term "snow day"  -- the one who loves being pummeled by snowballs as much as he loves devising his own sneak snow-attack, the one squeals to put on snow pants and cares less about the hot chocolate than making snow angels until his extremities are numb -- bounded through the blizzard this afternoon.

Blizzard6
We were breathless, climbing mounds of shoveled snow and leaping off park equipment into waist-high banks. We laughed. We flicked flakes off of each other's eyelashes while our pants and gloves were caked in pieces of ice. Our noses ran.

Blizzard5
We spied the deepest wells and highest drifts we could see on our block and raced to see who could fall into them first.

Blizzard10

And when our fingers felt frozen and the scarves and gloves and boots and down coats were drenched, we went inside and crashed hard into a deep, deep 45-minute sleep.

Blizzard4
Our neighborhood is still piled high with snow, the streets still quiet and mostly impassable. Inside, tea mugs and Legos and granola bar wrappers and damp socks are strewn about, the other marks of a snow day that could take longer than the snow plows to clean up.

  Blizzard9
Hours of boring and antsy and making time pass were all worth that hour outside, though. And the bliss that only comes when there is nothing but a stretch of fresh white snow and an afternoon to plow through it with footprints and snowballs and straight-edged ambitious shovel marks, the rare snow day for a city kid -- that's worth its weight in cold.

Blizzard8


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