Friday, August 31, 2007

Post Office



















A couple of horribly (yet delightfully) blurry images of
Dear Alex in motion on her new favorite thing.


We live a couple of blocks from a really grand post office - the kind of thing the government built when mail was king. A vast space with marble floors, high ceilings, banks of P.O. boxes and best of all a two-story open lobby with working escalators. It's a public space, and of late Dear Alex and I have been going to the post office every day to go in the "door that goes round and round and ride the moving steps up and down. okay!" I can't take credit for discovering this marvel - Beautiful Wife took her here on a real postal-related mission, and it kind of blew Dear Alex's mind - I'm not sure what it is, but she dearly loves her "eskalaterrr - moving stepss". Of course writing it does no justice to the delight of listening to her get the word "escalator" out. A couple of days ago, Dear Alex came to me when I got home from work to ask if we could go outside and walk to the post office, go in the revolving door and ride the escalators up and down. It made me stop for a moment - she'd made a pretty completely thought out plan of what she wanted to do, found the right words, and asked to do it. I'm impressed, and more than happy to oblige. This is the stuff I live for right now - being able to understand what Dear Alex wants, and give it to her. I'm quite sure that there will be a time when those requests will be more complicated and less charming, but for now it's a lot of fun.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Happy birthday Dear Alex











...Happy birthday to you. Two years ago today Dear Alex came into the world a week or so early and perfect. The world is a much happier place with the kid in it, and it's enough to note that she seems to be having a lot of fun.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pictures of Alex













It's been a while since I've had the will or inclination to write about Dear Alex - It's summertime and the living's been busy - not so easy, and there's been so much to do both in work and in life that it's been very hard to find that small quiet place that it takes to wax philosophical about being a daddy and the awesome responsibility of marshalling the force that Dear Alex has become - so instead, I take pictures.

In the way back time before there was Dear Alex (and even before Beautiful Wife) I took a lot of pictures, pictures by the thousands from the early days of digital photography - I have a box somewhere of hundreds of floppy disks from my first (and second) Sony Mavicas and more from smaller, sleeker, faster cameras that came next - I pride myself on being able to not only identify the place and time and even my state of mind when I took the picture - I'm mostly a visual person, and it does work - mostly. BW used to give me a hard time about the pictures, my "art director shots" as she rightfully called them - and I certainly did take a lot of random pictures, mostly of things that caught my eye, or in some way reminded me that I should always remember to look - because in life it's rare that we ever pass the same way twice.
Dear Alex has given me the perfect excuse ( and BW no longer coments on the ever-present camera) to take pictures madly, exuberantly, and without a care as to what it looks like. Secretly though, I take pictures in the hope that I'll remember the little things and important things in equal measure as Dear Alex becomes less cute and novel and becomes more and more a child, and that magic and wonder is lost to the day-to-day realities of pre-school and education and potty training and...

So, at least once a week - even whan I haven't had a word to say, I've been adding pictures regularly to the flickr photoset (hoping, of course, that each one will be worth a thousand words), and I'm hoping that really does capture what's new and important to daddy and Dear Alex - the analysis and philosophy will have to come later, as there's way too much to do before the summer's over to think about it too hard.