A birthday and a shaved cat

My baby boy turned 12 this week. We had a tiny party with a tiny piñata and an enormous 4-layer cake.

Leif had a scary birth. His cord was wrapped tightly three times around his neck, he was blue and limp when they plopped him on my chest before grabbing him away for resuscitation. The seconds of silence between when they took him and when I saw his little fist raise up above the bassinet were some of the longest of my life. When he finally made a small noise they brought him back to me, and with his first big cry the oxygen blushed through his entire body, turning him from floppy and blue to firm and pink in a second. It was amazing. Leif is funny, he bakes, he draws comics about farts, his conversation is full of sound effects and hand gestures. He’s an easy guy to hang out with. I love him so much.

While we were having cake, Mjolnir made it through surgery. He is comfortably back at home enjoying his painkillers. Billy has decided that his shaved flesh feels good on the teeth, and keeps trying to chew him like a corncob when we're not looking.

At work, nobody has tried to fight or cough on me, but I’ve gotten comfortable yelling across the library for computer users to pull their masks up over their noses. So far nobody has needed to be yelled at by a librarian more than once. We registered the kids for the online curriculum just in time for in-person school to be cancelled entirely as our island’s cases shot up from 20/day to 200/day in two weeks. Infected bus drivers, McDonalds workers, Costco employees, firefighters, government offices. The parks and beaches have been shut down again, inter-island travel has been restricted, the hospitals warned they were running short of ICU beds until 6 people died in them this week. It’s not a great scene out there.

But we’re fine in our house, with cake and cats. The kids are a bit stir crazy, I accidentally blew up the stove and started a little bit of an electrical fire, and the man has gotten weird about lifting weights and demolishing the fish pond, but things are going okay.

I'm going to paint a landscape this week. I AM.