If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a little announcement yesterday, that Sam was "walking." I use that term as loosely as I used "crawling" back when Sam was first writhing his way across the carpet with anguished cries of exertion. Sam has taken three unassisted steps, but those steps were as wobbly as those of a rum-soaked sailor, and they ended, dramatically, with a face-plant into the carpet. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Sam is filled with exuberant glee at the thought of forward movement on his own feet, so much so that that very glee turns him into a maniac with no thought to balance. Shrieking with joy, Sam falls over--that's how walking goes most of the time. But still: January 28, 2010, Sam walks. Ink pen + baby book.

In other news, boy, parenting is an exercise in extremes, isn't it? My children enchant me and exasperate me in equal parts. They are delights; they are horrors. We go from "Oh, look how adorable Sam/Charlotte is" to "PLEASE for the love of all that is holy and right STOP THAT INCESSANT WHINING" more rapidly than I would have thought possible, pre-kid. It's all "mama mama mama mama LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME mama mama mama mama" until I feel like my brain is going to liquify itself and run out my ears just for the chance to escape, and then suddenly it's bedtime, and I walk out of their rooms with an audible sigh of relief, sit down at my computer, and find that I want nothing more than to wake them up and hold and kiss them, or at least squeeze their fat little thighs just a little.

Nine nights out of ten, Jeff and I go to bed recounting little anecdotes about the children that the other missed during the day--funny things Charlotte said, crazy stuff Sam did, etc. And then the night speeds by like a time-elapse film and then it's (barely) morning and we start over again with the "mama mama mama mama" and the seemingly endless cycle of feeding and clothing and washing and playing and reading.

It all seems so monotonous and yet so unbelievably vivid and varied, too. How can these children be the same children we had a year ago? Three months ago, even?

With apologies to Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. (They are large, they contain multitudes.)

They do. They contain everything, express everything, surround and hold and promise everything.