Boy Oh Boyers

I've been in Colorado all week for a computational linguistics conference. The city is beautiful: the snow-capped mountains are the backdrop of even the most mundane scene, turning the view of storefronts into the view of something beautiful. It rained a lot this week, but today saw moments of sunshine and perfect temperatures. I've been immersed in thinking about technical things, pushing my mind to grasp the presentations of people who were presenting months or years of research in a twenty minute time window. Add that to the challenge of the change in elevation here compared to back home, and I've been a tired cookie. Strange thing is, I'm having a lot of trouble going to sleep at night. It's mostly because I miss my wonderful guys. I know Tom and Rowan are having fun with Meemaw visiting, but of course I wish I were there with all of them. What has kept me awake, I think, are thoughts about something a little deeper than being away from Rowan: these thoughts are about how we'll go away from each other by design.

It's not exactly a grand revelation that babies gain independence beginning the day they're born and continuing on through their childhood years. It starts with being able to lift their heads up, and turns into being able to move around on their own and have opinions about things. In a simply physical sense they obviously get farther from their moms; for their embryonic months they were never separated from the essence of her body, and when they're born they become so. They join back again during all those wonderful hours of holding, nursing, rocking...but the frequency and duration of those times decreases as the frequency of other wonderful things like laughing, running, splashing, and talking increase. It's a growing level of "away" that simply has to be, and actually although I can see how it would be easy to do, I don't lament it. Instead, I take pause and think about it with a sense of wonder. It especially hits home when I've been immersed in serious technical conversation with colleagues and then one of them sees the desktop of my computer screen and says, "Aaaw! How old is he?" It hits me all at once that he is mine, that I am away from him, that he's doing something now without me and probably having a great time, and that every second I spend thinking about it, he is becoming more and more his own person. He's not even two years old, but he's this amazing person. He's my son, and he is my friend.

The view from here is nice indeed. I hope you can come sometime.

Well, it's been a seriously busy couple of weeks since I got back from Colorado. Shortly after I returned, Gram visited for a week while I prepared a rather sizeable writeup that serves as my dissertation proposal document. Then, just yesterday, I gave the presentation to accompany that document. It was a pass or fail kind of event. As the rite of passage that it is, the whole experience was pretty torturous. Nonetheless, I did pass, and that means the plan is that a little less than one year from now I'll defend my dissertation. That's pretty exciting news.

Last night Rowan started coughing a lot during the night, and when he woke up this morning it was clear he has caught the little nasal virus that is going around lately. He was a seriously snotty guy today; I started to feel guilty for wiping his nose so much, but he really didn't mind slathering goo all over everything so I had to intervene a lot. I probably need to scrub the couches, coffee table, carpet, fireplace, dog...

I convinced him to let me wipe his nose by letting him take care of his wiggle cow, who we pretended had a runny nose too! So, lest you overlook it, there's a tissue in Rowan's hand and he's using it to take care of that precious cow. ;-)