Freitag Abend - allein

I am celebrating Friday evening, otherwise christened solemnly as “Date Night,” by keeping a vigil over my sleeping damsels while Lia attends a baby shower. Intimations of Friday evenings from my bachelor days (minus the sleeping damsels).

We are three weeks into the semester, and I have not yet lost the whole of my annual autumnal burst of educational fervor--though the controlled rapture of my engagement with the domain of administrative law has sapped a great deal of it. Julia, beginning her first year of formal schooling instead of her twenty-first, has lost none of hers.

A highlight of each day is walking Julia down to the Worthington Hooker school each morning, carrying her on my shoulders when she can get me to do it—which she can, with some facility. She’s heavier than she used to be, and my back, unused to the burden of two backpacks and a kindergartnerin, is older than it used to be. But I am richly compensated: Julia beams and giggles as she rides, exuding unbounded innocence and mirth, and occasionally the crossing guard opines warmly to Julia that, “You’ve got a good daddy.”

When we get to school Julia is distracted with a thousand new prospects and excitements and a host of friends to greet. I think she’s keenly aware and pleased when I kiss her goodbye, though, after the first day, she has not turned to watch me leave.

Julia and Eli miss one another abominably during the day. Each afternoon features a joyful reunion, in which Julia runs past Lia’s outstretched arms, throws her own little arms around Eli, lifting her little sister and spinning. Often Julia’s thrust exceeds her lift—and they all fall down. When they get home they make up for lost time with ritual quarreling.

Eli started Joy School on Wednesday. Her three comrades are all little girls—Maddie Thompson, Lia Kingery, and Savayah Knudsen. Lia [Collings] was their teacher for the first go-round. Asked what their favorite activities were, Savayah eagerly responded that she loved to “listen to lessons” on head phones. But she changed her answer to match those of her peers when all three of them answered, seriatim, “Playing dress-up!” Lia’s general reaction to the Joy School inauguration was one of wonderment at how easy Joy School is in the absence of boys.

Joy School coincides, as it happens, with my Institute class, which held its second session this week. I am teaching the “Mom’s class”—meaning that we meet Wednesday morning and the sisters with kids take turns babysitting in the nursery. Our curriculum is “Teachings of the Living Prophets,” and we are devoting one week each, in reverse order of seniority, to each member of the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency. We’ve had a wonderful turnout thus far, and the class is just wonderful. Young moms tend to be so spiritually sensitive, and to long so wholeheartedly for a pause for spiritual rejuvenation, that the class would be wonderful—indeed thus far is wonderful—in spite of me. It is an added thrill that, three weeks out of four, Lia will get to come.

Katharine passed her ten-month mark last Saturday. She frequently flashes her world-conquering smile as crawls—or rather prowls—about the apartment purpose, resolve, and a palpable fitness to command. Usually she prowls in search of Lia, paying court to the singular object of her adoration and the once-exclusive fount of her nutrition. Lia loves the attention.
Every day the bigger girls say and do a thousand innocent things that warm my heart and exercise my laughter but find no lasting place within the book and volume of my brain. Perhaps one of the delights of heaven—one of the keen joys of eternal family life—will be to read the register of all that one’s children said but that one was too distracted to savor and too mortal to remember. Perhaps, in other words, the angels who attend our little ones have a blog of their own, which it may be our life’s labor may be to endeavor to deserve hereafter to read.