Meyer Lemons and Baby Days

I burned through a bag of meyer lemons yesterday (lemon piccata and whisky sours), and today my mom, knowing how even the smell brightens my spirits, appeared with another big bag (thank you*)!  I have used them constantly: lemon-honey tea, salad dressing, I even squeezed one in my Corona.  Meyer lemon ricotta cookies are baking now.

It's snowing here.  The flakes are tiny and dusty, but their threat closed schools at noon today, and for the past hour, the kids have been in the backyard "sledding."  Our "hill" is about four feet tall and though there is some snow on it, for the most part it's a tangle of roots and dirt.  Their jeans and coats are streaked with mud.  They've been at it for at least an hour.

Maeve and I are sitting on the floor.  She is thumping her legs and squealing, smiling big gummy bashful smiles.  Hair, so unlike her sister's hair at this age (pony tail!), dusts her head and is rubbed a bit bald in the back.  When I carry her, Maeve holds my arm tightly like a koala, which I'm choosing to interpret as intense adoration.

Despite the fact that I called the Hoag Baby Line (at the hospital in Newport Beach where Silas and Eden and notably not Maeve were born) with lots of questions after Maeve was born; that I called the pediatrician to tell her Maeve's skull was not fused together and her brain was probably not developing; that I race home to put her in her bed rather than fostering the oh-so-flexible-baby-#3-on-the-go; I don't feel that same wild sense of juggling, the fear that one person will smack the ground as I struggle to hurl the other one in the air, that I felt when Eden was this age.  Instead, we are all moving together, more like the insides of a clock.  Together, somehow, we make the hands move.  I don't think our clock ever really keeps time, but it ticks, which feels daily like a small (and large) miracle.  And there are the days when we get all mucked up, like the white rabbit's pocket watch when the Mad Hatter slathers it with butter and jam and the whole thing goes berserk and explodes -- but then we carry on again.

This week was a hard one with ghosty feelings of overwhelm and gloom that I remember from days before, but the only option -- be it a battle or not -- was to carry on (the keep calm part would have been nice too, but no such luck).

A bit of carrying on: