New Day Dawning

We went out to dinner tonight, just the three of us. Restaurants aren't always relaxing these days, MZ will eat in her highchair but once the meal is over she wants to check the whole place out, and she's always angling for a tour of the kitchen. But tonight we needed a break from the cook-eat-clean routine, which is so much more time-sensitive now that there are three of us.

MZ occupied herself throughout the entire dinner with a bowl of miso soup and a Chinese soup spoon. She fed herself. Yes, she fed her bib and her highchair, too, but she fed herself soup for at least 15 continuous minutes. We were both startled -- physically startled -- when we realized that we'd completed a single, linear conversation in her presence-- the first since she became mobile, I'd guess. It was bliss, rejuvunating, a light at the end of a tunnel of fragmented conversations and fraught end-of-day nerves.

Yes, she had discarded the unwanted tofu cubes on the floor, but that seemed a small price to pay for a little adult conversation in the presence of our adored child.