for one-on-one time alone with roo. because he still nurses so often, roo comes to work with me full-time. which means that for 37 and one-half hours a week, he is not just my child but the very youngest of three young children. we're different there, he and i: he needs me less then he does at home, is easily entertained by the antics of the other kids. but i am also less available to him, more businesslike: i feel like i spend whole days doing nothing but chanting the words please be patient/just a minute as i struggle to meet the needs of everyone who needs me. 

i continue to work not just because i need to work but because i believe that, as a likely only child, it will be good for roo to grow up alongside c. and t., whose parents not only employ me but are good friends as well. i believe it will be good for him to have a community of near-parents and near-siblings.

still, i can't help but feel that he gets short shrift in this situation, content as he is much of the time to bounce on his little diapered behind on the carpet, shrieking in his excited pterodactyl way over everything and nothing while he waits to eat or be picked up. i feel, so often, that he deserves better than this, than me, than this frazzled, easily-distracted mother. 

but then there are weekends like this one: these endless days when audra's working and there's nothing for roo and me to do but nurse for leisurely hours on end and take long walks to nowhere and grin at each other, and i feel so glad to have the energy to lavish attention on him, to bask in the glow of his affection for me.

*

for a most septemberish discovery: apple trees! secret trees, right out in the open. while washing the dishes this morning (well, okay: while contemplating washing the dishes) i saw, out our kitchen window, one of our friendly neighborhood groundhogs (the woodcharles family, we call them---nick and nora and their many fuzzy, nameless offspring) sitting on his haunches, nibbling away at piece of fruit. he turned it round and round again in his tiny paws. it looked like an apple, but it couldn't be. unless...yes! feet from the stone wall we share with our neighbors is a skinny, gnarled apple tree, studded with ripe, misshapen fruit. and then, on a walk, we take the long way home by the pond and there, where it's always been but where i never noticed it, is another tree---this one with even more fruit, so much that dozens of apples have dropped to the ground and are rotting there, sending their boozy, delicious scent of decay into the air.