In my head lately

Things I have been thinking lately, in no particular order:

I can run 13 miles. I know this because I did it twice. The first time was fairly hellish. The second time, yesterday, was much better. I’m excited to do this with thousands of my closest friends in exactly two weeks (!!).

What if, when the baby comes, the person who picks him up from child care is also the first person home and has to walk the dog? How do we do both in a fast and efficient manner, where no one cries or has an accident on the rug?

Also, what kind of child care should we use?

Apparently we’re going to Italy in less than four weeks. Apparently one should make some loose itineraries when fortunate enough to have three days in Rome, five days on the Amalfi Coast, and four days in Tuscany. One now has plans for the long Labor Day weekend…

Throwing a party for 40 people on your rooftop deck is stressful, but realizing you have 40 friends who want to spend a Saturday night on your roof is pretty darn awesome.

Sometimes, when I’m watching TV at night, I look to the entrance of the hallway off the living room, and I see a tiny little boy standing there in a sleeper, holding a blanket and sucking his thumb.

I suspect adopting a baby from Korea is going to bring some really good new friendships into our lives.

I have seen the Chicago skyline from the north many, many times, but it never gets less breathtaking, especially the first time it’s approached on foot, after running six miles south on the lakefront path. Turning the bend around the domino tables, and pow—I actually consider it a kind of reward.

Stella actually understands when it’s the weekend and that that should equal a ride to the dog beach. She follows us around the house, and she starts dancing in place and wagging her pointy hound head if I change my clothes. Apparently something is working inside that golf-ball-sized brain.

I do not approve of darkness at 8 p.m.

If I worked at an adoption agency in Seoul and my responsibility was to match infants with their parents, what kinds of photos of those parents would I want to see?

Where is the child who will become our child right this very second?

******

This past week, we went to an outdoor concert at Millennium Park downtown. David Gray and Ray Lamontagne—oh yes, we were excited. We packed our picnic basket (including a clandestine bottle of wine under the cloth napkins), hoisted up our camping chairs, and I grabbed a light scarf because it was unseasonably cool, daytime highs in the 70s. We claimed a patch of turf close to the stage and proceeded to enjoy a really fabulous show, while the sun set behind the skyline and couples held hands and swayed together and someone, somewhere, smoked some pot.

Ray played my favorite song of his, a sad, quiet one with a violin called “Jolene.” There is this plaintive line that just pulls at the proverbial heartstrings, that I always sing along to: “Still don’t know what love means.” And so I sang along to it in my camping chair, with my plastic cup of cabernet, and suddenly it had a new meaning. I thought that it was very true, that there is a type of love that I don’t know yet, the meaning and experience of which I don’t understand. I know love, but not in all its manifestations, not yet. We are so, so incredibly on the cusp, sometimes I’m in awe of it.