Baby blue
Feathery satiny softer than silk
Creamily porcelain whiter than milk
Bubbling sparkling droplets of dew
Giggling babbling brookily blue
Carefully clumsily tumbling down
Fumbling bumbling down to the ground
Battered and scattered and prickly haired
Bruised and confused, little kitteny scared
Clambering scrambling wobbling tall
Shakily trying his best not to fall
One-step and two-step and tickly there
Up again, try again conquer the stair.
“My patience, resolutions and beliefs are tested to the limits – sometimes daily.”*
Right at this moment one of my challenges is the constant, tuneless whistling from my elder son. When my boys were babies it was getting them to sleep or trying to figure out why they were crying. On any given day now, it might be squabbling, fighting, teasing, screaming, shouting or rudeness. Who’d be a parent? We might well question ourselves after the event, but we can’t very well put them back! Just how we find those inner resources, how we constantly demand more of ourselves, how we keep marching up that hill with a smile on our face and gladness in our heart at the sight of our ‘babies’ is one of life’s mysteries.
* © from Being Mummy by Anne‑marie Taplin published April 2007