If I was asking—and I’m not, because I totally can’t handle the answer—would you say that I have a baby and a toddler, or two toddlers? Or something else entirely—maybe a toddler and (gasp!) a preschooler? I continue to think of myself as having a baby and a toddler, but I am beginning to suspect that that may no longer be accurate. Strictly speaking.

Okay, I’m asking. What do you think?

For reference: Sadie just turned one and is walking, Audrey is two and a half. And also walking. But that probably goes without saying.

Today is Sadie Jane’s birthday; today she is one year old. We’re quite surprised by this around here. I haven’t packed away the baby clothes yet, I haven’t ordered toddler size cloth diapers, I don’t have a real high chair for her. We still call her the baby. (What’s that? No, it’s not at all bad for her psychological development, thanks for asking.)

My mother dropped off some new clothes for her this week. “Will Sadie fit a euro size 80?” she asked. (Euro sizes are based on how tall the child is, in centimeters.)

“I think she’s, like, a 60 still,” I said.

Yeah, the 80 fits just fine.

Sadie does not care that we parents refuse to notice the passing of time; she continues to grow and develop skills anyway. She has teeth. She climbs. She walks. She talks. (And by “talks,” I mean she says “uh-oh,” at humorous intervals, and “no!” when angry or injured or when she means no. She is also capable of saying “dada,” “mama,” and “wow,” but those all get far less airtime.) She eats, sort of, a very little bit.

I try not to think about how her babyness is slipping away; how every day she gets a bit bigger, stronger, more independent, more practiced. How we can never get back those first days of squeaky cries and tiny balled fists, of watching her sleep swaddled up, no bigger than a loaf of bread. Not thinking about any of that. Not thinking about how she will one day be school aged, like Abigail and Owen; not thinking about all the firsts yet to come that will slip into the past as surely as did the days of milk-stained sleepers.

Because I can only focus on one thing or the other: I can be melancholy over what’s gone before, or I can participate in the now. Today I choose the now. Today Sadie’s brother and sisters gave her presents they had carefully chosen and wrapped up themselves; today she clapped and giggled and grinned when we sang Happy Birthday, dear Sadie. Today she drank from her new sippy-lidded water bottle, and yes, today we had to go back to the store to get a matching one for Audrey, who cried bitter tears because Sadie’s water bottle has a sippy lid and all our others only have sport tops (which, okay, are hard to work when you’re only two). Today was a good day. A full day. A very normal day.

And tomorrow we will go to a costume party (her first costume party!) and she will wear a costume (her first costume!). The milestones, they just keep piling up.

Ahhh, thank you all. I’m so glad to hear that I’m not the only one who needs Velcro pants! (Velcro pants: Nothing to do with my propensity to eat cake for breakfast. It’s in the comments, you’ll see.)

I did finally come up with really important things to do. 1: Email Dane: Do you think Sadie’s big enough to sit in one of these? 2: Update kids’ Hintbug list for Christmas. (Haven’t actually done this yet.) 3: Check recent polls and other political news, because why not spend time and energy reading numbers that will change twelve hours from now? 4: Email Dane again: The broccoli, it is watching you.

Clearly, I live a very busy life.

It’s quiet time at my house; the kids are asleep/reading/listening to audiobooks/laying down awake. I’m staring at my computer screen. I would swear there are dozen things I need to “do” on the computer, but I can’t think of a single one. Not any.

And then, you know what’s going to happen? Sadie will wake up, everybody else will get up, I’ll close the laptop, and then my head will suddenly be filled with virtual errands: Email so-and-so! Check if whatchamacallits are on sale! Update something or other on the blog! Shop for cute shoes! (Wait, shoes? What?)

And then I won’t be able to find a pen, so I won’t make a list, and tonight after the kids go to bed I’ll sit and stare blankly at the screen again, willing my mind to conjure up even one thing I intended to do. Sigh.

Dane brought home a pie, y’all. A pie. The kids are already in bed, so that pie is MINE.

I’m going to keep working on my links page while I eat it. If I’ve missed your blog, or messed up the link somehow, or put you in entirely the wrong category, or if I linked to you and you don’t want a link, just let me know, okay? I’ll fix it.

I’m absolutely sure I’ve done at least a few of them wrong—after enough
<a hrefblahblahblah> in a row, my eyes cross and blur and I have to take another pie break. I’ll check them myself eventually, but you know how speedy I am about these things. (Not. Not speedy. Not even one little bit.)

And! Not especially related to that: Are you doing NaBloPoMo this year? I’m totally in, baby. And I am totally going to need more pie.

Hey, look! We took photos of the apple adventure. There were apples:

Whole rows of trees with apples, actually:

There was apparently a dog:

I don’t actually remember that particular dog, nor can I explain why on earth we took a picture of the wrong end of it. Did I mention that the light was bright that day? So bright we could hardly tell what we were taking pictures of? Maybe that explains it?

We also got a picture of me, trying to keep Audrey from falling into a puddle. Or maybe it’s a picture of Audrey being hampered from getting wet. (Incidentally, you can tell that’s me because of the small foot growing out of my midsection. We call that “Sadie.”)

And then we pressed apple cider in an old-fashioned cider press! You can drink the cider right out of that bowl on the ground! They can’t sell you any, because it’s not, you know, pasteurized, or otherwise sanitary in any way. But it sure is tasty!

And did I mention there were apples?

Do you guys read Grosgrain? It’s a sewing blog, but the blogger GIVES AWAY pretty much every fabulous thing she blogs about. This week’s giveaway? A Marie-Therese costume. (You know, Marie Antoinette’s daughter.) It is beyond amazing. How did she even DO that?

And equally important: Which of my girls could be Marie-Therese for Halloween, I wonder? Hmmm…

I am staring right now at six—count ‘em, six—okay, you can’t count them because you can’t see them, but trust me, SIX—empty tissue boxes waiting to be flattened for recycling.

Which boxes might lead one rightly to conclude:

Firstly, that we all have head colds.
Secondly, that mayhaps I ought to invest in handkerchiefs.

And lastly (though I suppose this isn’t really a conclusion at all), why have I not yet flattened those suckers and recycled them? What the heck am I waiting for? An even TEN tissue boxes?

And extra-lastly, that apparently head colds result in affected writing styles. For which I do thusly apologize. I’ll be over it soon.

We are very boring people here at my house. Or at least predictable. We are predictable people. And what is a predictable way to spend a fall weekend? Why, apple-picking, of course. What could be more obviously fall? Other than maybe pumpkin-picking. Which we’ve also already done. (Disclaimer: Please note that I do not intend to cast aspersions on other apple-pickers! I only assert that my own family is predictable or otherwise boring. Carry on.)

So. We bundled the kids up (because though it’s hot here, the apples grow in the mountains where the air is a little crisper), packed them into the car, and drove for an hour and twenty minutes to a wee little town surrounded by apple orchards. Before we got to the apple-picking town, though, we had to drive through another farm town.

We were only passing through, but Owen was very interested in the downtown area. “Is this a cowboy town?” he asked as we waited at a red light, and we had to allow as it sort of was, sort of a town for the cowboy-like farmers whose ranches we had admired along the road.

“I thought so,” he said. “Because that store there has cowboy words on it.”

The store:

Pop Quiz! Would the correct parenting response be:

A)    A hearty, “Why yes, son, those ARE cowboy words!”
B)    A noncommittal, “Hmm. I see what you mean.”
C)    A thorough explanation of the difference between a cowboy-style font, which the sign certainly employed, and cowboy words, which—well, whether the sign features cowboy words is probably debatable. Though certainly those words do feature prominently in the town that we’ve already established is something of a “cowboy town.” [At this point you might begin to wonder whether he’s still listening, or whether you lost him at “font.”]
D)    Other (please explain.)

I wish I could get actually current local news.

I can read live reactions to the debates from bloggers around the country—heck, around the world, if I tried—but I can’t get any current information on the wildfire I can see from my bedroom window right now.

We’ve got Santa Ana winds this week—hot desert wind that cracks the skin on the back of your hands, dries out your sinuses and makes your nose run. Santa Anas also happen to be fire’s best friend, tossing sparks over fire breaks and flying embers to ignite every scrap of dry brush in the vicinity.

A fire broke out on Camp Pendleton—that’s the Marine Corps base in the north of San Diego County—around 3:30 this afternoon, and by seven p.m. had burned over a thousand acres. And that’s the most recent information I can find, though it’s four hours old and fires move quick.

We could smell the smoke before we could see it today. When the sun went down we could see reddened smoke and cloud cover from our backyard even though we’re a few suburbs to the south.

And now there are sirens. We live down the street from a fire station (really, doesn’t everyone in this county live right down the street from a fire station?), and they don’t usually run their sirens at night if they don’t have to. But tonight they’re wailing on and on, one after the other, presumably headed north to keep us safe from there. I’m sure all will be well by morning. (Or at least, that’s what I’d like to have happen. And it probably will.)

Last year, when the fires were close enough that we could see smoke, I was in early labor. I called my midwife, told her we expected to need her in the morning, and went to bed. And then we woke up to a brown sky raining ash, air too thick to breathe pressing in through the cracks around windows and doors.

The contractions stopped and didn’t return for five more days—the day we left our house with birth supplies and newborn clothes in tow, not knowing where we were headed or for how long; the days we spent in a rented vacation house; the day we came home to hose charred wood and burnt plastic off our lawn, then to launder every smoky blanket, sheet, and piece of clothing in the house before I collapsed into bed, exhausted and nauseated.

And then the next morning, though the sky was still a pale tan instead of blue, though the air still smelled mildly of burning brush, Sadie decide she had waited long enough. She was born after three hours of labor, with Dane and the kids, my mother, and four midwives ready to greet her here at home. She had some breathing difficulties, both right at first and over the next several days. We still put her to bed with an air purifier in the room.

Tonight she fell asleep easily, is sleeping soundly. Hasn’t called for more milk even once since I put her down. And while I’m on edge this fire season, I wonder if this weather feels familiar to her. Whether she’s oddly comforted by the dry heat, the woody smoke smell. For me, it brings back a sense memory of being that heavily pregnant mother, forced from her nest; for her, maybe it recalls our first meeting. I don’t suppose I’ll ever really know. But I wonder.