Thoughts While Running #007

baby cars.

It’s been a bit of a week with a side of some heavy-ish life stuff and as I usually do, I was working through it all on my run this morning. Fall is in the air in SF and our mornings have been especially crisp. It was sunny and a warm 58 degrees and the nostalgia of it finally feeling (and smelling!) like fall made me want to immerse myself in dirt and trees and trails where I could find some quiet solitude away from all the traffic (cars and humans) that can come with living in a large city. The life stuff is just well, life really. Nothing bad, just general stickiness that might be a little slow to move through but the growth that comes with navigating these moments always makes it worth it in the end; even if it’s hard to see in the woods.

As I headed out for my run this morning, it happened to be street cleaning and a meter maid drove by me. My son likes to refer to these as ‘baby cars’ as to him, they look like baby versions of regular cars. While he might mean it in the very literal sense, it also sounds like he’s making fun of them a bit and it makes my husband and I laugh every. single. time. No one likes seeing a meter maid in the city as it means there is a very high possibility of a traffic ticket coming in the mail in 30 days. The last ticket we received was due to ‘residential overtime’ and it cost us $102.

baby cars.

I wrote about my son turning 2 last week and he’s at this age now where he’s making a hundred observations, drawing a million conclusions and has absolutely no filter and I love it. I hope he keeps this unfiltered naivety for as long as possible because someday he’ll become self conscious of what he says or how he acts and I’m sure he’ll be far too young when it happens. Right now when he figures out or learns something new, he just latches onto it, repeating it over and over as he’s trying out this new piece of information, committing it to memory before it then becomes this ‘look at what I know!’ sort of badge of pride. I had prepared myself for all the hard things that come with parenting : the lack of sleep, the loss of agency over my body, the restructuring of my needs to center around whatever this tiny little human required. What I didn’t prepare myself for was the absolute joy and delight that it could be. Not once did it ever cross my mind that it could possibly be so much fun.

I’ve been in awe of him as he grows and changes and develops seemingly all so fast. I absolutely love watching his little brain work and I wish I could record every little thing that comes out of his mouth right now for fear of forgetting something in 3 or 5 or 20 years. His favorite color is green…so every other color in his eyes is ‘not green’ which makes so much sense like why even waste the time identifying what this other subpar color happens to be? The doorbell is either ‘gramma’ or ‘packages’ because the only two people who ring our doorbell these days are apparently either his gramma or the mailman. Things are so simple and uncomplicated as he processes and learns and discovers, no past histories or assumptions clouding any of his observations. These moments of curiosity, learning and external observationing are so pure.

It’s easy to get stuck in the gunk of the stickiness that are the heavier more uncomfortable moments of life and allowing my brain to wander into the indulgences of all his little ‘isms’, marinating in all the silly things that come out of his little mouth right now brought in some much needed lightness to my morning. I might write about all the stickiness later; right now it’s a little too fresh and I’m still a little too in the weeds to have any real clarity. So instead I’ll let it exist in the background for a bit as I work through it but also not get dragged down by it. I’d way rather join my son in his unbridled delight of baby cars and the color green.

*k