Medium Delirium

My baby, sweet cherub that she is, tends to begin each day in high spirits, with lots of laughter and smiles. This store of good cheer and amicability depletes rapidly after her second nap, subjecting us to 4 hours of an increasingly grumpy baby with strong lungs and a penchant for dramatically expressing her angst, existential or otherwise. She also has uncannily strong limbs and it’s no fun trying to reign her in while she’s trashing wildly and howling like a banshee. Sweet cherub.

J’s dad, my father-in-law has the interesting habit of carrying out 50% of a conversation in his head, and only verbalising the latter half of it. For example, the other day over dinner he suddenly declared, ‘After 10 days of it my borderline has dropped from 4.5 to 4.3.’ J and I sat in stupefied silence. 10 days of … what? Borderline … what? After some probing it emerged that 10 days of subscription to a plant-based meal plan had led to a drop in his blood glucose levels. How he imagined we would flesh out his original statement with this essential information, I will never know. This tendency to obfuscate key elements of a conversation could, perhaps, be attributed to his more advanced age, but I think it’s likely just a hilarious personality quirk. Further along the meal he launched into a gripping description of someone who had committed criminal fraud. I looked up from my chicken to ask ‘who is this man?’, to which the reply, with no further explanation or exposition, was ‘Peter Gui.’ I emitted a blank stare and a feeble ‘… who?’ but it was too late. The dear man had continued thundering along the tracks of his broken narrative, leaving much bewilderment in his wake.

Spent most of our free time at home today assembling a veritable army of pot-sticker dumplings from scratch. When we eventually cooked them up for dinner, they decided to live up to their name with such great fidelity and ferociousness that in trying to pry them off the steamer basket and each other, we essentially undid most of the wrapping work we’d done in the afternoon.

It be that way sometimes. Back to watching a film with J now – A24’s Eternity, which is going very well and has been full of laughs and sweet moments so far.