Once again, more than a week has slipped by without time to write a blog post. What have I been doing? Playing Chutes and Ladders and Match game, and spending a bright, windy day on Governor’s Island, a former army base and now a 173 acre island park just off the southern tip of Manhattan where I watched Emilio scamper over climbing structures and spent only a moment on the long stretch of criss-crossed logs myself and ended up with a splinter in my thumb that throbbed and seeped and shot pain under my nail for a week.
I spent a day with Ava who spent an hour going through my purse, taking out everything and putting it back, mimicking putting on chapstick (“open, open”) and holding up an appointment card and pen (“color, color”) and scribbling and who helped me walk the dog at the end of the day but not until she’d gotten properly set for the walk (baggie, baggie”) which meant hoisting an empty handbag almost as big as her over her shoulder and dragging it along the sidewalk, taking the longest two block walk in the history of dog walking, averaging a step every 30 seconds or so because there was the bag to drop and readjust and neighbors front steps to try and a driveway to run up and flowers in the grass that needed to be touched.
I went on a carousel and roller coaster and spinning cars and bumper cars at Adventureland with Emilio, and we make a good amusement park pair because neither of us like scary or twirling rides. The ferris wheel was my favorite. By the time we left I was with batman.
I got to watch Emilio figure out how to cross a line of monkey bars and then experience a 6 1/2 hour car ride from Long Island to New Hampshire with a five year old and one year old in the car (very long).
This weekend we had a full house — family, friends, peonies, strawberries, teaching Emilio how to make whipped cream, swimming, visiting the cows across the street and counting motorcycles everywhere we went because it was motorcycle weekend in NH and we saw 70 in a 5 mile trip to the store and back.
Finally, last night, I stopped being a baby and let Melia take out the splinter that was plaguing my thumb. Good thing — that 1/2 inch of wood wasn’t going to pop out on its own.
So, this is a very long introduction to a substantive blog post I did write, for the Prevention Innovations Research Center blog. Given the Orlando massacre and the previous attention to a too-lenient sentence in the Stanford rape case the topic of this blog — child sex offenders ending up on lifetime registries — may seem mild. But it’s another example of how we need to make sure our intentions line up with our actions.
Onward into summer.
Grace Mattern 