Sometime last week, Charlotte spent the afternoon running through the house with the noodle strainer atop her head.  “I am a fireman!” she told me proudly.  Toddler incarnate, this moment.

“Well run along then and put out fires,” I said.  I pinched her bottom and away she flitted.

After she was asleep, Donald and I sank into the couch exhausted.  This age is beautiful.  It is expressive, it is communicative, it is compassionate and heart-wrenching and simple and difficult.  It is peanut-butter breath and cherry kisses and sticky fingerprints on the wall.  We fired up the computer and popped in a DVD to unwind.  The first movie we had watched together in months.  Donald worked through a jar of pistachios and I nibbled on a piece of chocolate.

And then, there it was.  Subtle, slithering movements along the side of my belly.  Soft and gentle, kick kick kick.

A few days later, Donald placed his hand on my belly.  It took only a minute for him to feel his child.  Kick, somersault, kick, kick.  And that afternoon, I showed Charlotte too.  I placed her little hand beneath mine and when my skin pulsed against her palm, I told her it was the baby saying hi.

She stood on her tippy-toes and brushed a quesadilla kiss against my belly button.  “Hello little baby,” she said.

Ten minutes later, she was running around like a wild thing.  “I am pretending to be a dragon,” she told me.  “A big one.  And my name is Sweden.”

“Sweden?  Like the country?”  I asked.  She shook her head impatiently, her hair falling into her eyes.  Like a sheepdog, she likes to say.  “No,” she declares.  “SWEDEN LIKE THE DRAGON, MOMMA!”

This weekend, it was all hello little baby to the kicker within.  And hello big wonderful girl to the firecracker running about.  I hope I never cease to marvel at the miracles that are these two sweet souls in my life.

** Charlotte is two years and ten months old.  I am eighteen weeks pregnant.