I’ve been sporadically trolling the back-collection of the blog for the last couple days, flicking through random interconnections between posts, and trying to determine if I ever did anything more meaningful than just ramble about the bits and pieces of my life.

This evening in particular, I sort of got hung up on the posts dating back to when Claire was just a few weeks and months old. Those posts hint at a perception of yours truly that I was inundating my audience with the intricacies of parenthood, that I was writing an overwhelming quantity of texts explaining the details of our new life as the biological guardians of this little squirming, crying, pooping baby. But what I really found was a lot of fragmented, haphazard, starry-eyes wonder at this new life, and a vague attempt to wrap my own mind around it as I was busy writing it. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just what it was… and three and some years later it’s just this skimming glimpse at everything I remember, just enough to trigger the flavours of those days.

Is that going to be enough, I wonder. There are already so many posts to wade through, many hundreds — if not thousands — of words long, and while I’m sure I could have filled quantities of more pages with drivel of our day-to-day life back then, would I have really wanted to read it?

For example, I could pull today out of a random hat, assume that some day a few months, years, or maybe decades in the future I’ll be reading these words wondering just what the ‘flavor’ of today had been. I could hint at that flavor right now, remind myself that we spent nearly two hours this morning, Claire and I, entertaining the neighbor kids, Leann and Owen in our still-recovering-from-winter backyard. I could remember the plain noodles with salty cheese Claire and I shared for lunch. I could recall that we read a couple forgettable picture books prior to her nap. I could remind myself that we went out to Canadian Tire to run a few errands and ended up buying Claire a new bike helmet, a pink baseball glove, and a package of seeds for purple beans (at her insistence) before escaping the store — me not even sure we got what we went to buy. I could allude to the video chat with Grandma and Grandpa prior to supper. Or I could describe in detail, sitting on the grass in the cool evening air, explaining a dozen times to a giggling girl how to hold a plastic baseball bat as she defiantly (and deliberately) got a great laugh at her dad’s expense in completely ignoring — often doing the exact opposite — of my mockingly exasperated instructions.

“Stand facing the deck, turn your head towards me, no just your head, now hold the bat over your shoulder, no your other shoulder, now stand back where you were before, no don’t turn your whole body, just you head, towards me, now take one step backwards, no backward, no one step, no backwards, now put your bat back over your shoulder, and stand facing the deck, then turn your head…”

And so on… for as long as it was funny.

But I guess that’s the point. If I were to write down everything… I wouldn’t want to read it, would I? It’s the very fact that it’s so sporadic, so scattered, and just a glimpse. It’s that fact that makes it so interesting to breeze through these three years later, I guess.