You know that scene at the end of Blade Runner, where Rutger Hauer's dying android tells Harrison Ford's android/android killer about the memories that will die with him? ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain. [Pause] Time to die.")
Not too be too cinematic, but I felt a little bit like that as I ran around the Arb tonight, oddly energized by one of the odder evenings of parenting in recent memory. I saw things that I wouldn't have believed before having kids. Julia, playing "camping" by pretending that the dirty doormat on our patio was her tent/sleeping bag, which needed near-constant maintenance by the fwiendly ghosts that were camping with her. I saw Genevieve amuse herself while the rest of us ate dinner by crawling around the table, gumming everything she could. I watched Genevieve, slightly alarmed, poop in the tub, then try to climb away from it. I heard Julia ask me why, then observe straightforwardedly that, "Genevieve's poops look like yittle rocks!" I listened to Julia turn my assessment of Gigi's bath into an absent-minded song for herself : "Everything was okay but the end was rather messy." And, last, I watched Julia blink herself awake just long enough to listen to the end of her last bedtime story.
Kids: even better than slave androids.