Smiles, Squints, and Squeals can be beautifully distracting

U2 needs a solid punch to the midsection but I could probably listen to, ”It’s a Beautiful Day,” about a hundred times right now ‘cause it is (this admission in no way constitutes an affection for the band, not in any way, shape or form unless of course it’s 1986 again). Obviously it’s a Monday because it couldn’t be otherwise for the day to be so good. A high of 80-something degrees today and the sunshine shining as the song says. It’s gonna be a beauty day to spend eight hours inside at work.

Regardless of the day ahead I spent the morning hours thinking of the days behind and I still can’t wrap my head around the notion that I’m a parent, that we are responsible for another life, and a cute-as-hell one too. In the midst of changing diapers and missing Jacoby Ellsbury’s straight up steal of home last night I was fiddling with outright fascination with Zoey. She was just looking up at me all smiles, squints and squeals and I’m enraptured by her unrivaled coolness.

I know every parent thinks their child is beautiful, you’re supposed to, it’s the law, and naturally I’m no different. From my vastly biased perspective this kid is downright beautiful, not just cute, but gloriously beautiful. I know that such a cursory and impermanent asset is going to come back to haunt me some day, it has to. There’s absolutely no way that this kid can pull off beautiful and wicked smart and super successful at the same time across the distance of her life…no way. Of course I know that she’s not even grown and that a lot can happen in a short period of time…cute kids develop bad teeth, adorable morphs into awkward and precious turns into precocious awfully quick but the kid’s got a nice head start. I look at her and am floored by everything from the shape of her head to her skin to her eyes and it gets me to wondering how many boys I’m going to be required to fend off or befriend over the course of her life?

I get to thinking all that stuff and then I rattle my head back to reality, remind myself that this kid is 13 weeks old and try to get back to the baseball game. You can neglect an entire baseball season just by staring at your own child and musing ignorantly and unfairly. All that and you can miss a once or twice in a lifetime thing like a guy stealing home.

I think Nick Cafarto from the Boston Globe summed it up nicely when he mused that, “You've got to have guts, a great sense of timing, and a little larceny in your heart to pull off what might be the most exciting play in baseball.” Ellsbury's theft was the first straight steal of home by a Red Sox player since Billy Hatcher turned the trick back in 1994 and you know how it goes, when something happens about once every fifteen years you’ll inevitably be not paying attention when it happens. It turns out you’ve got to have guts, a great sense of timing, and a little larceny in your heart to pull off this parenting trick too, at least when you’re ring deep in poop, missing the game, and daydreaming about a little girl’s future when she’s just barely older than the baseball season so far.

She is pretty beautiful though isn’t she? Worth missing Ellsbury’s steal I think…yeah, definitely worth it.