Ten
Duchess has been here ten years. Ten years. The alert, responsive, unsleeping baby is suddenly an eavesdropping, sarcastic, guffawing giantess who's been knocking around for an entire astonishing decade.
Things about Duchess:
1) Her favorite podcast is Ask Me Another. (Really, you can stop reading right now, because that's a full portrait. She understands very little of it, but she already knows that she's definitely going to grow up to be a person who enjoys things like Ask Me Another.)
2) Her favorite book is whatever she's reading right now.
3) Her favorite anything is almost always the anything she's doing right now.
4) Nothing that goes wrong is her fault. It's probably Skipper's fault.
5) When things go wrong, they are irreparably ruined and definitely worth insanely weeping and wailing and railing over, until she thinks of something else to do, usually within two minutes.
6) Oh, is that something new to try? Duchess wants to try it. Unless it's dangerous, because then forget it.
7) She wants to go to New York City more than anywhere else. Unless you're going somewhere else and you invite her, because then that's the place she wants to go.
8) She laughs at everything. (This makes Skipper crazy, because she hates, above anything else, being laughed at.)
9) She likes you. And me. And everybody else.
10) She wants to tell you, and me, and everybody, everything that flickers through her brain. In detail.
11) She has no notion that we might not be very interested.
12) She still believes that all the minutes come hopping along full of interesting and delightful possibilities. She has a wonderfully low threshold for taking pleasure.* She doesn't make things happen, but she enjoys or at least is fine with most of the things that happen.
13) She is so, so alive. People usually say that about people who make things happen, but Duchess eats up experience in a way that, while passive rather than active, is a very strong engagement with her life. She's always been intent on being here, caught up in the immediacy of what's going on around her, since the moment she was born. I don't know where life will take her (and it will take her, not the other way around), but she will be in it completely all the way.
1) Her favorite podcast is Ask Me Another. (Really, you can stop reading right now, because that's a full portrait. She understands very little of it, but she already knows that she's definitely going to grow up to be a person who enjoys things like Ask Me Another.)
2) Her favorite book is whatever she's reading right now.
3) Her favorite anything is almost always the anything she's doing right now.
4) Nothing that goes wrong is her fault. It's probably Skipper's fault.
5) When things go wrong, they are irreparably ruined and definitely worth insanely weeping and wailing and railing over, until she thinks of something else to do, usually within two minutes.
6) Oh, is that something new to try? Duchess wants to try it. Unless it's dangerous, because then forget it.
7) She wants to go to New York City more than anywhere else. Unless you're going somewhere else and you invite her, because then that's the place she wants to go.
8) She laughs at everything. (This makes Skipper crazy, because she hates, above anything else, being laughed at.)
9) She likes you. And me. And everybody else.
10) She wants to tell you, and me, and everybody, everything that flickers through her brain. In detail.
11) She has no notion that we might not be very interested.
12) She still believes that all the minutes come hopping along full of interesting and delightful possibilities. She has a wonderfully low threshold for taking pleasure.* She doesn't make things happen, but she enjoys or at least is fine with most of the things that happen.
13) She is so, so alive. People usually say that about people who make things happen, but Duchess eats up experience in a way that, while passive rather than active, is a very strong engagement with her life. She's always been intent on being here, caught up in the immediacy of what's going on around her, since the moment she was born. I don't know where life will take her (and it will take her, not the other way around), but she will be in it completely all the way.
*"Wait, we're getting the pizza DELIVERED? It's coming to our HOUSE? That's so cool! Wow! It's being delivered!"
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