Do You Ever Just..?

[This post was written in two parts, one at around 2.30pm and the other at the time of posting]

Watch your baby sleeping and wonder how he managed to grow into such a big boy so fast? Mikey will be 2 at the end of September, last night he slept from light until light (9pm to 5am) but I stayed up until midnight expecting him to wake before I went to sleep like he usually does. I laid in bed and it took me a long time to fall asleep without him wriggling next to me and looking at his gorgeous little sleeping face. Weird huh? I considered going into his room to sneakily peek at him, but thought better of it.

He is napping right now and has been asleep from midday... it's now gone 3pm. He woke up briefly to the loud noise of the highschoolers playing music down the road from us but looked over at me laying on the bed reading a book and slowly closed his eyes again and fell back to sleep. This is a fairly recent achievement, he can now usually fall asleep without any intervention from me, just so long as he can see me.

***

I started reading Sophie's World again. I was given this book by an old teacher when I was 11 years old. It is a long book for an 11 year old but I read it from cover to cover and loved it. I read it again at 16 and now I am reading it for the third time at 23. This time around I am still enjoying it as an easy read but I am starting to find it lacking deeper thought, so much so that I very nearly paid $14 for a copy of Plato's dialogues at the PX. Thankfully I realised the error of paying that much for what was very probably a bad translation in the first place, I will have to be satisfied with the philosophy books that I already own. Perhaps it is time to give those a re-read.

The reason I mention the book, is that it strikes me as an unusual book to give to an 11 year old. How did my teacher know that it would be so perfect for me? Perhaps it was just an educated guess, I was quite the avid reader and the same teacher also gave me a copy of Dickens' David Copperfield as a prize for writing what she told me was an absolutely wonderful first person narrative (That must have also been at age 11 or so). As it goes, my teacher was either absolutely right about me and what I would enjoy reading, or she had a strong hand in shaping the future of my thought and perception. What a wonderful thing it must be to be a teacher and have that kind of impact. I half wish I still knew her or at least knew her address so that I could write to her. Part of the reason that I think I would like to be a librarian is so that I could do something like that. It only needs to be small things that make an impact on people's lives.

At the moment I just feel as though I am wishing time away. Deployment is nearly over and the last part is proving more difficult than every other part. Mikey is keeping me good company with his newly learned trick of leaning in really close for a kiss on the nose. It's cute, but sometimes he overdoes it and headbutts me in the face.