The Magpie Diary: Feb. 9, 2025.

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My children have been bathing in our bath tub the past two weeks, much to my husband’s chagrin. “They have their own bathroom!” he insists! Which is true! And it is full of toys, and their shampoos and bubble baths, and their tiny towels. And he has always been disciplined about keeping a boundary between our bedroom and the rest of the house. This has admittedly been the saving grace of our family sleep hygiene. I am such a softie and would whisk them into bed at the first sign of a whimper, but unless one of our children is visibly throttled by a nightmare or physically unwell, he will return them to their rooms immediately after addressing whatever issue they bring to our doorstep. I suspect he implemented this boundary because I refused to sleep train them when they were young. I know — gasp! Do not come to me for sleep advice! But for whatever hell I put us through during those early years by insisting on getting up to tend to them any time they cried, we now have fantastic sleepers who sleep through the night and rarely knock on the door. All thanks to Mr. Magpie’s consistency in returning the children to their rooms. But I digress. The point is that they have now found a way, through their tender-hearted mother, to infiltrate our bathroom for bath and shower routines. It started when Landon was out of town and I found the shower diverter that converts the stream of water from the bath tub faucet to the showerhead stuck. I couldn’t get it unlodged! So I let them bathe in ours, of course. And then the floodgates opened, and they have begged each time for another bath in our inner sanctum. “Ooh it’s just so comfy,” my son will say as he swans around our tub, a veritable Thomas Eakins painting. “I like the water in this tub,” says my daughter thoughtfully, as if it’s drawn from a separate well in a separate world.

Mr. Magpie, meanwhile, dramatically announced the unlodging of the the shower diverter a few days after his return: “It works perfectly fine now,” he declared, as the children filed by him en route to our tub, a towel rolled under my daughter’s arm. I already know that the next bathtime, when they are reintroduced to their paltry and pedestrian tub, will elicit a chorus of complaints. I know too that my children don’t really care; they simply enjoyed the novelty of doing something normal in a different context, one typically verboten. And my daughter — well, she spars for sport. We call her “the family attorney” and I’m already curious as to what careful arguments she will trot out about the injustice of being barred entry to our bathroom after a full week of access.

But when I went to hang the bathmat over the edge of the tub this week, I noticed a tiny trail of toy trolls lining the interior. Cryptograph: Emory was here. And I thought all at once of how our children leave imprints of themselves throughout our daily lives, and spaces, and thought patterns, and how essential those imprints are to my sense of happiness, and purpose. They leave tracks of joy; signatures of play. What a gift, you know? To have these signposts scattered throughout the mundanity of the everyday. Reminders that this, right here, even the conversation about the shower diverter and the anticipation of my daughter’s litigiousness, is the main event. There is no other thing. Before Tilly died, I wrote: “are we in the good ol’ days?” And I think of that a lot now. How these years, with the children home and healthy and desperate to bathe themselves within my earshot, are exactly what I have always wanted. Life with them, while busy and demanding, is also magical and in its own way simple. It is governed by play, and cuddles, and reading new books together, and resisting and then accommodating new foods, and learning to lose at Uno, and crying over lost pets, and tying shoes, and suspiciously consistently forgetting elements of the uniform that they wear every single day upstairs. Motherhood can sometimes feel like a too-fast rush in which I am stretched too-thin, but then I see the little trolls in my tub and I think: no, Jen, focus. This is it. We aren’t in the waiting room. We aren’t at the appetizer course. This is no dress rehearsal. We are smack dab in the middle of the main event.

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Also this week…

Our interior designer Kelley Proxmire stopped by to drop off these beautiful console lamps and ended up rearranging some of the decor to more prominently spotlight my Love Prints!

New morning routine: meditation, LED mask, coffee, and a little poetry/reading on the floor of my studio.

Keep coming back to this WCW poem, “Of Asphodel.” There is something each revisiting. Some earlier thoughts on it here.

Surprise carpool treats for my little Valentines.

I had a set of our Love Prints float framed by Framebridge (I did the Irvine Slim style). I’m obsessed with how they turned out! Going to hang these in my studio.

Frost on our trees. Reminded me of Robert Frost’s “Birches”:

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

If you are a sour candy lover, these really hit the spot. Found them at Costco. Super tart.

He’s five, but there’s nothing more delicious than a freshly-bathed, freshly-pajame-ed baby! Here he is wearing his Petite Plumes.

From Maggie Smith’s Good Bones book! Loved this poem — such a responsibility and privilege to be your child’s first cipher.

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