I have not posted on this thing for months. Not in a journal or on scraps of paper much, either. There have been a few essays, but little else besides what I scrawl in my head.

I’ve become shy and prude, at least on paper, not talking, never divulging thoughts on the election, not my new baby nephew, not our community, not weather, nail polish, or what is going on in Israel. Not really anything. And time has passed. See? There are no longer even leaves. We are at the edge of a new year, even.

How does one get back to it, to writing or anything they did? They do it, the thing they were without. They go back to the meetings they missed, back to raising a hand and being noticed, to tying up shoes for a run though it’s been forever and they will limp along like road more Hunchback than Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

I will start although I’ve missed decades of dates, forgotten milestones that number the hundreds, more than the crumbs in my box of panko. y youngest child is now half a year old, a day or two from crawling, and the middle one is a boy who only jumps from the fourth steps, never walks down. We have been down to one fish. Our house is stocked with two boxes of mikan, and everyone but me is asleep. I’ll start with this:

Things I Missed But Am Writing Now 1):

*My daughter lost that first ever front tooth, finally lost that cute, stubborn snaggletooth, right before leaving for the Hanukkah party. It’s been her parallel universe with the character Junie B. Jones who also loses that first top tooth. I disciplined her brother who actually hit her tooth with a ROCK while on our dog walk/ride around the neighborhood. This tooth has been through the ringer. The rock is still in my coat pocket because I told J I would be showing his father. I have a rock in my herringbone pocket, guys–(same coat that is crying for dry cleaning with its tooth-sized grape juice spill on the back). It’s all evidence, isn’t it. Sigh, smile, oi vey, and that other beautiful yiddish phrase, ver veyst.

(Oh the highs and oh, the lows. Growing can be summed up by the losing and getting of teeth, plus also, sibling assault and making up).

It was the BEST DAY for her—total rock star mode that dissolved with a sad fizzle when she discovered it was lost and thrown out. She will never ever let a fallen-out tooth stay in a wadded tissue because that looks like trash and this was a number one kind of treasure. It was so sad and unfair that I scolded her with such passion and verve, I held myself back from actually diving into the bag of Hanukkah party trash to find the tooth because one cannot actually think to look inside tissues for a white six-year-old-tooth when they may have to go through snot. Why, O why did she not just ask me to hold onto the tooth for her? It would have stayed in my pocket. It would be under her pillow now.

And we are not doing so hot over here, from the ratio of kept tooth to total abysmal losses—one tooth she kept/or maybe it is lost by now. The second lost tooth she accidentally ate with her cracker/Japanese osembei. This momentous third, as you know, is in a pile of snotty trash. At least lost things make decent stories. She will always know that Hanukkah parties and wadded tissue balls of teeth do not mix well.

So, you see, I am starting with that. I don’t know what this blog will be or what I will really continue to craft with my time. I do know that I still want to catalog moments of our family’s highs and lows, track what it is to grow. I’ll start again if even other with lost things. A kind of retracing of steps and finding if I can stand up straight and make strides again.

If she relied on us, the tooth fairy would be out of work. She would be sleeping on a friend’s couch, for sure, and not eating anything as fancy as latkes or roast beef. She would nibble on foraged, mushy mushrooms and frozen carrots. And she’d find rocks in our pockets.

Okay. Starting with that.