Two-year-old wanders into the kitchen carrying the toilet brush.

Mom takes toilet brush away, goes to bathroom and replaces the industrial strength rubber band on the cabinet knobs. Mom returns to kitchen.

Twenty minutes later, mom returns to the bathroom to find an entire pint of organic blueberries resting on the closed lid of the toilet.

Mom takes blueberries to the kitchen, holds them up in front of family and poses the question: “If you find a pint of blueberries on the toilet after you’ve caught the baby with the toilet brush, what do you do with the blueberries?”

Mom answers her own question: “You give them to the chickens.” Mom then delivers lecture about keeping cabinets childproofed.

Dad says: “And can we not leave $10 worth of blueberries where the baby can reach them? Because then NOBODY gets blueberries.”

Baby yells: “Chickens does!”

Alma makes out with her hands like a fifth grader who’s been allowed unrestricted access to R-rated movies. So, like fifth grade me. Except she cries if she bites herself too hard.

She’s happy and smiley so often, when she does gets upset — from a gas bubble or teething — she gets a confused look on her face, like she’s thinking, “This isn’t right! I’m a happy person! Why am I not happy?” Sometimes you can get her to smile at you in the middle of a crying jag, before she realizes she’s still pissed.

She’s muscular, just as Nora was. But she’s far more interested in moving around than Nora. She scoots around with her feet and if she’s lying back and wants to see something, she’ll repeatedly try to sit up, basically doing little baby crunches. She loves her Bumbo chair and sits it in on the table top while the rest of us eat dinner, watching us and sucking on her hands.

When you lay her back on her changing table, her face lights up, “Oh! There’s my beloved light switch!” She coos through her frequent diaper changes. She pees a lot.

She adores her dad and her big sister, showing all her gums and crinkling her eyes when she sees or hears them. “Everybody loves Alma Bea!” we all say to her, many times a day.

Nora loves to be responsible for watching her while I shower or pee (I’ve committed to peeing by myself as often as possible). Nora looks for excuses to pick her up and comfortably carries her all over the house until her arms get sore, then hands her off to me. A few weeks ago she told me that she should be Alma’s primary care-giver because she’d do a better job and she loves her more than I do. I nodded solemnly and told her I’d consider it.

I was worried Alma didn’t like her swing anymore. When I set her in it, she fusses unless she’s already asleep. But I found if you put some Marvin Gaye on the turntable, she chills out as fast as she ever did.

Charlie, the goofy hound mix, still comes running to check on her if she coughs. Though he mainly ignores the crying now. You know what would actually be helpful, Charles? If you didn’t howl and bark bloody murder every time you heard the diesel engine of the UPS truck. It always happens during her afternoon nap, which would be her longest one if he’d shut the hell up.

During the day, she mostly cat naps. Rarely do naps last more than an hour now. But she’s a good sleeper at night, so I’m not complaining.

I’m the opposite of complaining — which turns out is bewildered. I can’t believe this is all going so well.

Today is the last day of school.

And it would have been my last day of maternity leave. Tonight is the night I would have found myself crying in my sleep, just as I did eight years ago.

Instead, I quit.

This time, I won’t spend my energy on work that doesn’t quite matter enough while my baby sleeps in a crib with plexi-glass sides. I won’t spend evenings scrambling to get breast pump supplies cleaned and a diaper bag filled for the following day. I won’t squeeze the important parts of my life into the margins of a workday.

I spent over two years of hemming, ha-ing and worrying that a move toward self-employment would bring catastrophe (foreclosure, food stamps) down on my family. But now, facing two alternatives, one that pulled me and one that repelled me, the choice was clear.

Writing is now my real job instead of my side thing. And lo — I’m still paying the mortgage and the grocery bills.

It’s harder than I thought. I half expected to discover some rent in the space-time continuum for weeding the tomato beds, baking bread and diving into the neglected pile of books at my beside. No such luck.

I’ve been trying to find my groove for two months now. Writing during naps and between diaper changes. Keeping the baby far enough from the electronic devices that I don’t suffer mommy guilt over the potential hazards of Wifi waves. I’ve found there’s no sense trying to stay in the groove. It’s best when I jump in and out of it — or rather, I jump from one groove (the smiles and tears of my children) to other (inside my own head, writing), knowing I have little control of when the jump happens.

If I try to ride the ridge between the grooves, I’m breaking my own rule — if the baby’s eyes are open, my full attention is with her — and I pull myself back to what’s important. The time she is little, I remind myself, lasts about as long as a truly deep breath.

I know that now, as I look at my eight-year-old, with her enormous-seeming head. I was never resentful of her getting older and bigger. Never wanted her to “just stay little.” She’s doing the hard work of growing up, just as she should. She doesn’t need to feel me pulling her back into babyhood.

The more I settle in to the moment and soak up the crying, the eye contact during feeding, the smiles, the diaper changes, the more I can let go when time inevitably lurches into first steps and first days of school.

And now, with my own work, I’m finally comfortable with the example I’m setting for my girls.

Everyday, softly, my life will whisper to them: many things are out of your control, but you can take risks that make room for love.

Alma Bea Campbell, Born March 19, 2015, 6 pounds, 5 ounces, 20 inches

We’ve passed the point where she was delivered by a nice hipster doctor in skinny scrubs. We’ve passed the “Oh, keep that, we can use it to reseal the driveway” phase of poop. We’ve passed the mild case of jaundice.

The dog is accustomed enough to five-day-old Alma that he will occasionally sleep through the screaming of a diaper change, instead of running to check that we are doing things right. “No, you’re supposed to LICK her butt,” he seemed to be urging.

We’ve suffered our first diapering-related injury: Ben got a snappi shoved under his fingernail in the middle of the night. And our first breastfeeding related injury — poor Ben again — while cleaning pump supplies. “Ouch! Good god, steam just doesn’t stop being hot!”

We’re at the part where her periods of alertness — searching our faces with brown eyes camouflaged gray-blue — are increasing.

We are surprised with the strength in her six pound body — seconds at a time of practicing to hold her head up. We can see and feel her trying to control her body movements. “How did I just do that? I want to do it again. Oh yes, I move this fleshy bony thing to my mouth.”

We’re at the part where breastfeeding is effortless, we both know the drill: root, root, root, open real big, insert huge nipple, suck, suck, suck.

We’re at the part where one of my breasts is twice the size of her head and all naps are taken on my chest or daddy’s.

We leave Nora to watch her while we pee or get a refill on water and we hear fussy squeaking and then Nora cooing, “Alma Bea, your big sister is here for you.”

We’re at the part where we stare at her endlessly with love and fascination. And we always will be.