This weekend my mother-in-law visited and brought with her several tattered cardboard boxes filled with all sorts of odds and ends from my husband's childhood years--the missing years, as we have called them, because while a quick trip upstairs to my parents' attic will open up a time capsule to my childhood, Scott thought for a long, long time that all those boxes were lost--thrown out by a renter who had once used their family's garage and taken it upon himself to do some housecleaning.

On Sunday afternoon T. asked for some computer time, so I set her up in the office with her favorite site, and busied myself peeling potatoes for dinner. Not even ten minutes later T. came out with her hand in her mouth, and an awed, almost frightened look on her face.

“What is it, T.?” I asked her.

“I have a loose tooth!”

Her first loose tooth EVER. She wiggled it for me, back and forth, back and forth. She was amazed, and a little scared, and a little worried, but mainly she felt big. Really big.

Back when L. was just a baby, Scott and I coined the word "tag-team parenting"--well, maybe we weren't the first to coin it, but we certainly felt like pioneers in that make-it-up-as-you-go territory. I distinctly remember the first time the phrase popped into my head. I had parked our old Dodge Grand Caravan at the Hardy's parking lot opposite the bus stop where the free university shuttle dropped off and picked up. I was nursing--or trying to nurse--an unhappy L. who was bundled into layers of onesies and a sweater (it was October and COLD).

Lately when something doesn't go right at school with T.'s friends, or when her feelings have been hurt by her brother, she'll disappear into a room and play with her "imaginary friends." Sometimes she does this even when things just haven't gone her way, and then I'll feel badly--like she needs to turn to these perfect friends, the ones who don't let her down, because she feels unliked.

If last week was filled with too many terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad days, then yesterday, our snow day, was the most perfect day possible--a shining exception to last week's mayhem. I made big bowls of steaming oatmeal for the kids in the morning (my new favorite way to eat oatmeal is to dice up dried apricots, toss them in, and drizzle lots of honey over the top), and L. ate an entire huge serving of oatmeal for breakfast--something he almost never does.