April 28, 2009

Better than a nap

Yesterday afternoon, after a long, hot, tiring day, I came home with the kids and found this: and this:
April 2, 2009

On a wish and a prayer

It's a mind-blowing, life-changing fact that from the minute you become a parent--the minute you hear that first snatch of breath and that first cry, you see the world forevermore through the eyes of a parent. When I was single I saw the world through the eyes of a single person. When I was married my attention was always drawn to other married couples. When I was pregnant I was haunted by stories of other pregnant women--joyous stories, tragic stories, but they resonated with me in deep and consuming ways.

March 30, 2009

Kite

Do you see that?

The kite

There in that blue, blue sky--that teeny, tiny thing? Of course you can't see it. That's L.'s kite. There's a reason you can't really see it. This isn't, as L. keeps reminding me, a happy tale.

*********

March 25, 2009

Roots

When I picked T. up from Scott on Monday afternoon the first words out of his mouth were that they had cut the tree down. I didn't know what he was talking about.

"What tree?" I asked, confused.

"The tree on the playground at her school," he said.

March 16, 2009

Front and center

On the train Saturday the kids and I were lucky enough to score the coveted “family seats”—four seats together, two and two, facing each other. The train was pretty empty, so we were able to spread out our things over the fourth seat. L., who is perfectly capable of reading for hours by himself, wanted me to read his latest Hardy Boys novel non-stop; then discuss the merits of the latest article in his Flight Training magazine. T. colored and chatted, and colored and chatted.

March 9, 2009

Ghosts

Yesterday we had some friends come over for the afternoon, and they stayed for dinner. Because we went from ice and snow a week ago to 80-degree weather on Sunday, we headed out with them to a park we haven't been to in years. When we first moved to North Carolina, we rented a house for eight months in a neighborhood near the park. Those days now seem so far away, yet at the same time, close enough to touch. L. was only 13 months old when we first moved into the house--a blue two-story with cedar siding (and lots of woodpecker holes).

February 18, 2009

Sunday at the park

This past Sunday we finally broke free from the house and took the kids on a family trip to the library (more Junie B. Jones books--help us!) and then to this store to replace the little jeweled box of chocolates we got for L. for Valentine's Day. The dog swiped the box off his side table a few hours after he got it, and only minutes after he'd arranged all the chocolates just so in the box.

February 9, 2009

The Robin Tree

This past weekend was perfect--beautiful, cloudless blue skies and temperatures in the 60s all weekend long. On Friday, as Scott and I flopped, semi-comatose, on the couch, trying valiantly to stay up later than usual (because it was, after all, Friday), we decided that we'd set Saturday aside as a day of no worrying about things we can't change, no talking about where to send T. for kindergarten, no thinking about health insurance benefits (or lack thereof) for this and that, or workload woes.

April 9, 2008

The unbearable lightness of siblinghood

A few years back, an acquaintance of mine was pregnant with her first child, a son. She told me that she was relieved that her first child was going to be a boy. This way, she told me, she wouldn't have to worry about whether her second child would be a girl or a boy. She didn't want two girls--girls, she told me, fight too much and usually just don't get along (as it turned out she had three sisters, and they fought tooth and nail for years).