Seasons and Memories

The children and I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon outside.  It was Beautiful… must have been at least 70, slight breeze.  Since M went down for a nap at 12:15, we ate a quick bit of   lunch and headed out at 12:30.  (She slept till about 3… love the “1 long nap” in toddlerdom.)  The garage and the wintertime “piled-in-the-middle of the doorway-cause we’re-too-cold-to-put-it-where-it-goes” mess was calling me.  This mess consists of a toilet waiting to be installed, a soccer goal set, a Christmas tree with a few of the last decoration boxes, empty dog food bags, boxes of outgrown clothes and outlived but not outloved toys, a dismantled weedeater and a motorcycle that fell to the way when we found out we were expecting M 2 1/2 years ago (not quite sure why a baby is more important to stay alive for than tween twins and a wife, but that’s OK… paranoia comes in many colors, shapes and sizes.).

I lit into the boxes in the center, just knowing I would now, at last, find the hand me down clothes for M that I had been remembering.  P   helped me because she loves to go through old memories as much as I do.  The earliest images that she can’t remember, she relies on me and these occassional walks down mommy memory lane to fill in.  S fiddled with the broken down weed eater which he took apart last fall, trying to diagnose the problems and put it back together.   If we get many more of these pretty days, I can be assured of some sort of Frankenstein-hybrid weedeater/lawnmower/go-cart… or “something that blows up”, as he put it.  Actually, it was a question ~ “hey mom, what do you think the likelihood is of getting something that blows up out of the weed eater parts?”   My S is like the 50’s version of all-boy… he likes to tinker with stuff, doesn’t particularly like to get dirty, likes to camp, likes to spend time with his family (not including his twin sis so much any more if friends are within hearing distance… ewww), gets bored easily in church ~ think Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, but doesn’t like to get into fights and doesn’t like hurting people or being hurt.  So we enjoyed a few hours of doing the things we can’t normally do with a toddler running around.

With M waking up, we shifted into placate and adore M mode.  Playtime!  There were several pairs of shoes that she wanted to try on (thanks Ms. Sue) and a preschool barn bingo kind of game that makes an interesting boing sound.  We shifted stuff back into the garage and pulled the doors down.  S & P hatched a plan to put the tent up and sleep outside for the night.  I walked M around the yard, picking sleds up and opening up the sandbox… flicking dead leaves around with my finger to inspect for further signs of spring and admiring the already bloomed crocuses and waiting daffodils.  And just like that, we went from the hopeful expectation of just one more good snow, to the giddy “please won’t you stay” thoughts and activities of spring.  With DST, it is now light out until about 8 or 8:30, so there was still plenty of time to scratch our spring itch. 

We built a fire in the outside fireplace and grilled hamburgers, which tasted much better than usual with a little flame-burnt-broiled kiss and a breeze .  M played in her sandbox with P while I played in the fire.  Unbelievably, M turns out to be scared of the fireplace.  That would be good, except that I’m such a firebug!  Still probably a good thing, though, and something I’m sure my grandmother would approve of.  After all, you do not play in the fire unless you want to pee in the bed.  Neither do you carve your name into a picnic table because “fools names and fools faces always appear in public places”.         You can learn a lot of rhymes from your grandmother… not that you particularly follow the advice.  We do, after all,  play in the fire and we have our own homemade picnic table that I’m sure we will all inscribe our names on for posterity if we leave it here when we move.  But I digress in my digression… there’s also the everpopular “30 days hath September, April, June and November.  All the rest have 31″… except for February and I can’t remember that part of the diddy.  Or do you remember the one about chatty hens coming to no good ends?  ~ something to do with gossip, I think.

Anyway, we did eat outside, M got to swing and run around “like a chicken with her head chopped off”  (thank my mom for that saying) and S & P camped out last night, under the stars and additional warm blankets.  So, we close the chapter, hopefully, on another winter and run pell-mell into summer.  Now with any luck, March will go out like the lamb it’s supposed to and there won’t be an outlandish amount of April showers, because my May flowers are already up and     don’t want to be flooded out!