I love that calendars remind us of all of those quirky honorable mention days, don't you?
I would love to be able to tell you that my absence here is due to great works, vacations, dinners out, and wonderful books elsewhere, but the truth is we are mostly sitting around waiting for spring to finally arrive, for this blasted snow to leave, and for life to pick up it's vernal pace again. The good news is that spring begins this week, and so even if there is still a blanket of white outside my window for a week or two more, I will find it within myself to be patient and calm with the knowledge that spring has, indeed, arrived and we are on our way to better weather. I don't know why this winter in particular wore on me so, but if the blahs arrive again next year I think it will warrant the purchase of a light box.
If not for Harry and Emma I surely would have dried up and died waiting for Brendan to arrive home from work each day, such was my boredom with snow and ice and cold. But my children, the little kicks that they are, heroically saved each day and kept me in stitches with their silly ways. It's been awhile since I've shared Harry's funnies with you, so here are a few for you with which to beat down the very last of the winter blues:
In the car, on the highway.
Harry: Mommy! Daddy! I have to go potty!
Brendan: Can you hold it until we get to Grandma and Grandpa's house?
Harry: Ok. Faster, Old Chap! Hurry, Old Chap!
I am babysitting Isaac and Isabelle, and Isabelle stands by the door through which her dad has just exited, crying sad, forlorn little sobs. My attempts at consolation have not worked, but Harry walks over to her, plants a kiss on her cheek, takes her hand and says: It's ok, Isabelle. You come with me. She smiles and they walk, hand in hand, to his bedroom. Jeremy and Michele, I assure you I will not be so nonchalant about such things when they are older!
Emma is sitting on the toilet, working on her mad potty skillz, when her big brother barges into the room. It is quiet for a moment, and then he shouts to me, although I stand mere inches away: Oh no, Mom! Where did her penis go? Did it fall off?
With many of our friends and neighbors happily expecting new bundles of joy, Harry has become fascinated with pregnancy. When I am a big boy I am going to grow lots of babies in my belly, he tells us. I honestly thought it would be awhile before we had these conversations, but alas, no.
Emma, Harry's ever-faithful sidekick, is more of the silent type. She can yell and scream in pitches that could shatter glass, but when she talks her words are barely a whisper. Rather than allow his sister to attempt speaking at audible decibels, Harry speaks for her. She will whine and cry at my feet, I will be completely perplexed as to what she wants or needs, and Harry will look at me and say Mom, she wants a cracker in the exact tone of voice a bored seventeen year old uses. Sometimes he even rolls his eyes. I am doomed.
He just crawled into my lap and asked me to read the words on the screen to him. I read, and when I get to the words Emma and Harry, he looks at me a says Me, Harry? Those words are me? And Ems? It's a story about us? When I explain that the story is indeed about them he starts to giggle, begs me to read more, and then laughs uproariously at the funnies I have just written, as if it's the best comedy he's heard in a long, long time.
My days are filled with the counterpoints of laughter and frustration. Frustration because some days, like a beginning skier who doesn't yet know how to use the edge of her ski to cut the hill and turn, I feel myself flying full speed down a very big hill and I simply cannot find the edge I need. And then in the next moment, the laughter of my children buoys me and I am flying, not needing my skis, or the mountain, at all. This family that Brendan and I have, it is the best. Even on the days that I can't win for trying I find moments that take my breath away, that make my eyes well with grateful tears, and I find that I would not change a thing about any of it. Parenting is precarious and wonderful and awful and exhausting and uplifting and worrisome and hysterically funny and I love it.
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