Just So I Remember Later

She's gripping a fat pink Crayola crayon in her little fist, and she draws it back and forth through Harrison's hair.  She loves the idea of coloring but doesn't yet grasp that crayons are best suited for paper, or maybe she does but likes the idea of pestering her brother better.  When she does touch crayon to paper it is in the form of dots.  She is into pointillism, it seems, and her page of the coloring book is freckled with pink, white, and blue.  Harry is patient with her and allows her crayon to graze his scalp for a moment, then shakes his head and tells her to color on the paper, and only on the paper.  It's a direction he's heard a lot of in his almost three years.  When she finally concedes and begins to polka dot the paper he pleads with her to make lines instead of dots, but she laughs off his request and continues with her masterpiece.
He is learning to write.  He holds his crayon like a pencil and makes studious, focused lines across the page.  He demands that I make 'dots' for him, which I know means he'd like to play connect-the-dots, the game we've used to try to teach him to write his letters.  He loves making his lines into something, and he is delighted every time a recognizable image appears where only polka dots lived before.  He brings me his "school work" to hang on the fridge, and I happily comply.  The pages he chooses to work on in his coloring book are not the pictures to be filled in with crayons, but the pages that show numbers and letters, word searches, and matching games.  He wants to know what the words say, what they mean, and how to make the letters into them.  He demands the reading of words everywhere, from receipts to newspapers to cereal boxes.  He loves the written word already, before he can even cipher the meaning on his own, and I find myself filled with joy at the thought of the books we will (re)discover together.
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Brendan straps the orange snowshoes to his feet while I struggle with my own buckles.  The freshly fallen snow whirls around our heads in the late-morning wind, and we're off.  We start on the driveway, where Harrison quickly finds his rhythm is thrilled to watch his dad use the snow blower, but even that soon gets old for a boy of such energy.  We cut a path across the front yard and then around the back and into the trees.  He asks me if he can go first and I let him take the lead, his little snowshoes making a meandering trail through the untouched powder.  He stops to admire the ice on tree branches, and shows concern for smaller pines that have buckled under the weight of heavy snow and ice.  He insists on dusting the snow off of them and correcting their posture.  We discover "tree huts" under a few tall, old hemlocks at the very back of the lot, and I remember being a child myself and playing in the caverns formed by snow-laden branches of evergreens.  We duck under the snowy branches and Harrison smiles and laughs out loud at the luck of finding such a perfect hiding hole.  As we head back toward the house his cheeks have taken on a rosy glow, and he stumbles over a log that was hidden beneath a drift.  Rather than allow frustration to seep into his outing, he laughs and reaches his hands out to me, and I scoop him up and set him right again.  He leads me along the fence and into the front yard, and we watch his dad circle back with the snow blower.  He doesn't want to take off his snowshoes; he doesn't want to go back inside.  It was only fifteen or twenty minutes but it made his weekend, and watching his adventure through the woods made mine.
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She hates to be told "no".  She doesn't hear the word very often because she is eager to please by nature and follows directions more than she bucks them, but every once in awhile Emma is told "no".  She turns her eyes to mine, and the sadness that peers out of those big brown spheres at that one simple word is enough to break my heart.  And then she sticks her little bottom lip out, her cheeks quiver, and enormous tears literally splash down her face.  Her face crumples into devastation, and I am between giggling and tears myself.  It hurts my heart to see the physical expressions of her sadness, but on the other hand I know the reason behind my use of the word "no" and really it wasn't anything to cry about.  I hold her and whisper "shhhh" in her ear and her tiny little sobs quiet.  She looks questioningly into my eyes and I assure her that I love her, but that she still  cannot drink my hot cup of tea.  Satisfied with the exchange she smiles and wiggles her way to the ground, off to new adventures.  Her cheeks are still shiny with tears, but her heart has been restored to sunshine.