quiet

It's gray outside. The new green leaves on the trees, riotous with vibrancy and color just yesterday afternoon, seem today to be saying shhhhh. Simmer down. Put your sandals away -  it's still March, for crying out loud!

I have a cold, and the children are at school. I should be working, but I find myself drawn to the muted stillness in the house instead, staring at the light shining through those excellent little green flying saucer petals you see above for long empty stretches. Our friend left them on the porch for us on Tuesday and they still seem to be glowing.

tuesday

Yesterday I was distracted. It was a rare day with no work, obligations, errands or visits on the schedule and I fear I squandered precious open time with the kids, so caught up was I in wonderings about the future. Ah well. We can't be makers of homemade time every day, right? The good news is that the camera served as a kind of tether to the present moment, so I don't think I missed too too many good parts.

pump it up

Spring served up some seriously wet and muddy weather over the weekend, and though it struck dull, domesticated me as a nice opportunity to make tea and stay indoors, it held a special appeal for the kids. They played hard together all yesterday, with only a few meltdowns requiring parental intervention. When they were ready for a walk, it was with our friend Fawn. I took a short jog and found them wading with her and a sweet pair of neighbor kids in the muddy creek at the end of our street, pleasantly dirty and wet and decidedly unwilling to follow me home.

Believe me, the sibling solidarity and independence was awfully nice. It allowed not only a jog but some solitary time in the garden, planting seeds and whacking fence posts into place without the worry of small fingers in the vicinity of the mallet. 

anniversaries

Here is a picture of my dad, my mom, my sister and me. My dad would have been about the age I am now.

And here is a picture of my dad as a child, the one standing somewhat defiantly off to the side, the youngest, the rebel. He is showing you something: a handful of walnuts he plucked from the ground around the big tree in the backyard. It wasn't his backyard: it was his grandparents' backyard. Later his father--my grandfather--moved back to the home of his childhood to care for his ailing father. After my great-grandfather died it became his and Grandma Joan's, the place my sister Rachel and I visited every summer, the backyard littered with those same painful walnuts underfoot.

an auspicious start

When we woke up this morning, it was spring. The vernal equinox! A momentous day, to be sure.

It was misty and gray on the way to drop Frances off at school, so after we came home I made paper cranes out of last week's homework and Gabriel painted them in lovely jewel tones. Soon the sitter came with her four year old son and I escaped to the downstairs office to work to the muffled sounds of pretend dinosaurs, rocket ships, and high volume squeals that could have been expressions of delight or distress - it's hard to say - so I eventually made myself a much better work soundtrack (my new favorite Pandora station, Wye Oak).

After Gabriel and I had lunch, I baked these cookies (wrong season, but tulip-shaped sugar cookies just aren't my scene) while he played "lepidopterist" by drawing elaborate butterflies and then pretending they were mortally ill and in need of tending.

O love

This morning in church there was a special Celtic music service featuring Irish melodies and instruments, spare and beautiful. I like to think the music poured forth and seeped into a deep part of me that is somehow bound to those Celtic Howells, Rouths, Gormans of generations past who traveled to this country long ago. That might explain my easy tears. But I think many people, of diverse descents, have the same emotional response to the unaccompanied Celtic flute.

And we began with Come thou font of every blessing, and we ended with a dignified (when are they otherwise?) bagpipe player leading us in Amazing Grace. Both those hymns were nap time favorites when our children were tiny. Frances would request "Amay" as a baby, and even though Mike and I sang it a thousand times, it never lost its power for me. Once I listened to Ralph Stanley sing it on the Diane Rehm Show with Gabriel in the backseat and nearly broke down in sobs at a stoplight. 

But really, I've always been a crier in church. Throw a bagpipe in and I'm a goner. 

There was one more hymn today that hit me hard. The first lines are

O love, how deep, how broad, how high,

how passing thought and fantasy

It's about God's love for us, but it also captures how I felt standing in the pew, carrying Gabriel so he could get a good view of the bagpipe, trying to keep my tears at bay so I could sing those dear words. I knew love before I became a parent. But there is something about the love I feel for my children that yes passes thought and fantasy. It is something underneath, around, above, and through my rational self. It makes no sense. The mysterious, hazy edges of the emotional experience of motherhood have helped me imagine what God's love for creation might be like. But it is too big and scary to conceive, a love that boundless, so I tend to stay a few paces away.

Spiritual temerity aside, what a joy it is to see one's children off and running in the world! I am grateful for the view I've been enjoying these days, blurred by tears or otherwise.

happy friday

Frances doesn't have school today, so we dropped off her brother at preschool this morning and set off on a series of errands together, just a couple of gals wandering the aisles of the little health food store, chatting the wine store guy up about his favorite Italian alternatives to Chianti, and finally browsing the stacks at the library.

A book I'd been waiting for magically appeared on the hold shelf (I love when that happens!) and what might be the only Magic Tree House book that Frances hasn't yet read was sitting patiently on the shelf, waiting for her. Without remarking on the novelty of the situation, the two of us squeezed onto a single cushion of the couch in the children's section (all our other books occupied the other cushion). Within our cloud of quiet, fizzing excitement, we dove into our new books. The sounds of nearby toddlers yanking picture books off the shelves and the librarian chatting with patrons at the return desk soon faded away. We read for a long, long time.

Sometimes my six and nearly three-quarters year old daughter is a mysterious child: a practiced thrower of tantrums, a triumphant queen of imaginary play, a speaker of strange languages that only she and her brother really understand. But today I looked to my right and found a quiet companion equally absorbed in her book, equally ready to ignore the rest of the day's plans. Just five more minutes, we said to each other. (Such rare, sweet, simple solidarity!) Just til the end of this page.

Here's to pages that never end. Happy weekend, everyone.     

greener grass

What is it about this time of year? Waking up to a thousand birds who are searching and chirping away madly for The One (or at least this year's One), noticing a new unexpected bloom every day, freeing toes from their airless woolen tombs, seeing the children's bodies anew--freshly stripped of coats and heavy clothes--seemingly longer and leaner with each passing spring day. Spring! It somehow manages to astonish and surprise, despite the fact that you have been hungrily anticipating it for weeks. It is simply that extraordinary, watching the world wake up.

But it's also cruel, right? In this warming time, March may as well be April. Spring stirs me up. Mike has been on his spring break from St. John's, and we are reveling in this sweet time together as a family. It has afforded us the opportunity to stand back, look around, and reflect: are we living in a way that is harmonious with our values, our vocations, our desires?

sick day

Gabriel had the sickest day of his short life today. Starting Tuesday night, a nasty GI bug took hold of my dear boy and gave him a fierce shake, the aftermath of which left him exhausted and incapable of keeping more than a sip of water down for nearly two days. I am happy to say (fingers crossed) that he is now out of the worst part of those woods and sleeping peacefully on a bed that is very, very clean, the sheets having been changed and washed twice in the past day.

noticing

I caught the tail end of an interview on Fresh Air today with Charles Duhigg, a New York Time reporter and author of a new book about the power of habits. We had just picked up the kids from school and a playdate. I was sitting in the car with them while Mike (who is on spring break, hallelujah!) ran into a store before we headed home. Frances was buried in a Magic Tree House book she got at the school library today (the series is apparently limitless) and Gabriel was staring, heavy-lidded, at a dinosaur book in his lap. Terry asked Duhigg, who now knows so much about how we form and break habits, about the personal habits he would like to form.

After some nervous chuckling, he said he wanted to cultivate a habit of mindfulness, specifically in regard to being with his young children. He talked about how easy it was to be mentally checked out with kids, and that he wanted to form a habit of greater presence. He pointed out that breaking the mental distraction habit is more challenging than, say, breaking a more external habit, like eating cookies every afternoon.