The calendar says spring. New England has its own terms for spring: just a little snow left on the ground or just a little snow fell overnight. Look! Crocus! Look! Person in t-shirt (ignoring snow)!
It’s not pitch black at seven in the evening, I’ll grant you that.
This is to say March is often a particularly long month around these parts, and I think it tugs on our collective spirit: we want spring fever and are met by more cabin fever.
Save for my eight year-old, who has been skiing six times now and is navigating black diamond trails and says about five times a day: “I want to go skiing.” He spent a happy week in Florida and went skiing the next morning. He wants more snow.
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I am not sure I have anything all that smart or pithy to say. I returned from a week away to so many different things to do I just feel like an utter and complete failure up front. I won’t successfully complete every task scattered about my mind, computer, countertop, house or to-do lists. At those moments, I definitely start to wonder what it is exactly that I’m doing living a life that’s so, um, brimming over seemingly always. Maybe I should do some major pruning all around?
I never exactly do.
I’ll probably do some stewing about my work and put some laundry away and clear through a few piles and then get through a busy stretch and the anxiety will go underground while I’m so occupied and then I’ll look at the next piles and the next too busy stretch and stew a little more. That’s my pattern.
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Meantime, the girl decided she wants underwear like Addy and Arella. We pushed the first to this moment because the preschool he attended required such things and, long story extremely short: never again. So, this is all hers. Like so many milestones, we don’t call it yet we can’t ignore it, either; our assistance is required and like so many milestones, this one has her feeling more than a wee bit out of control. So, she’s clamping down on that. She’s screechy and whiny and demanding and controlling and not sleeping terribly well. She’s kind of a mess.
Yes, she did bring the booster seat from the mudroom and sit on it on the couch. She also told me yesterday, “When I am big I’m going to sit in a little seat in the car and face front like Remy. I’m going to stop diapers and bottles and chocolate chips.”
I interrupted her: “Chocolate chips aren’t for babies.”
“When I’m big, I’m not going to like chocolate, like Remy,” she explained. Right, of course not.
We were on our way to the market, where she decided to ride in the cart with the infant bucket seat. She curled up there the entire shop, with her baby doll in arms for much of it. Until she tossed the baby to the floor, that is.
This, too, shall pass.
While I’m on the subject of milestones, though, I realize there’s another one to mention: it’s the one where your kids are so very amazing in the world and yet there might be scant evidence of this particular acumen at home. As my mother described this phenomenon when I was an adolescent: “I’d hear from people you babysat for how responsible you were, that you cooked and did the dishes and cared for the kids… and I didn’t know you could cook or clean up.”
We’re having a bit of that around here with our eldest pair. I guess I kind of expected it to be this way and I am proud. Truth be told, we are seeing many glimmers of their goodwill and capability at home. For example, overall, the kitchen is becoming a calmer place (and more consistently delicious, when Lucien’s the chef).
For another example, after his first ever solo babysitting gig, he put his earned funds to… shiitake mushrooms (cash to me for buying him the mushrooms he desired).
So, when we do catch the glimmers, it’s pretty lovely. When we’re not seeing them, it’s very much March in New England. We have to remind ourselves spring—the one with daffodils and green grass and such—really is on its way.
