Day 364 (again... and still not really)

My little boys lately are seeming not so little. More and more, Jules is showing moments of maturity: some come in the form of Buddha-like insights, others in stern safety reminders shouted at Kai... Kai who of late has taken to wearing his Mets hat everywhere. And a Batman cape - often with nothing underneath. 

But they're still little boys - who snuggle, who squabble over the Christmas train, who want to be read to and rocked, who spontaneously reach for each others' hands, who find all sorts of "treasures" and sneak them into my pockets. Which I love. So much it makes me teary to think that this tender time will end - soon. And I worry that during so many of these sweet moments I've been too tired and distracted and too concerned about "bad" behavior to have savored them thoroughly.

And so I save these little pebbles and stash these tiny wood chips on shelves in my office. #importantreminders

Day 291

Oscillation defines me these days. 

I look forward to the day when everyone in this house (including Tina the fluffy cat) can wipe his/her own @ss ...  but then I get nearly teary thinking our days of diapers will soon be done. (Gross but true.)

Some moments, I want to move into an old Victorian, or a modern bungalow with few walls, downtown somewhere... or back in Pennsylvania. Then I think about my NNE posse, the proximity to the bike path, the house where Jon and I grew from two twenty-somethings with a bad-ass orange tabby who hailed from Harlem (RIP Chuck)  into a family of four (humans) with the sweetest Dempsey dog and two quirky kitty sisters. I can't imagine living anywhere else. Which alarms me. I don't nest. Settle in. I'm the girl who pretty much kept her college dorm room decorating to a poster or two because I was going to move along in two semesters. And I always expected to live in this house just a few years. Yet here I am. 

My dance class makes me feel alive, like "me"; my online gamification course, interested, eager, thrilled by possibilities. And then I consider what maybe I should be doing instead: coming straight home to kick around a soccer ball while it's still a little bit light outside, investing my energies into investigating four-year-old behavior, looking into kindergartens. Sleeping more so I'm not so snippy. Or doing work that's tied to actual deadlines and deliveries. 

And then there's that work: so many cool projects, ones that allow me to use both sides of my brain, to draw from all of my disparate interests and the patchwork of "liberal arts" experiences I've pieced together over the years. It's awesome. And engaging. And exhausting. And then I start to wonder: should I be expending so much energy on this right now? 

These - these - are the thoughts that have been muddling around in my brain for days. And, then, today, when I opened my lunchbox (a hand-me-down from Julian, no less), I found this a little yellow taxicab. 

And for whatever reason, I felt better about it all. I realize that this makes no sense. 

But this is what it is. And then I started thinking: maybe the comfort of lunchbox surprise had to do with the idea that I'd started thinking of the little car as the manifestation of an important message... 

That I'm still me - the girl who loves New York City and the fulfilling career that started there and being a mom to two crazy little boys in Vermont.

When I walked through the door at the end of the day home, Kai welcomed me with, "Mom, how was your work today?" So sweetly, punctuated with his double-dimple smile. Like he really wanted to hear about my day at the office. Like he loved his little life in which both of his parents work. And kind of a lot. 

And after the boys were in bed, I reached into my mailbox to find a single hot-pink envelope, which held inside this card from my godmother, "Aunt" Judy. 

Inside she'd written ... "It reminded me of of your blog entry and how I often I felt this way while working." 

Here's the thing: My childhood memories of Aunt Judy - Mark's mom and basically a second mother to me and my sibs - was that she was there, always, with homemade baked goods and Band-Aids and the best books. Cheerly loudly in the bleachers. Offering advice in just the right ways. And all the while she was working as a school librarian and working on her PhD.  

I'm going to choose to intepret this second surprise of the day as follows: Give up the guilt. Work really hard to be present. There's not enough time to waste any of it second-guessing. And if you need a reminder of just how fast things change, peep that old dot-matrix up there. 

Day 260

My run through Bessemer today jogged so many memories, which, I guess, makes sense: I ran the road that connects my parents' house to my granmother's. I rested on a rock at the quarry where I learned to swim. I paused at the run-down field where I cheered on PeeWee players and where, I hear, practices still take place.

Recently, my uncle told me that, years later, kids don't really remember the specific details of their day-to-day. Rather, they just gather a sense of the experiences overall. And maybe apply the feelings they had to photographs that actually captured moments of the moments.

So what then, 20 years from now, will my boys remember of this day? The one when Aunt Kate and her roommate hooked them up with field-level spots at Pirates batting practice and a suite for the game. The one where the whole fam rallied (Grandma and Papa, Uncle Ange and Aunt Casey, Mom, Dad, and Aunt Kate)... when it took an hour for our dinners to come out and everything was partly wrong... Of the game where there was cotton candy and... there was, randomly, in from Dallas...Dan Jay.

Dan Jay, our kid-hood comrade from two doors down, who is wrapped into just about every summer childhood memory of mine - from baseball games and lemonade stands to bike races and tiffs over GI Joe guys.

What, when they look back, will my boys remember? What do you remember?