I love Sunday morning, especially this Sunday morning that feels like new, after a really old week of feeling under-the-bus (AKA worse than under the weather, not bad enough for the hospital). Our house is demolished, even after I spent last Friday in a rare cleaning frenzy. I guess it isn't bad really, except for the vaguely sour-milky smell in the kitchen that we think is either coming from the three or four unwashed vanilla coffeemate bottles overflowing from recycling, or just some nasty old milk that spilled on the floor over the course of the week that we neglected to wipe up. Oh well, time will tell. Maybe we can pass it off as science.
Finally a respite from feeling crappy, although every one of us hovers around the edge of sickness still. This is the time of year for it - but I love the cozy calmness of this time of year too. Everything wrapped in a blanket of white, the crunch of snow under boots, the smell of snow in the sky. Everything waiting, hovering around the edge of spring.
Well, enough about that. I am grateful that the kids we have are old enough to occupy themselves this week while I hunkered down upstairs. No major mishaps, no broken bones, stitches, or CAT scans. Success! Sort of.
Lily leaves home, Emma has a date, laundry holds a caucus event in our living room
Lily spent the night a couple of blocks away at her friend Alanna'a house, a first for her if you don't count staying over at Auntie Kathy's and Uncle Jack's with Emma and Henry. It was a big deal and not a big deal at the same time. She is so like a flower, carefully blooming and growing but not wanting to get too far away from her roots. I wonder if she will still be like that later in life, although she has a steely toughness inside her that shines through in the most surprising places. She is the most tenacious of the bunch.
I can see her struggle with growing older - one minute, she's nervous about a situation and the next she's grown more confident and sure of herself. It's a whirlwind the emotions she deals with, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not so much. Danny went to pick her up this morning and she asked to stay over longer. I am so glad for her that she didn't let her fears get in the way of her being happy and having fun. Such a small thing, but such a big lesson in that.
While Lily and Henry played a few blocks away, Danny and I took Emma on a date for Indian food at Mr. India in Newburyport. It was gloriously delicious and satisfying to sit and enjoy a quiet meal without Henry standing up in the middle and meowing and dancing the bum bum dance.
Emma was being adventurous, at least culinarily speaking (is culinarily even a word???). We ate mango ice cream and garlic naan and shrimp pakora and chicken korma. We talked about where she wanted to travel (Western Europe), what languages she wanted to learn to speak (Italian and French), and what she wanted her career to be if she had to magically time travel to the future right now (science teacher for older kids). What a treat to have a date, just the three of us.
Fat snowflakes fall from the sky as Jack Johnson plays in one room, Spongebob in the other. Sophie sleeps at my feet next to a Jabba the Hut pile of boots and snowgear and dirty/clean laundry, stacks of books and papers that call to me to actually work some today. Ahh, another Sunday. Beats laundry or doing dishes.
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