We are in such an intensely sweet stage with the kids at the moment, interspersed by periods of intense whining. Such is life, I suppose! But I want to remember these moments because this is the part of childhood I loved the most, and the part of parenting I was most excited about…
Pretty much everything is amazing. Arty ran in while I was showering this morning to say, “Mom! You have to see this!” and then he pointed at Ella who was whooping like a little monkey. He was bent over double laughing…
Ella has the sweetest new habit of showing enormous surprise when she sees something she didn’t expect: mouth open in a perfect O, eyebrows raised. At the most ordinary little things – we raised the swing a little higher this weekend because their legs have grown so long, and she couldn’t believe it. The two of them then spent a happy hour pushing their t-shirts on the swing till they fell off (?!)
“Come see this, it’s going to blow your mind!” is one of Arty’s favourite sayings at the moment, and I giggle inside every time he says it.
His cousins gave him my mom’s old camera this weekend and he spent the whole afternoon taking photos of fairly random things (127 pictures in a few hours). Then he decided he was a game ranger, and we had to sit on the couch while he listed all the animals we were going to see – wild dog, wild jackal, giraffe, warthog, leopard, mountain lion – he rattled them all off in quick succession, and then proceeded to take photos of things around the lounge as if they were wild animals. So very sweet.
What I love about this stage is that they’re totally in it: they are immersed in the wonder of the everyday. And then, abruptly, not. We built a verge this weekend (literally! Sunday morning our outside verge was a patch of sand, Sunday evening it had a rock wall and a path and plants. It was deeply satisfying.) The guys who delivered the rocks came very suddenly and Arty was busy putting his shoes on so he could go outside to watch them unload the rocks. He couldn’t find his socks in time, so he only caught the end of the unloading, and the despair he felt was deep, and real. Similarly, when he’s stuck in whiney mode he is stuck – like a record with a scratch that can’t get out of it.
I find the rollercoaster pretty exhausting, but they are starting to be old enough that we can unpack the feelings afterwards, which is something. And the sweetness is so very sweet that it (mostly) makes up for it…
On an entirely different note, I have been listening to this song on repeat, and I love it so much I’m tempted to buy a piano. Mark very gently pointed out that Philip Glass is a professional pianist and composer, and I probably won’t sound like this right away. One day, though!
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