Lovelihood

I realize that this marks the second straight day that my daily photo features the truncated figure of my youngest. I had meant to bring the camera with us to the playground, but in the course of getting everyone shod and jacketed (turns out this step was unneccessary, but habits die hard) and sent for a pre-emptive potty break, I forgot to grab the camera on the way out the door. And I can't quite snap snap snap the pictures on the camera phone in the same rapid succession. So what I have here is a headless Bear "wee"-ing her way down the spirally big kid slide. With smudgy stockinged knees. A sure sign that a good time was had today.

Nap time announced, Bear assembles her pastel crayons, snaps them up in their case, and gathers it and the coloring book to square away into the bottom drawer, the one designated for kids' crafts. Once she and her brother are tucked in, snotty-nosed sick, heads filled with the latest Narnian installment, I fish the coloring book out to analyze Bear's work. What I find is that, while, at twenty-one months, she's still too young to dissuade of the notion that coloring needs to happen between the lines, she's been setting a trajectory towards spots on the page where color is meant to be applied. And she makes it happen. For the fourth time this hour, I'm blown away at the little person she is becoming. (This photos, of course, has nothing to do with anything, but I couldn't resist the stockinged tippy toes.)

Trying to make the case that Spring has, indeed, arrived, another set of blooms is under way. Photographic evidence of the changing of the seasons proved invaluable, because, on this sixth day of April, the sky went suddenly dark and started pelting what they call a wintry mix. I'm not one to complain about the bleakness of Seattle weather, particularly so soon after our re-homecoming. But jeez.

I don't care for the color of our house. Its rust color was off-putting on the photos the Mr. sent back on his house-hunting trip last spring, and I re-envisioned the house in a blue tinged dark gray with glossy yellow accents. Driving down the street the first time to our new home, though, I met with three houses on our block alone sporting gray exteriors. So, instead, we did up our bedroom in a cavernously deep shade and put up sunny yellow bedside lamps. Meanwhile, that aging reddish color on the outside is starting to grow on me.

I wish I had a real button collection. As it is, most of mine were released from the little envelopes attached to new sweaters and blouses with those little brass safety pins. Some of the fancier ones were embedded into the seams of the garments ensuring their proximity in a closure emergency. Others were simply salvaged off old favorites that were no longer fit for wearing. Whatever its origin, it makes a pretty meager non-collection, easily contained by the 4-up novelty egg carton that had previously held Easter chocolates.

We were upstairs playing with Duplos, Bear's building blocks now that The Boy has graduated on to proper Legos, the other day, and the kids built something that came strikingly close to Fallingwater, but with a more compelling color story. It's not the first time Frank Lloyd Wright has been re-envisioned with those blocks. And all sorts of fantastical dwellings come to life, enlivened with farm animals and train tracks and the occasional piece of weaponry. Downstairs, the Legos lead a different life, carefully put in their proper places in the the proper order according to predrawn plans supplied in the manufacturer's packaging. Occasionally, though, some pieces get loose and start banding together to create a different sort of landscape.

I still know it as Cost Plus, because that's what it was called all the time I was growing up when we'd make trips to the store near Jack London Square and pick up miniature furniture befitting a dollhouse. I remember it being a rambling, multi-storied warehouse, musty, disorganized and really giving the impression that its wares had come directly off an importer's dock. At some point, without my noticing it, they expanded their operations, opened up little stores in far-reaching strip malls and downplayed the "Cost Plus" in favor of the "World Imports" catchphrase. It might be lacking its old straight-off-the-boat aroma and charm, but I still love browsing their edibles, and, most of all, their bottled goods. Like the shiraz, direct from Austrailia, emblazoned with a luchador (bought!) and whatever the hell a fermented botanical dandelion and burdock drink is (ditto!).