Lovelihood

The Boy, on our walk home from school today, remarked that our street had become so beautiful with all the flowers growing in dense, shocking splashes of impossible color. Even the poor snail infested shrub we examine every morning on the way in, dotted with little baby snails, is now more white with flora than its usual blah-green shrubby color.

The Boy doesn't know that Dick and Jane and Vampires is a send-up of an actual kids reader. All he knows is that he can read through its 144 page entirety rather easily.

Straight from school, we set off to dinner and errands, coming home in time to rush through the bedtime rigmarole. So we didn't have the usual unpacking of the backpack, the great reveal of worksheets and drawings and random items sifted off the playground and deemed worthy enough to haul home in his pack. But today's loot was pretty excellent, a paper and popsicle stick rendering of the musical ("Moosical" as it were) the Kindergarteners put on two weeks ago.

What's left after de-papering the english paper piecing. The little paper hexagons, I can reuse. But all the pesky bits of thread just attach themselves to whatever I'm wearing and become lint tray fodder. Suddenly, my all black wardrobe seems less sensible.

Cut up some new hexagons to freshen up my current mix of ready-to-assemble pieces. This thing might just take forever.

By the week's end it'll be back to the usual forecast of wet and cool. And we'll still venture outside, bundled up and complaining about rain. But today, the first 70° day of the year, I, like any good Seattle parent, threw open all the doors and shoved the kids out back to play. Bear quickly ditched socks and shoes, scampering around, slimy-toed, while her brother consorted with the neighbor girl, hashing out plans to force a hole in the fence, through which they would set their own playdates. The cat, not one to pass up an open door opportunity, stayed close by, lest the door close on her prematurely.

The Boy is off at a chess tournament, giddy at the novelty of hotel-staying and event-swag accumulation. Us girls, left behind, have to make our own excitement, today, in the form of microwave potato chips dusted with paprika and kosher salt. Not bad at all.