fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
The Boy now focuses his attention, follows objects of interest, and consequently loses interest. Unless it’s food.
The other day, I was getting ready to feed him his soup. It was still a bit too hot, though, so I set it to the side of his chair and turned my attention to the tea bag that was making my cup of tea a dangerously unsavory mess. The Boy, not to be distracted, followed his food. And stared for a good long time.
Aunt L, passing through on her way back home in Tennessee, stopped by for a visit. It was the first time she’d met the Boy, but certainly not the first time she’d chatted with the Girl.
This was quickly obvious as the Girl began monopolizing Aunt L’s attention. “Look at this!” became the common refrain, which I suppose is to be expected of a five-year-old.
Papa, of course, was preoccupied with the Boy.
I grew up in a closed environment, literally. There was one way in or out of our housing subdivision, a fact that was of great solace to my mother as I was growing up: now strangers just “passing through.” And so I had almost complete freedom to go wherever I wanted in our neighborhood while growing up.
The only rule was that I had to be able to hear Dad whistle and get back within a reasonable amount of time.
I wish we lived in such a neighborhood now, for every time the Girl is outside playing alone, I’m a little edgy. It’s unlikely anyone would be just “passing through,” and it’s unlikely that anything would happen to her. Yet Amber Alerts, urban legend, and the Jaycee Lee Dugard case make a slightly paranoid father like me more so.
And so when she heads up the street to visit a friend, I stand at the end of our driveway and watch her head up. The friend’s parents do the same when he (or they) come back down to our place. It’s a simple enough matter, but I watch her bouncing up the street and realize, not for the first or last time, that she’s growing up, that she’s journeying from home and toward independence with a rapidity I’d been warned about but doubted for myself. And it will all repeat itself with the Boy, but I’ll be more prepared by then. I hope.
A pile of leaves in the backyard cannot go to waste. It calls — begs — for family photos.
It’s not big, but it’s all we’ve got.
When you have a backyard like ours, with so many huge trees with so many thousands upon thousands of leaves, there's only one thing to do on a late-November afternoon. It takes a bit of work at first, but the Girl loves work when it's play -- a sort of Tom Sawyer in reverse.
Yet quickly enough, the fun begins.
The Girl remembers from last year the fun of jumping in the leaves, but she's forgotten -- or simply not realized -- the fact that she weighs significantly more this year. And this means a harder impact, for leaves don't provide as much cushion as a five-year-old might assume.
The Boy, on the other hand, takes a totally different approach. Calm, curious he sits among the leaves and wiggles his feet, swings his arms, and enjoys the newness of the situation.
It's easy to credit this to his age, but there's a personality difference that's indisputable.
There's a certain explosiveness to the Girl ("You think?" responds everyone who's ever met her.) that finally finds direction, throwing leaves here, there, and just about everywhere.
The amount of leaves in her hair after this little adventure astounds. And we haven't even begun burying each other.
Still, we sometimes manage to get her calmed down within the near proximity of the Boy for a portrait.
But the calm doesn't last.
Still, it wouldn't be the same family if it did.
We're almost in quarantine. With the Boy still a little iffy from a previous illness and K sick, we have stayed inside the whole weekend. Sometimes, though, that's just what we need: a lazy Sunday morning with everyone doing what we want. L reads; the Boy plays; I hang out with my children.
As the morning wears on, I turn my attention to the Boy's lunch: a soup made of pureed potatoes, carrots, squash, broccoli, and chicken. The Boy loves it, and I can see why: it's really not that bad, despite the fact that it's a bit bland due to the lack of seasoning.
The Girl helps with our lunch, which includes an eternal favorite for L: shrimp. This time, we set her to work cleaning them.
After lunch, a walk that reveals the irony of suburbia: nature and concrete.
With a short week in front of us, a relaxed Sunday is about perfect.
WordPress's automated permalink creator tells me that this is the fourth time I've titled a post "growth." I suppose the real surprise is that, given the fact that we have two kids, I haven't used that title more often. It's a constant refrain in the house, among friends and family, even acquaintances.
"How she's grown!"
"How he's grown!"
Still, for K and me, that growth is gradual. Parents get used to seeing their children daily and the incremental changes disappear into the blur of everyday reality until we suddenly see something that shows, pointedly, how much a child has grown.
Like stumbling on an old picture.
At six months, he spills out of the chair he barely fit into at six days.
We never made it to Falls Park during our walk yesterday, so the family decided to start there today. I would have guessed, were someone to ask me, that we were too late to get much of an autumnal view, but I was happily mistaken.
This time, though, we took the whole family, including our one-and-a-half tooth Wonder Boy who seems willing to smile at just about anything.
The Boy's smile probably had something to do with my wiggling fingers and silly face, but with colors like this, though, who could resist a smile?
As we headed into the main downtown area of the park, the sun came out fully and consistently, making the Peace Center glow. We, though, were less glowing, especially the Girl, who had by then adopted an all-too-familiar refrain: "I'm hungry."
Nothing is quite as filling on a fall day as an ice cream cone,
and it never tastes as better than when outside. Or so someone told me.
