Lessons In How Snow Falls & Other Fun Stuff

Sometimes I don’t remember to blog about the everyday bits and pieces of my life (which I  store here in a category quirkily called The Good Kind of Quirky).

About the ordinary fall days of fields and pumpkin patches, hay rides and orchards.

About the first dusting of snow that sent the four year old Emperor flying about the house peeking out windows and shouting, “It’s all over the car!” (Another window.) “It’s on the porch!” (Another window.) “It’s on my swingset!”

Lesson of the day: when snow falls, it apparently falls in blankets. It washes over everything; a bright white canvas as far as the eye can see.

Then there’s Malachi (“Mac”), the 14 month old Chief of Staff, who wakes up grinning and sings in his crib until Momma climbs the giant stairs to retrieve him.

In Mac’s world, the living room is a wrestling ring. Every other purpose–the sitting, the dialogue, the book reading, the fires, the TV–are all secondary to what the space was designed for, which is hurling your small body onto any member of the family who dares walk through.

When Chuck or I sit too long, you know–under the illusion that this is what our easy-to-wipe-down pleather couches are for–Mac runs up to us and lets out a smiley scream. Then he dashes away and plops himself down on the floor where he stares at us smiley-screaming all the more. The clear message: I want to wrestle!

And the wrestling is actually one of my favorite parts of the day. To have two giggling boys on top of me, twisting and turning, hugging and kissing, stirring up so much happy squealing. Happiness surges inside of me. It has occurred to me that my heart might give out if every moment was as happy as these.

The Emperor is crafting these elaborate pics now too. When the Sunday School teacher gives him a Bible sheet to color, he inevitably flips it over and sketches detailed Angry Birds on the back, reciting–as he goes–their various names. “Red Laser Bird” and such.

He also takes to the Magna Doodle more often these days. He uses it to convey important messages to his parents. “Dad and Mom, this is you…” He points to a blobby person with Edward Scissor Hand fingers. “And this is me being sad because you said no I can’t have a candybar for breakfast.”

Cue another blobby Edward Scissor hands moping about the Magna Doodle screen.

It’s true. We like to think we’re flexible, but we draw the line at breakfast candybars. Most days.

We spend the biggest stretch of our days puzzling over all the wooden learning toys we’ve collected. There are fraction pizzas and weights and measurement cakes, most of which get served up by the Mario Brothers or various Ninja Turtles (Pizza, you know) while I clamor on about this particular slice being 1/8th of an olive pizza.

We also cook. On many days, real-from-scratch meals. With Justus teetering precariously on the top step of his cooking stool and sticking his fingers into way too many in-progress dishes. He thinks he has particular expertise in cracking eggs, which means he regularly contributes small pieces of shell to our recipe as well as drips of yolky goo to our countertops.

This week he made his first Mickey Mouse mug of hot chocolate this season. Just the instant add-water stuff, mind you. And he yelled out about the whole process as if it were magic when the tiny dried marshmallows in the mix floated to the surface, appearing–in his mind–out of thin air.

Our hot chocolate is awesome like this.

Mac is also a bit of a Houdini in all the worst of ways. He scales baby gates as if we’ve installed rock climbing walls for his entertainment. He unsnaps his onesies and squishes out of his diaper…and smears the content on whatever things we will be sanitizing later that day.

It’s all bits of happiness and grace. Swinging and laughing. Playdoh and smiles.

We’ve rearranged and rearranged and rearranged our schedules to make this all possible. Justus goes to three half-days of preschool to subtly shift him toward a highly-socialized full-day of kindergarten coming next year. The real world is coming…it’s there looming in the distance, peeking over the horizon. And while he is off to school and while his brother sleeps (and/or Houdinis out of his diaper), I peck away at my MacBook doing the various writing and projects I questionably refer to as “my work”.

 

Tuesdays is my endlessly long work day, where a baby-sitter–Justus’ favorite baby-sitter who brings him Mario gummies and Scooby Doo graham cracker snacks–comes for four hours and I escape to the bedroom or a coffee shop where I work as late as my little heart pleases. (Thank God for a husband who is home by 3:00.)

We clear out the work from the bulk of our days so we can spend every morning and afternoon basking in being small drooly, messy, food-throwing children with their Chief Servant following close behind with wipes.

 

And in between I try to get other things done. We’ve lived here over a year now, for example, and while I managed to scrape up a 22 year old pontoon boat with red pleather sleets and two only-slightly-damaged kayaks in order to take in the Michigan lake-side colors outside, we’ve never managed to get a lick of color on the inside.

And I am a color–intense and bold, not washed-out pastels–sort.

So this month I am endeavoring to break free from the big white box we call home and infuse it with a warmer color palette–the sorts of cinnamons and golds and rusts and mild teals that I just keep repeating out in every house we live in. They’re my color crushes.

And all of these things together–warm walls and living room wrestling, Magna Doodling and gate-scaling, winter evenings by the fireplace–somehow in the chaos still, through streams of God’s grace come to equal a comfortable, be-you kind of place we call Home.