Spring Fevah

God how I love spring in Maine.  It always comes out of nowhere, just when you were about ready to give up on it ever coming at all.  With it comes those familiar but forgotten sounds, smells, and colors that remind us of the new life around us.  And suddenly, everyone in Maine has a smile on his face, a spring in her step, a better mood.  The world awakens from hibernation and wants to get out and do things, see friends, get fresh air, and celebrate spring.  Even my diehard winter lover has fallen under spring's spell.  Throughout the month of March, Ethan dug his heels in the mud (or snow, actually), insisting that he HATES spring and that he LOVES winter.  Every time the rest of us jumped for joy at a forecast that included only rainshowers, he grumbled and wished for snow instead.  But right around the time we turned the calendar page to April, and spring suddenly decided to join us, Ethan hesitantly told me, "You know what, Mom?  I kind of like spring."  And then a day or two later, he came down and said "listen to that beautiful sound Mommy!  Listen to all those birds singing!".   And then my favorite, another couple of days later - my January baby stepped out into the blazing sunshine, took a deep breath, and shouted, "Spring smells SOOOO good!".  And so spring has this way of surprising us every year.  We Mainers wait for it all winter long, and somehow, it's always more than worth the wait.  That spring is an overachiever, consistently exceeding expectations.  Yes, there's the mud and the rain and the cold days and the gray days, but there's also the promise.

Maine Maple Sunday - the promise that spring has arrived...right?

A first trip to the beach with the promise of a fun summer ahead, filled with sand and surf and neighborhood cocktail hours on the beach.

 Baseball!  With all of the optimism that the start of the season brings.

Ethan replacing the "0" with a "1" - this guy is hopeful the Sox will have another great year.

More green (or brown) than white in our backyard, with the promise of a garden in the distance.
The ice cream man's return to our neighborhood, with the promise of a summer filled with god-awful, intestine-rotting, outrageously-priced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pops.

There ain't nothing natural about those pops.  Take a look at the stain around Adam's mouth.

 Our first walk in the woods this spring, with the promise of more mud and less ice on our next one.

Pretending to kayak

The annual kick-off to the road race season, with Race 2 the Point at Ethan's (and soon to be Adam's) school.

And kindergarten registration for our littlest guy, with the promise of a very exciting few months ahead.

Big brother giving little brother math homework to get him ready for school

Hooray for Spring!

Leprechaun Magic

I know that there is many a mom out there who hates the recent Pintrest-inspired, Facebook-promoted explosion of holiday expectations for moms (and dads).  There was much public disdain for leprechaun mischief this past week, and the old Elf on the Shelf has more than a few enemies.  Of course, I am completely sympathetic to the fact that we moms do NOT need yet another thing added to our already overflowing plates, particularly something that involves naughty leprechauns or elves who make our houses messier than they already are!  But I'll be honest - I like making magic.  I love thinking of new funny spots for our elf, or dreaming up mischievous acts for our leprechaun, or designing an intricate treasure hunt courtesy of the Easter Bunny... Heck, I've been preparing for the Tooth Fairy's inaugural visit for years!  I have a special book (that Ethan will have certainly outgrown by the time his stubborn baby teeth decide to move on out), a special tooth pillow...I am ready!  And it's not because I'm trying to be Supermom or outdo anyone else - I admit that I would fail miserably at that.  It's because making magic is something that I truly enjoy doing.  I think I get more excited than my kids do on Christmas Eve, anticipating my boys' faces as they descend the stairs, when they realize that Santa really did come.  There is nothing like experiencing magic through a child's eyes - the wonder, the gaping grins, the eye twinkles...it's, well...magical.

So when my boys asked if we could try to catch a leprechaun earlier this week, I embraced it.  I helped them research leprechauns online, build a suitable trap, and fill it with things that might entice a naughty leprechaun.


And after they'd gone to bed, I tripped the trap (but also staged an escape route for our leprechaun), painted tiny green footprints on the floor, and filled the trap with coins and a note saying "Nice try!".
 

And when my boys woke up the next morning to see that the trap had been tripped, the giggles when they discovered the green footprints, the nervous excitement to peek into the trap, the glee at discovering the coins left inside...I ate up every moment.

And I wholeheartedly hope that me getting stupidly excited about holidays doesn't make some other mom feel inadequate, because this is just my thing.  I am lazy about cleaning my house, I totally mail it in when it comes to pretend play, and I make a terrible birthday cake.  But making magic....I'm good at that.

Part of me knows that I am clinging on to these traditions because I know they are fleeting.  Ethan made a cursory comment recently (then quickly redacted) which suggested that he has some inkling that Mom and Dad have at least some role in the Easter Bunny's antics.  He is seven, after all, and I'm not naive enough to believe that that magic twinkle in his eye will last forever.  We are dangling on the precipice of tweendom, and some days it feels like we already have a teenager in the house.  Favorite TV shows and books are suddenly "too babyish", playing pretend is less appealing, and the "I'm bored"s set in more quickly these days.  So I know.  I know my days with leprechauns and tooth fairies and bunnies and elves are numbered.  And so I'll take them now.  I'll take the extra hour of scrubbing to get that darn washable paint off the floor.  I'll take the jumping out of bed in the night to move that silly elf.  I'll take the late Christmas Eves building bikes and trampolines and wagons.  Because it's all part of being the parent of a little kid.  One of my favorite parts of being the parent of a little kid.  And though some days I wish it might, it can't last forever.

In Living Color

Since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by genetics.  I've always known that both my brother and my uncle are color blind, and I remember my mom explaining to me, at a very young age, exactly how that had happened - how the color blindness gene travels on the X chromosome, why men with their single X chromosome are therefore far more likely to be color blind than are women who would need to have two "tainted" X chromosomes to exhibit color blindness.  All this was so interesting to me, and I remember learning about other similar sex-linked traits in high school biology and then in a semester-long genetics course at Colby.  While the genetics behind the transmission of color blindness is fascinating, the reality of the trait was never much of a big deal for my family.  Color blindness was a party trick - people loved asking Paul "what color is this?", "what color is this?", "now what about this?", and he was a good sport until it got really old and he wasn't.  But it was never an issue for Paul - he has adapted and learned which colors he can recognize and which he can't and lives a perfectly normal life despite his inability to see the range of colors that most people do.  When Paul was in preschool, however, one of his teachers expressed some concern over his learning capabilities because he couldn't seem to grasp his colors.  And later, when Cuisenaire rods were en vogue among math teachers, he was at a disadvantage because he couldn't immediately recognize the orange ten or automatically distinguish the yellow five from the green six.  So while color blindness really shouldn't matter, it can, particularly in early childhood education, where so much of the learning is focused on and around color.  And so I find myself mulling over all this the other night as I fill out Adam's kindergarten (gasp!) paperwork.  A question reads: "Does your child have any known or suspected vision problems?" and I hastily check "No", as I have to all the questions before it.  But then I pause, and think, and erase my answer, instead checking the "Yes" box and writing "color blindness suspected" beneath it. 

We have assumed that Adam is color blind for a long time.  According to the rules of genetics, I had a 50% chance of carrying the color blindness gene, and if I had that gene, each of my children would have a 50% chance of being color blind.  I forget exactly how additive probabilities work, but I'm pretty sure that means that there was a 50% chance that at least one of my children would be color blind.  Unlike letters, numbers, words, and shapes, colors came slow to Adam.  Some of the first words Adam read were those on his markers and crayons - his inability to distinguish a brown crayon from a green crayon motivated him to read their names to give him a clue.  I notice him making the common mistakes that Paul makes - green for brown, light blue for pink, gray for violet.  But Adam seems unfazed by his inability to see colors in the way that most of us do.  He adapts, learns new tricks to identify colors, and asks for help when he needs it.  The other day, he was working on a Perler bead design and was having a lot of trouble finding bright yellow beads in his mishmash box of colors.  So he asked me to pull out one bright yellow bead, and he carefully placed it to the side.  Then I watched him, with painstaking effort, take out bead after bead and place each one next to the bright yellow bead for comparison.  I watched him bend down close to the beads, with his little nose almost touching them, trying to determine whether he'd found the right color.  It was endearing, and I was so proud of his effort. 

Adam's efforts don't get him all the way there, and he still mistakes his colors more often than not.  When he asks for help he says, "Mommy, can you help?   'Cause I don't see colors so well."  What I should tell him is that he see colors just fine.  Colors are subjective, and who knows whether the purple I see looks like the purple you see, or whether it really is purple at all. 

I know that this little Easter egg was "supposed" to be pastel green, but who's to say it shouldn't be tan instead?  All I do know is that we have one little determined almost-kindergartner who won't let a little color blindness stand in his way. 

February Moments

In June, we'll have lived in our house for six years.  And for six years, I've looked at this every time I close the door to the boys' bathroom:

And I've often thought to myself, "I should really paint over that."  But yet it remains, partly because I am lazy and have too many other more important things on my to-do list, but partly because it somehow feels wrong to paint over it.  We have our own little growth chart going at the top of the basement stairs, and it makes me sad to think that someday someone else will live in this house and will inevitably erase my boys' names and the physical record of just how tall they were at various points in their childhood.

These snapshots, these moments in time that we parents record and document, these are our way of freezing time, if only for a split second.  These are our attempts to capture just a few of the infinite number of moments we'd like to capture, to turn this parenting experience into a string of memories that will stay with us forever.

As the boys get older and life gets busier and "big" milestones are fewer and farther between, turning to my little blog to document our life is not as automatic as it once was.  With less to "report", weeks whiz by before I think to write.  But I am always happy when I do - happy to look over photos we've taken on our phones (gone are the days when we dragged out our big camera for extensive baby photo sessions), happy to reflect on all that we've been up to, and happy to force myself to mull over this whole parenting journey for a bit.  And when it's all said and done, and the growth chart at the top of our stairs is long painted over, I want a record.  I want this record, not just of the big "firsts", but of all the little moments that I will surely forget along the way.  Tonight, I am savoring these little moments from the last few weeks:

No school on Valentine's Day, and lots of extra time with my valentines.

Our medal count tally!  The boys had so much fun researching and drawing some of the countries' flags and recording the medals won.

Date nights, and weekends away

Finding this smiley face in a dying plant.  Apparently our Adam thought this plant was happier once he watered it.

Hearing nice words about my kid.

Being served a homemade stir fry and tea at Adam's school Chinese New Year party.

And watching adorable preschoolers sing and dance and speak Chinese.

Maine winters.  OK, I'm aware that comment's not making me any friends, but I love me some Maine winter.  Until March.  Then I'm ok with spring.

Ethan's first sleepover!

Friday night dates with my little men while my big man brings home the bacon at his poker tournies.

And more date nights (and grandparents who are forever willing to babysit!)

A new obsession in our house: trading NFL player cards.

Sorry, Sorry, and more Sorry.  It doesn't get old (nor do the costumes)!

OK, maybe I'm a little bit sick of winter...

An amazing February vacation week at the Duck House - ski school every morning and activity-packed afternoons.  This guy started the week on the bunny slope and ended it on the black diamonds!

And this one couldn't stay out of the terrain park.

Being able to all ski together.

Winter or not...testing out new bikes!

A fun weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's with the Ferenc family including many, many runs down our custom world-class luge course.

Big cousins showing little cousins how to rainbow loom.

And boy cousins getting into lots of trouble with a whole bottle of shampoo and the whirlpool.

A friendly visitor who liked Grandma's coconut cream pie almost as much as we did.

Finding love notes from my lovebug everywhere.  If you read this from bottom to top, you'll see it says "Adam loves you."

My growing, happy boys!