Time Sensitive Stuff

A funny thing happened on the way to the blogarena this morning.  I was sort of getting down on myself because I have only done five posts this month.  Knowing that if I didn't do another one today or tomorrow  it would be my fewest ever in a month I resolved to get one done.

It's a pretty day here, the boys are playing athletic games in the well manicured backyard and I am making a healthy lunch  I'm working on this as the boys are playing some PBS kids crap on the computer that probably teaches them something.  We'll get outside after lunch I am sure.  A bike ride or a creek walk, something will happen, perhaps the pool.

Dammit!  See what I do, blather on and on when I have to get something said...

Anyway, I was leafing through the "keeper box" considering what of the endless supply of stuff that waits there, hoping to be shared, I would use when these came up:

Marker drawings of flowers in vases done by the boys sometime last year in second grade.

They are not aging well; the colors are fading and running; the paper is brittle and is a bit crumpled.  They are not holding up.  The ravages of time will soon take away their beauty and, unfortunately, their relevance.

Honestly, my memories are not aging well either.  I once asked a group of friends with older kids what they did when they couldn't get their kids to eat this or clean up that or poop right or pee left or, whatever, and none of them remembered.  I was appalled.  Now I get it.

There's just not enough room in my heart for all of it.  The joy that was watching them watch a fire roar up in the living room, that memory, is supplanted by the lazy memory that is a summer at the pool.  Trying to keep up with books they are reading now leads me to forget their early favorites.  It wasn't until I watched them eat a bag of chips between them, that I remembered to remember thinking they'd never be clever enough to eat anything crunchy.

And then a wave of images of bottles and soothies and diapers and giggles and knocks and trips and wonder and joy and fear and hope rolls over me and I realize, I can't.

I can't be expected to remember all of this, can I?  Could you?  Do you?


I suppose that's why I continue to poke around here, blundering one way and then another.  I am trying to remember this stuff, boys, really I am, but growing up is complicated and trying to watch it and guide it and live it sometimes gets in the way of remembering it.

Don't worry, we took some pictures, too.