Snapshots #2

After almost two full weeks away from us, Willa and Ruthie were greeted this morning by the snowmen in our front yard holding a crude cardboard Welcome Back sign taped to the handle of our red shovel. No time for breakfast until after everyone had been introduced to the Christmas toys and had an icebreaking quarrel or two over them. A new game was invented involving the three new inflated rubber cows and a colorful half-dozen of children's bowling pins. Three children would straddle their cows and, giggling and shrieking, bounce across the attic floor as fast as possible, racing toward the row of pins set up by the odd kid out. First to crash through the pins won, and surrendered his steed to the pin-setter for the next round. Later on, this wild but organized pastime devolved to the barbaric practice of catapulting the cows over the attic railing and down the steep attic stairs. By the end of the day, however, the cows were dressed adorably in infant hats and fancy scarves, a teacup beneath each snout, and consigned to comfortably watch one of the innumerable shows the older girls like to put on for whatever audience they can muster.

The day was so warm for January that we were able to spend two long stints of it outside, stockpiling and pitching snowballs, constructing snow forts, and trudging around the block and back and forth from front to back yard under the supervision of calling crows and unseasonably frisky squirrels.

Cobbling the pizzas together for our traditional Friday movie night while the older children whined and quibbled underfoot, I did not notice my youngest strewing leftover popcorn across the floors until it was too late.  Having already mopped up two large milk spills from the same party over the course of the day, I knew it was no use crying over this either.

Snapshots #1

There are two snowmen in the yard. Their eyes, blueberries squirted into finger-pokes, have stained the surrounding area a disquieting magenta. Fragments of pine needles and streaks of dirt blight the lumpy contours of their snowy dermis.

If you could have witnessed their creation, the sparkly-eyed concentration invested on them by two earnest children, you might feel the same tenderness I feel as I peek through my window curtains at their grotesque forms.