A day in the life

Wednesday:

The day began, as usual, with Henry popping into the room to say "Good morning, Mama. I found Baby James! What Henry eat?" After breakfast (for Henry, a bowl full of raisins, and some banana chunks he arranged like Stonehenge on the edge of his chair instead of eating), I took the boys out to the back yard and sat in the cold for as long as I could stand it. Henry played in the mud. I cried.

Shivering, muddy, AND weepy was too pathetic, even for me, so I decided to pull myself together and try A Craft Project--the sort of organized child-enrichment activity I don't do nearly as often as I intend. And it was a success! Last fall, in a spasm of maternal ambition, I made fingerpaint, but Henry, who is erratically fastidious, hated having goop on his hands. Three months and/or brushes made a big difference:

Full disclosure: This is actually today's painting, not yesterday's. The palette is different, but the vernacular's the same.

After lunch, instead of napping, Henry alternated between sitting on my head & walking on my spleen, so I just shut him in his room and left him there for a bit while James & I had a tete-a-tete.

Mid-afternoon, Molly came over and we bundled everyone up in the stroller & went around little 9th Street park until we were dizzy. After our walk we snacked on leftover cheese from my cheese-of-the-month club: a Christmas present from Dad. (The FedEx lady looked pretty taken aback by my expression when the February delivery arrived.)

Peter came home, gave Henry his bath, we all went to bed and I cried myself to sleep. Yep, it's really that fun over here these days.

Thankfully, there are bright moments too: Notes from my brothers (honoring our pact to exchange inconsequential e-mails more often); conversations with Molly about Middlemarch and Chinese poetry and the complexity of families; hilarious diary entries by long-dead British folk chronicling the aftermath of World War II for posterity; gossip magazines supplied for therapeutic purposes by Peter and rich with the raw material for Schadenfreude.

And of course, my boys. Henry has been trying to share his knowledge of the world with James, lately, so he holds stuff up in front of James's face and tells him about it, e.g., "This is a purse, Baby James... purse," or, while approximating a yoga pose, "Here's an elbow, Baby James." And James beams.

Visits from Virginia are bright spots, too.