It’s March. The snow seems gone for good. The crocuses have bloomed, the daffodils are on their way, and the kids are playing in the yard again! It doesn’t get that cold in Seattle, but trampolines, swings, and climbing domes are less fun when they make your butt wet. The rain hasn’t stopped the kids from going through the forest path to visit their friends. Last summer the kids would ask us to text other parents and see if their friends were available, and I find that tedious and irritating. Now I just tell them to go knock on their door and ask, and they do!
The last months have involved a lot of making things (edible and tactile). We baked cookies for the teachers at their old school and walked around handing them out. This was important to me because the kids didn’t have time to say goodbye when they switched at winter break. It felt like closure, and there were cookies. Lorelei and I also made chocolate covered cake donuts, and of course I made Moriarty’s Minecraft birthday cake for his laser tag party. Oh yeah. He’s 10. TEN. That really moves us into a new parenting class. Like wrestling weight classes. We were in the Squishy age class, and now we’ve moved into the Sassy class. We’re not all the way to Snarky yet. No eye rolling, but he has started doing things like saying “yes ma’am” ironically or saluting the au pair. Not sure where that one came from. But he’s still an incredibly sweet and sensitive boy. He still wants mommy snuggles every morning and smiles at me with this sincerity that melts my heart.
At school, Moriarty learned some hand sewing techniques and inspired us to make mini stuffies. The whole family went to the fabric store and picked out some lovely fleece and batting filling. Pip did a project I had shelved for a long time. When I was in high school, my mom bought a microwaveable neck heater (full of chia seeds). I used it until the fabric ripped apart a couple years ago, but I saved the chia. While the kids and I were making stuffies, Pip remade the neck heater. Moriarty wanted to do many projects, but he started with a red heart. Lorelei asked for a dolphin. You can see pics of them in the recent photos. It was very fun and we’ll be doing more of this.
Moriarty has been using his Army surplus gear to cart his Nerf weapons around and to play with his friends. This is adorable, but he’s leveling up. Rebecca bought him a functional bow-and-arrow a couple years ago and he loves it but has terrible aim (so do I, for the record). So I signed him up for archery lessons. Now he’s going once a week and learning proper form and improving rapidly. I’d love to take classes too, in the future when I have more time. He doesn’t know the rules to baseball, soccer, football, or polo, but he can break boards with his feet and shoot a milk jug at 10 yards. I think he’ll be more prepared in the zombie apocalypse.
Other Media:
Latest photos, password “mal”
Videos:
dancing to weird cat music they like
Pip and Moriarty playing ping pong