I'm working on it.

There is sun.
Finally after so many months of
dark, grey, cold, wet, drab.
And there are birds.
Their chirps stun me.
Marvelous.

The ground outside is still wet from last night's storm.
But the dampness, warmed by the sunlight smells good and clean and new.
Fresh.

The bright baby green leaves
budding everywhere echo that same good, clean, new, freshness.

Spring.
Spring light.
Spring color.
Spring sound.
Spring smell.

Spring. It is really that.
A leaping - a leaping forward.
A leaping toward the good, the clean, the new.
A leaping toward the fresh.

It is this that I've waited for.
Through the long autumn months and the dim winter light.

It's summertime.  The end of it, for sure, but still summer.  My Google tells me that the astronomical summer  in the Northern Hemisphere doesn't end until September 21st.  So I know, because it's Google, that it is still summertime.

I also know it's still summertime because of how lazy our days are ... We get up, we play, we eat, we play, we snack and run and rest and read and make a mess and go to the store and the park and the beach and the pool and have last-minute-picnic-dinners downtown where we can look for carriages and ride the ferry and stop at the candy store and stomp in the fountains and laugh at the stars.

Summer-time.

The changing light hasn't come yet.  It will soon, and the days will become short and fast and exhausting, and the warmth will fade and the cold will come and then it will be gray for a bit and every day will feel like a scheduled chore.

And every day of the dark and grey I will think of the summer, and the summer time, and the summer times, and I will long for it and wait for it and hope it comes early.

And then, one day, the light will change again.  And I will see it.  And it will be spring.  And there will be days and days of longer, brighter, lighter times.  And then, the sun will wake one day in June and it will be that time, this time, one more time, again.

It's a breezy day here.  The sun is in and out of the clouds which are thick and grey and heavy with coming rain, and the wind is moving them and the trees in every direction.  The light is nice, not too bright, not too golden, not too clear.  It's hard to explain, but everything is easier to see today.

Girl-the-first is sitting on the loveseat in our school/playroom reading book after book after book.  She can't read all the words yet.  But she loves going through all her favorite ones and finding the words she knows by sight: the, a, and, is, this, on, to, in.  She finds them and runs over to me with her small finger marking the exact spot on the page - "Mama, close your eyes!  Now, look, Mama! It's 'and'!"  I like this. I like it a lot.

Girl-the-second is sleeping.  Yes, she is.  She is sleeping soundly in her own room, in her own crib, in her pink sleep sack with no bloomers on.  An afternoon nap.  After sleeping all night last night.  Well, from midnight or so to seven-thirty.  It's incredible.  And restful.  I feel a little sleepy myself.  It's almost as if getting those straight seven hours have made my body and mind suddenly conscious of how much they've missed in the last fifteen months. They both want to shut down and cuddle with a pillow for a few.  They are greedy for more slumber.

As I type this, the pages for next week's kindergarten classes are rolling off my printer.  I'm scanning them ahead of time, and am so thankful for these minutes to do this.  Just a little bit of preparation makes it all so much easier.  I feel like this about most things, but especially school.  It is so much better when my lessons are prepped in advance.  If only I could get this far ahead with my dinners, laundry and grocery shopping.

Aside from the general state of the house (toys everywhere, on everything, under everything, in everything, laundry waiting to be folded, dishes waiting to be put away, and one persistent cobweb on the chandelier), things feel good, balanced, calm.  It is a good feeling.

So many times what I know to be true doesn't translate to feeling true.  And when it does, when what I know to be true also feels true, oh how nice the minutes are.

It is a good reminder to me of perspective.  Despite the hard - despite the sad - despite what can feel like a forever of struggle - life is so, so, so good.  It is better than what we deserve it to be.  I am thankful, filled with gratitude for this goodness.

Oh. Yes.

Last night, very, very late last night, after a near-death showdown with child-the-younger over whether or not she would fall asleep in her bed, (she did finally, but alas, only stayed put until four), the boy and I managed to enjoy the chicken we'd been trying to cook for a few days.

It's hard for us to cook grown-up meals with any regularity, especially those like the ones we used to prepare back in the pre-parent days of our lives - meals with grand and sometimes expensive ingredients, cooked with special techniques and lots of wine. We manage it every once in a while, but spaghetti is seen at our table much more frequently than Linguine con le Vongole (although we actually did prepare that for Christmas last year and it was amazing).

All that aside, we finally, after returning the first, smelly package, had the chicken, the Pimentón Dulce, the Pimentón Picante, the flaked chili, and the citrus. Both girls were in bed. The grill was hot, the chicken marinated, the Stella, cold, and the football, well, it was not going so well, but what can you do? Anyway, the dinner made up for the ballgame.

Amid what seems to be one of those 'terrible, horrible, no good, very bad' days, when everything that could be a wreck actually is a wreck, the sound of a big sister working so hard to make a little sister laugh, and the successive sound of that little sister laughing at her big sister's efforts is a much needed gift.

This could've been a post about my failed, "too-cool-for-east-coast-sense-we're-from-cali-y'all" diaper bag purchase. And maybe one day I will post about that ... I do after all, have a tag for things I hate. But in a springtime fueled effort to focus on the positive, I thought I could rave for a bit about something I love. And the latest in the long (yet somehow not nearly touted enough) list of those things is my brand new, finally got it right, Skip*Hop diaper bag.

So. It's now been 4 months and 24 days since we added one to our three. Life as four is good. It is a new kind of good. A kind of good I guess you don't know exists until you get there. Because three was good, too. And I really didn't think it could get better than the good we had at three. And yet, this new kind of good changes what I thought of the word before four existed.

forget the sight of my beautiful daughter, smiling, laughing, dancing to her favorite songs. Tiny toes, bare legs in her diaper, and her floaty, flannel, ruffled jammie top swinging out around her small body as she twirls, hands high, fingers spread around and around and across our living room floor.

No matter what, I want this moment for mine, for always. I never want to forget her face, her eyes, bright and happy, shining and laughing on their own. I never want to forget the wonder of her smile and the joy, really, the absolute joy in each of her deliberately placed steps.

This moment, these minutes, they are full, full, full. My heart is warm from them and from her.

I joined a gym. Yay me!

To celebrate, I'm baking peanut butter cookies.

Yay peanut butter!

*** Peanut butter is high in protein, vitamins B3 and E, magnesium, folate, dietary fibre, arginine, ergo it's good for me, ergo, it's healthy. Yay me!

Yay Cookies!

Things I love, Part 2 in a series, continues with . . . the space bag!

Yeah, I know. But the infomercials get me every time. Sometimes I get stuck watching them for hours. It was worse pre-parenthood, because then, I had hours of free time to sit around doing nothing. Back in the day, those late-night spots always managed to hook me. Needless to say, I've seen just about any product of this nature you can think of, and I've contemplated the purchase of many of them. (My husband just thanks heaven that we don't own the Little Giant and Mighty Putty yet.)

Typically, I'm not a fan of catalog ordering, tv shopping, or the like, although if it's online, I have no issues with making an unseen purchase (evidence of my over-dependence on and trust in the medium?). And even though I have no intention of buying these items, I watch the 'shows' over and over. Could be I'm lulled into a semi-conscious state by the practiced voices of the hosts, could be that those mesmerizing lights; either way, I watch and take note, and can later recite all the virtues of said product to my leery and slightly bored husband.

All this to say that thanks to our beloved Target, I can now inspect some of this TV product for myself. And that's exactly what I did with the item known in organized circles as the space bag. I was skeptical but intrigued. Could it really make more space for me?

The answer, folks is YES! In fairness, I'm a first time user, and I've only been using for about 20 minutes. So we'll see how these things hold up over time. But, if first impressions are everything, I am Impressed with the "Big letter I". I've had 4 big bags of too-small-for-our-angel baby-clothes sitting around in the closet for several months. Each time she outgrows something, I add it to the top of the bags. The bags were nearly bursting from the strain of holding in so many clothes. But not anymore.

This morning I was able to get all 4 bags worth of clothes into 2, count 'em 2, medium-sized space bags. With the air sucked out, they take up about 6 inches of vertical space.

Sometimes things work out well. Chalk one up for me today, and one for the Space Bag. I'll be a repeat customer for sure.

I suppose that most people already know about the goodness that is color-safe bleach. I suppose that many people, people smarter than me, have already experienced the joy that is seeing spaghetti sauce come right out of a navy and white striped shirt. And I'm certain that I am nowhere near the first wife and mother to shout with glee as a particular article of clothing comes out of the wash minus the offending stain ( . . . that wouldn't have been there in the first place if you'd just listened to me, I mean I've told you fifty-million times, well, ok, 50 times then, but I've told you that you must rinse that stuff out immediately, and what the h about a bib already? . . . ).

I admit and accept that I'm a bit slow on this uptake.

But folks, the truth is hard to ignore - even if it's a commonly known one. Color-safe bleach is the savior of laundry and stain-tired women everywhere.

Let me paint you a picture of my laundry-life up until a few days ago:**

Baby-clothes, mounds and mounds of tiny socks and bloomers and jammies and shirts multiply like mogwai each night while I sleep. And I mean multiply by enough to need washing nearly every day. For the record, it's a lot of washing and a lot more folding. Add to that record that somehow, every single piece of clothing is stained with something. Yes, I said every piece.

How the cheese sauce ends up on the bottom of her bloomers is beyond my ability to discern. But it's there, and it's ground in good. There are stains on her shirts, and stains on her shorts and stains on her socks and so many stains on her bibs I'm embarrassed to put them on the child in public. And many of these stains, mind you, have not been rinsed or pre-treated or even blotted off.

So every couple of days, you could find me hunched over the utility sink (thank God for that) in our laundry room with a pile of tiny garments and a bottle of stain remover. There I'd stand, spraying, scrubbing, rinsing, praying and attempting to cajole those worn in stains out of the fibers of the clothes. A lot of the time, I could get the marks out, but most of the time, this process took hours. And at the end of it, I was sore from being stooped over and cranky from breathing in the chemicals.

And then, world, then I discovered Clorox 2.

It looks like detergent. It even smells like detergent, and thankfully, not like regular, chlorine bleach (though I have to admit that the Lavender scented one hubby recently brought home is a huge improvement in that vein). You can add it right to your washer with your regular laundry soap. It brightens colors. And, it whitens whites! But the key thing for me is that it gets stains out of colored clothes, and that is currently one of the best parts of my week.

My laundry life now still involves large piles and many loads of dirty baby-clothes. But the agonizing hours of bending and scrubbing have been reduced to a matter of minutes. The moments of worry during especially messy dinner times have nearly faded, and it's now rare to hear the phrase, 'well, that's ruined' coming from my lips.

Clorox 2 is a life-saver. And for that, it takes it's place as a thing I love.


** In the interest of full disclosure, it must be noted that while my laundry life before the introduction of C2 was disheartening, it was not as awful as that of other women who are not married to a husband who actually does the laundry. During my 'mothering' season of the last few months, I've taken over that responsibility; however, it must be noted that during the first 4.3 years of our marriage, that amazing man washed nearly all of our stuff.