I still smell him in my hair.....

Goodnight Moon

Tonight there was a super perigee moon, the first in 18 years. My kids and I have a little love affair with the moon, so after sunset we put on snowpants and coats and went out to find it. It was hidden on our street, but when we got around the corner to the top of the park, there it was, shining low over the playground equipment, bright and huge and yellow. The kids ran to the bottom of the park for a better look. Ben said that it looked like a big bubble, or a balloon. Naomi said it looked like a circle. My camera battery died after a couple of pics (dang, should have checked it this afternoon), but we were entranced.
I sat down on a bench and let the kids play for a while in the darkness, hiding in the shadows, sneaking up the slides and racing down them. I listened to their whoops and whisperings as the moon lit the cratered landscape of countless footprints on the soft snow of the afternoon, now lightly frozen in the night. So much beauty and happiness, and under it a gnawing sadness because I would have loved nothing better than to be watching it on that bench with another, someone who looked up into the sky tonight and whose first thought was to tell me about it, wishing that he was there to kiss me under that wonderful moon.
We walked up to the top of the park again and said bye to the moon. I looked at the kids yelling, "Goodnight Moon!" and I remembered that the next time a moon like this comes again they will be grown.
Then we had a really good howl and walked home. Goodnight moon, I love you.

I have reached the weepy stage of exhaustion. Something has to give, and it can't be me anymore. Universe, please give.

Good quote

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
— Albert Einstein

The hopes under my pillow

So, Naomi lost her first tooth yesterday. It's the bottom middle-right, and the left is already loose. I missed it, but I'm told that she was very excited and talked of nothing else the entire day. A great deal of attention and thought was given to how exactly to ensure the tooth's safe dispatch to the tooth fairy. She finally decided on a box within a box under her pillow. The twoonie received in payment was almost completely ignored - she was just relieved that the tooth was picked up.

It seems too soon. Ben is two years older and he just started to lose his teeth last year, but it's not about the timing. She's my baby and this means more than just a tooth under a pillow. I thought that I could find a way to write about my kids growing up that didn't sound cliche or overly sentimental, but I'm not having much luck.

I can't wait to find out what they will be like when they get older, I am so curious about who they will become, what they will be passionate about, who their friends will be, what they will accomplish.

But I don't want them to be any older than they are at this very moment, when everything is fun and people are all nice to them and they invent games and make up stories and laugh and sing with abandon and crawl into bed with me and cuddle up and tell me their dreams. At this moment they are perfect. They are not limited by anything.

I don't want them to lose this moment, this feeling of everything being possible. Faster than I can believe, I know that the spaces between parents and children appear and are filled with new interests and people and independence. It's what has to happen, parents move further back, taking on more distant supporting roles, guiding gently and hoping that the basic things that we teach them when they are so close are enough to help them make decisions that make them happy later on. Some days I'm proud of the job I'm doing, other days I feel like I'm failing.
But right now, they are still perfect and it's so easy to keep them safe and make them happy and fill them with confidence so they can create the beautiful things they do.

And I don't want that to come to an end, even though I know it has to.

things you eat when the kids aren't home

I found the best bread yesterday, I should never go to Akhavan hungry - the bread, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, smoked salmon, feta, almonds, yogurt = eclectic dinner. I wasn't surprised when I woke up from a nightmare involving purple trees that talk like Dame Edna.
Could not get a last-minute ticket for the MSO last night, truly bummed because I was looking forward to it. I needed some beautiful moments.