This boy, Danner Man, is 7 these days and just as loving as ever. Sometimes he shows his love by staging a surprise attack while armed with kitchen utensils, but we all show love in different ways, right? (He’ll also use a brussels sprouts stalk in a pinch, apparently.)
This girl, whose strangest nickname is Muffin Monday, sometimes wears glasses “just for fun.” She also likes to make up words and then explain that she’s using that word lately to mean something else. “Rame” means goat, because “ram” and “rame” rhyme, she’ll say. If you could hear the supremely adorable way she explains this, you’d understand why we always nod solemnly and agree that her logic is sound.
This girl, my Caitlyn Bug, recently narrated our church’s Christmas program. She totally nailed it with the poise and confidence she seems to pull from a large crowd. Her nose is constantly in a book or in her kindle, but when she comes up for air she’s full of wise and sometimes off-beat things to say. She recently read her book all the way through the Oregon Symphony, but managed to make a dozen friends at intermission.
This girl, Mackenzie (not Kenzie), recently turned 12 and has a goal to spend 1,000 hours outside in 2020. She has logged most of them so far out on a freezing trampoline with siblings, but she’s also sat on our front porch reading books on more than one chilly occasion. Unstoppable (once she gets started) that one. This is her happy place:
And this girl, Nugget, is one who frequently scores a spot in the thick of the action (see above), and also gets to be the brunt of some jokes. One of her big sisters thought it was so funny to stick a piece of injera on her forehead when she wasn’t looking. She could feel it was there, but was not quite coordinated enough to remove it herself. I did eventually rescue her but not until the rest of us laughed until we cried.
Sometimes I wonder how I lucked out with this job.
(And there are other times that are so challenging, I cry. I mention those in case another mom out there thinks they’re the only one. Far from it! The sweet outweighs the bitter by a longshot though, and the more I savor the best bits, the happier I am.)
