Slowing My Roll

 I am keeping a running list on my chalkboard.  There are 16 days left of summer.

Grayson doesn't want to talk about it.

"Hmph," he snorts in the way a little baby deer would, "I don't want to talk about the future," he reminds me.

So we don't.  I keep the days tallied to myself, behind the sink sponge, where only I see the countdown 1 million times a day.

The thing is I'm sad the summer is ending  for him.  I couldn't be more flipping happy myself but he deserves more time off.  He has been so good, so flexible, so helpful, so my Diggy Boy that I want to repay him and show him the BEST summer a five year old boy can imagine.  This probably is much easier than I'm making it out to be.  He is over the moon ecstatic with the small things.

 

He's like a modern day Tom Sawyer that way. Last week, someone drew "Fruit Day" from the theme jar and nobody knew what the hell to do with that so we came up with an alternative. "Camping Day!" Grayson decided and we all cheered.  Inside tents are cool.  We leave post haste to buy stuff to make one.


Within seconds of entering the thrift store (What?  You expected REI from this frugal mama?), Grayson found a flimsy rope laundry net and his eyes danced.  "Mommy!  A fishing net!  We can use this for our campsite!"  I adore this boy's imagination and glowed each time he "casted" over the couch, the piano, and despite my blessing, the Sparrow nightly.  (Sadie is much too sophisticated for such trifling things.)

His other big finds for our "campsite" were:

• a red flashlight
• small wicker hatchet looking thing that is lined in purple felt and adorned in glass diamonds
• "fisherman's" hat (canvas cap, The Gap, summer collection of 1996)
• old yellow blanket that I dubbed "Old Yeller" because, well it looks like we should bury it

If the list of treasures isn't enough to break a mother's heart, Grayson's unbridled excitement to put it all into action was making me completely mute with pressure.  I could not disappoint this child.  We had to make one incredible indoor campsite and make it now!  I nearly drank an entire pot of coffee just to get out of neutral.

By the time Andy came home, we had it all together and the kids spent all of 78 seconds playing in it.

  25, 26...

32, 33...

49, 50...

78, 79...DONE!

They decided not to spend the night under a Tuscan party light and took themselves back to their proper dry walled bedrooms.

Then I collapsed in a heap on my own bed, wondering when I will enjoy this part?  My kids are growing literally every night.  They go to bed with pudgy legs and wake up with the limbs of a gazelle.  Why am I not bursting at the seams with happiness and joy?

I want to be here.  Not in my head, not rushing around like a squirrel on bath salts.  I want to be in the moment just like all the blogs I read talk about.  This doesn't last and I don't want to miss this!

But I fear I am.

When do you stop doing and just soak up these fleeting times with your kids?  When do you stop worrying about the yogurt cup in the fridge without a lid that is practically screaming, "Listeria!!!"  When do you ever catch up to exhale into your lovely anorak and matching slippers?  When?!?!

Maybe it's too hard when there are things to remember by way of microscopic paper corners?  And when your brain is working on -oh about six years - of sleep deprivation (self induced sleep dep now as I cannot turn off BRAVO if Andy Cohen were interviewing guests in my bedroom himself.)

Maybe I'm trying too hard.

Maybe it's coming and I just need to find patience.  It must be hiding with the my pre-nursing tatas I can't find either. 

Maybe it's here and I should unplug the coffee pot.

I guess that's one reason I keep this blog.  So I can look back on a day that rioted past me like an angry nest of bees and remember it more slowly than it happened in my crowded mind.

I hope, for all of our sake, when we get to heaven, we are allowed to watch our life with a remote in our hand.  If so, I will pause the sh*t out of these years and watch them slowly with a powder-faced Sadie to my right, a healthy Tillie to my left and a spunky Sparrow who no longer has to run from a wayward laundry net.

It will be good to remember slowly.