Daily Monster, I hardly knew ye

For 100 days, Stefan Bucher drew a monster every day and posted the video of its creation to his blog, encouraging commenters to make up a story about the monster. I caught up with Daily Monster on about day 85 so I feel a little cheated to lose it so soon. But you can see all of the archives at his website. Enjoy!

Silver linings...

Now that it's been over a week since my crushing disappointment, I'm ready to play a little game of "on the bright side." The deal on our dream house fell through last week and, ever since, I've been moping...slurping away at a bowl of pity soup with a garnish of poor me. But I'm done now. To prove it, here's a list of silver linings I've come up with:
- now we have disposable income again!
- we won't have to box up the whole household and move
- bigger houses are just more rooms to clean
- we can travel instead of paying a significantly higher mortgage
- we can pay for our kids to go to college instead of " " " "
- we can pretty much do lots of things instead of " " " "
- I can replace our hammered sofa
- who wants a beautiful turreted Queen Anne Victorian on a tree-lined village street, anyway?

Well, maybe I'm not completely over it yet.

A stretch of charmed luck

We're in DC this week for February break (don't be too jealous...the down side to this week of school vacation is we don't get out of school until almost Independence Day). For some reason we've hit a vortex of good fortune. We must look like the Clampetts freshly arrived in California because we are being treated like refreshing novelties everywhere we go. Apparently tourists are uncommon in mid-February (or we really do look like hicks or a traveling circus).

Our trip down here was not only uneventful but even enjoyable and shorter than we anticipated. We arrived and the hotel clerk upgraded us to a two-bedroom suite. The weather took a balmy turn the day we arrived...apparently the first time above freezing for 25 days...and it's in the 50s today. The lady at Krispy Kreme gave us 5 doughnuts for the price of 3 (this one particularly delighted M, who suggested we continue testing this generosity every few hours). The hotel provides not just breakfast but also dinner!

While I am enjoying this blessed good fortune, I can't help thinking--we are due a really nasty piece of bad fortune in the near future.

I realized today that it's been several months since S has deigned to hold my hand in public. He used to voluntarily hold my hand, even on the way to school, just reach out nonchalantly and link himself to me for the walk home. Sometimes there would even be a skiphop as he trotted along next to me, matching his boy-sized strides to my mom-sized ones.

I wish I would have known the moment of the last one. I would have savored it more, looked down on the sun shining on that cute swirl of hair at the crown of his head, maybe squeezed his hand to punctuate that last hand-to-hand that would launch him into middle childhood. But then I would have cried and nobody wants that.

"...the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less" (Anna Quindlen).

So savor, sieze the day.

For my valentine

Why a picture of Thai paper lanterns on Valentine's Day, you ask? Quite simply because this is what my heart feels like when I think of you. Hundreds of glowing lights. Here's to you, GLW!