Life with Little Boys

It's Saturday afternoon and my house is clean. Floors are swept, vacuumed and mopped. Tables are polished. Tub is scrubbed. Mirrored doors and window panes are muck-free. The laundry is done and put away. As is the most of the general this 'n that—the clutter that builds up around the house during the course of a busy week. There are, however, a few notable exceptions.

One: the fireplace and reading chair in the living room are connected by a pirate bridge made of leftover foam strips from the interlocking mats we picked up for the school library. Two: the bare dining room wall is adorned with the tracing paper pages of a Bakugan story Sam spent the better part of the day creating. These things I will leave be.

My Neat Freak single self couldn't imagine maneuvering a vacuum cleaner gingerly around a 10-foot pirate bridge (which went up three days ago), and she would have thought twice about agreeing to scotch tape anything to the walls. She couldn't understand why mothers would let the house be taken over by toys, why all that stuff couldn't be squared away where it belonged. In fact, she couldn't even imagine slapping a child's artwork on the fridge...and leaving it there. Wasn't that why children had their own bedrooms? No, Neat Freak Angie was happy in clean, tidy spaces that were geared to grown-ups and smelled faintly of vanilla or pear.

As Angie-Mommy, I still very much prefer a clean house, but I don't often have a neat and tidy one. Those "signs of Sammy"—the messy evidence of his play—are part of the landscape of life with a little boy. They make my heart sing with the remembrance of his joys and frustrations as he created them and then showed them off, confident in his right to fully inhabit the house—to re-engineer and redecorate as he pleases. They're wonderful in a way that you can feel only when you are fully, completely in love with a little boy whose imaginary worlds bring energy and colour and quirkiness to your real one.

Is It Just Us...?

...Or is there a really good chance that (baby teeth aside) this will be what Sam looks like in his high school graduation photo?

And THEN ...

When Sam gets on a roll with an inventive story, it can go for hours. He strings the wild-and-crazy elements together with a not-so-inventive but delightfully emphatic "and THEN..." before taking a big breath and carrying on. Sometimes, he follows me around the house as I clean it, filling me in on the latest chapter of his fictional life. As long as I keep the questions coming or murmer the occasional "really?" or "fascinating!", he's assured of my attention (which barely qualifies as "divided," given that table polishing doesn't require much thought) and the story flows. This is how I know so much about his adventures on Tarzkon, his home planet, and how it is he came to earth to pretend to be our son. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Thing is, I haven't posted for 10 weeks. I'd need a huge "and THEN" post to catch up. Sam started senior kindergarden; and then we went on a week's holiday in Nova Scotia, where he was a ring bearer in Jacquie & Brent's wedding; and then we went to Innisfil for Thanksgiving; and then he was the Hulk for Halloween; and then Grandma & Grandpa Arnold came for a visit in their motor home; and then Sam and Jeremy went out to BC to visit Grandma & Grandpa Ashe; and then we celebrated Daddy's birthday. And those are just the headlines.

In the background of all of this, Mommy's been working on her side projects—Garnish and School Council—in the wee hours of the morning and, more often than not, falling asleep before coming to the computer at night. Hence, no storytelling. In fact, I've even fallen out of the habit of making a mental note when something is said or done that should be recorded in this blog. While visiting Spencer Robert Webb (!) for the first time this weekend, however, Angelika roundly (but lovingly) chastized me for my long hiatus from the role of "Samstorian."

And looking at the enormous gap between baby Webb and big boy Arnold had me thinking, again, about the speed at which our children transform in front of our very eyes. The old saying "The years tell much of what the days never know" came to mind. I think the days do know, but in such small ways that you have to be watching for it—you have to be tuned in to the little leaps of maturity and appreciate them as they happen. And, to remember them for any amount of time, you have to write them down.

I promised Angelika not to let the weekend pass without logging a post. It's 5:30 a.m. on Monday. My post is about not posting. But that counts :) There's much more "and THEN" to come.