1. After some dithering, we put our house up for sale. It is under contract. For the next six months, we will be living not in Texas.
2. Our youngest, Little, will be leaving his preschool, his home since he was a toddler, tomorrow. His wonderful teachers seem genuinely sad to see him go. He's our last child to attend this school, where Dubya went, as well. That's our baby, a baby no more. Next year: kindergarten. Really? That can't be right. Those five years? A flash.
3. Our middle son, Dubya, surprises us every day with some new facet of his mind and his personality. I can't say how much I'm enjoying watching him unfold and open up to us. Much of this has to do with his considerably greater comfort with his teacher this year and a couple of newfound friends who are like he is: sweet, creative, thoughtful (once they *get* it), courteous, kind-hearted, and not socially precocious.
4. TH continues to be TH, which means all the things I've ever written about him here on this blog...and some new things. He's feeling the onset of prepuberty, I think. He expresses confusion about his thinking. It's not an easy time, this age when your mental powers surpass your maturity, when your hormones play hell with both, when you're torn between being the child you still are and the cool fella you think maybe you want to be. The latter is probably never going to be something that TH typically presents, but his ingenuousness alone qualifies as cool in my book. He lately finished a fascinating if brief treatise on the tapir in honor of World Tapir Day. That's just how we roll.
5. The Viking wrestles with many issues of the early middle-aged man who provides for a family in every way, whose own family is going through some changes of age, whose decisions are not only his own to make and won't be for the foreseeable future, if ever. That's something we all have to grasp when we have children or have other responsibilities that build around us. Those duties may seem like walls closing in, I know. But it's all life, living, breathing, embraceable life, the good, the bad, and we both know it. And the two of us are just...I never can find sufficiently powerful words to describe Us, so I won't try here, either.
Me? I've just turned 43. Is that old yet? I'm looking at the coming weeks and...although I should be cringing at the prospect of continuing to write and edit for my many great clients while homeschooling two children (I've got Little now for the month of May), packing up our home (a Byzantine process involving multiple storage locations and two living spaces), and continuing to oversee our day-to-day existence, which lately seems to include a visit to a pediatric specialist at least once a week...in spite of all of this, the hyperorganizing project manager in me is looking forward to working out the knots, streamlining the work flow, stacking boxes just so in an enormous three-dimensional puzzle, and consuming a great deal of Riesling in the evenings. It is Riesling weather now, right? After all, this is Texas and it's been in the 90s for days now.
Which takes me back to #1, above. After some dithering, we have sold our house. Our anchor will no longer be Texas soil...and my apologies to those preceding seven generations, but dammit...it's just hot here. We're pulling up our anchor, unmooring, and pretty much have no beachhead past six months. But that's OK. Indeed, having done something similar to this before, I can say that it's OK because we've learned that our anchor is ourselves. Wherever we are, that's where we live. That's what we're hoping for the five of us.
