The good in today:

• Being the person a stranger needed to talk to, letting her know that she isn't alone.
• Giving my time to let others show their children a new home so that the children feel more confident about where they are going.
• Staying calm through another challenging bedtime for a child. It's been a number of difficult nights, but I'm helping her work through them while still staying calm myself. "You are worth waiting for" seems to be sinking in and might be making a difference.
• Waffles.
• Making the time to exercise even thought it was 10 pm.

I learned this poem years ago, in junior high.  My class has to each learn a poem to recite, and was the one I selected.  Every once in a while, I think of it again, as I've never forgotten in.  Something about it touches me.  Perhaps it is the fact that I grew up inland, yet I always longed to see the see.  Vacationing in Maine the times that we have done it was magical.  The sound of the waves, the scent of the air.  I could sit and stare at the ocean for hours.  

Kansas Boy
By Ruth Lechlitner

This Kansas boy who never saw the sea
Walks through the young corn rippling at his knee
As sailors walk; and when the grain grows higher
Watches the dark waves leap with greener fire
Than ever oceans hold. He follows ships,
Tasting the bitter spray upon his lips,
For in his blood up stirs the salty ghost
Of one who sailed a storm-bound English coast.
Across wide fields he hears the sea winds crying,
Shouts at the crows - and dreams of white gulls flying.

Passage of Time, take two

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. ~e.e. cummings

One is not born a woman, one becomes one. ~Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies. ~Author Unknown

...and slowly, with a little fanfare, another child starts the transition to adulthood.

Creative Kids Continued

For the holidays this year, Simon received his first Erector set. He thought it was wicked cool since he has been wanting to use Vincent's forever. Simon's is the younger child version, larger plastic parts instead of tiny metal pieces.

So the boys were playing together when they popped downstairs to show me their latest creation. Instead of a car or some other traditional Erector Set vehicle-type creation they made...a helmet and sword.

It was so funny to see.

Tinker Toys

Simon and Vincent received a set of large Tinker Toys for the holidays. These are great toys; I remember building fabulous things with Tinker Toys as a kid. True to form, though, my in-laws never get quite the right thing. They found not regular Tinker Toys, but the jumbo ones, so we have Tinker Toys with wheels the size of saucers and foot-long sticks.

Anyways, Simon was just playing with them, putting wheels on what I thought where axles. No. He laid down on the floor on his back, put an axle/two wheel combination in each hand and started panting.

He made dumbbells for himself.