Yesterday, you napped for about three hours, which was long enough to sleep through a tornado hitting North Minneapolis. Three houses of friends were damaged, either from trees falling or roof damage or worse. Heidi and Garry lost their whole garage. But nobody was hurt, not even pets, and so we have plenty for which to be thankful.
It amazes me what you sleep through sometimes. Thunder storms, fireworks, sirens, bad kung fu flicks. We are in quite the bed time rut these days. Bath, snack and books, and then we just turn your fan on, sing you a couple of songs, and leave you to put yourself to sleep. Sometimes we hear you talking, although we don't know you're saying or how you're entertaining yourself. If often makes me want a video camera in your room because I'm terribly curious. But you don't seem to stay awake too long, which is good. And then in the morning, it's always interesting to see where your stuffed animals have ended up. They seem to move around quite a bit.
When it's not pouring rain, it's finally nice enough to be outside after dinner. Sometimes that makes going up for bath time a little harder, but that's okay. One of the funny things you've been doing outside is trying to fit Dad though one of the holes in the side of your climber. You push on his back as if you're actually going to put him through a hole barely the size of his head. It's quite funny to watch. We had to find a carabiner to use on the gate latch, because you learned how to open the gate, and as soon as the gate is open you are off and down the sidewalk. You still love to run everywhere, and chase us, and have us chase you. When you run, you hold your arms stiff at your sides, and it gives you this kind of penguin waddle. It's both endearing and entertaining.
You've started really enjoying stacking things and making towers. We stacked up all of the buckets in the bathtub one night, and now you stack all kinds of things. You stack up tall towers of Mega Bloks. You stack your stuffed animals. I stacked your sippy cup on top of a covered tupperware dish the other day, and now you stack your sippy cup on all of your dishes. But you've also figured out that the real fun of stacking things is in knocking them over.
Other than severe weather, it's been a good month. We bought a different car this month. We traded the SER in for a Mazda3 hatchback. It's been the first little car that you've ever driven around in, between our minivan and Grandma and Bapa's big van. It's nice to have a car that is more reliable and gets better gas mileage. I was always nervous driving the SER; I never trusted that it wouldn't strand me somewhere. So it's nice to go back to only driving the minivan when we really need the cargo space, or when we're traveling. It would be very nice to see the amount of money that we spend on gas go down. Bapa and I were talking the other day about how I remember stopping at O'Malley's gas station on the way to the Cottage, and gas was less than a dollar a gallon. Yesterday, I got excited when I saw gas for less than $3.75 a gallon.
On one hand, it would be easy to lament that times change, and seemingly not for the better. Gas never seems to get cheaper, and O'Malley's doesn't exist any more because the highway moved, and that's a part of my childhood that's just...gone. And yet, I don't lament the passing of time. I like my life and my self now, and it was sometimes a hard process to get to this point. It's painful to learn certain lessons about life, like how to tell if someone is a real friend, or how to choose an apartment well, or how to take criticism from a teacher or boss. I hope that you will see the passage of years as something to respect without feeling dismayed by what may or may not have happened during those years. Life will never happen exactly the way that you plan it, not even when you plan it as obsessively as I do. It is still hard for me to look at choices I have made and to be truly at peace with them. I'm much more likely to think, "I should have done that differently," and to feel some regret. But it helps to think that every single choice I made was leading me here, where I get to be with you and your Dad and our whole family. There is nothing that I would change about that.
Love,
Mom
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