a lion, a lamb, or a stupid wooly mammoth?

Well.  This weekend, I spent just about every spare moment I could outside.  I strapped Rudy in a carriage while I filled a giant wheelbarrow with sticks and branches knocked to the ground this winter.  I strapped Rudy in a Bjorn, on me, while Marley pushed her baby in a toy carriage and mastered the pedals on a purple, sparkly, hand-me-down bike with training wheels.   On Saturday, it was sixty degrees outside.  I opened the windows.  I went for a long walk with Rudy and saw kids in the neighborhood shooting hoops and tossing a football.  Our neighbor, a kindergartner, learned to ride without training wheels in a perilous and glorious fifteen minutes on display outside our kitchen window.  Yesterday, after another balmy March day, the fresh foot of snow in our yard was gone, replaced by mud, moss, and patches of pale yellow grass.

Marley and her cousin Emma get out some early spring gear.

Todd and I got out our lacrosse sticks (his, at least twenty-five years old and mine, borrowed from the woman I'll be coaching the sport with in less than a week) so that I could learn cradling, catching, and throwing.  I will not hide the fact that I've never played from my team, but I would like to be able to demonstrate the basics without their laughing at me.

[About ten years ago, I coached high school track and was responsible for the high jump, only because the other coaches had expertise in the other field events.  First of all, I actually said things like, "Next time, try to jump higher?" when the kids looked to me for advice.  But even better, during an indoor practice at the start of the season, I attempted to clear the bar when the team was running its warm-up laps outside.  I smashed into the bar backwards and lay sprawled and bruised on the mats.  The softball coach, also indoors for practice that day, watched with his arms crossed on top of his belly.  He knew me because back in the day, he was my JV basketball coach - I am  a Townie, officially - and he said, quietly and seriously: "Don't ever let them see you do that."]

Hooray!  And then when I woke up this morning, it was snowing, and the lawn was covered again.  I yanked open a window-shade, yelled, "Bullshit!" and then went about my morning routine.  When I found Marley upstairs working on a puzzle, I told her to look out the window.  She brought her shoulders up and clasped her hands together, her eyes wide and excited, and said, "Soon it will be Christmas!"