"And Me All Starry-Eyed."

At least it's spring on my table, even if it's dreary and gray and cripplingly depressing outside.

Last Friday, in a blurry haze of craft store puffy chicks and freezer bags of accumulated plastic eggs, I tried to make our home feel brighter and warmer.  I think it worked.  Now, my cloches cover small white bird houses and lacy vases instead of bottle brush pine trees and piles of pretend snow.  While Rudy helped, sorting the eggs by color and yanking all our paper snowflakes off of the kitchen windows, I sang along very earnestly and loudly with the Songza Final Countdown mix.  As in, here I am placing blue and white eggs in an apothecary jar and my Valentine's Day orchid in a bone china teapot, but let's be clear: this is "November Rain," and this is "When Doves Cry," and this is Asia's "Only Time Will Tell," and I need to sing these, especially that last one, as loudly as I possibly can, regardless of what my four-year-old thinks of me as a result.

And then, I changed up the tray I used for the fall's thankful jar by covering a new piece of cardboard with leftover fabric from the puppet theater I made our girls for Christmas.  (Don't be too impressed.  Our "puppet theater" consists of pieces of a shower curtain, hemmed with an iron and Stitch-Witchery, and and then clipped onto tension rods pressed into an open doorway.  That's all.)  I was quick to point out how resourceful my tray liner was when Marley came home fresh from her first grade Reduce-Reuse-Recycle curriculum, complaining that I throw away too many things.  She's currently hoarding over a dozen toilet paper tubes, for example, and I am not a fan of holding to piles of anything for too long.  I think it's because my sisters and I have moved our mother too many times, and the first time was the most traumatic, because we cleaned out and packed up our childhood home and filled at least  TWO industrial dumpsters with who-knows-what-all-crap that had been accumulating for two dozen years.  (Actually, I know it's because of that.)  So, see, Marley?  I was reusing and reducing, and it is bright and fancy, and and please can we recycle those tubes?