Feels Like Something Special is Coming to an End

It is dangerously close to being a full year since I have written. I'm already losing track of the running list of ideas and things I have to capture in my head. Just the other day I was trying to remember what Josh used to say as his own take on, "See you later alligator." It took almost a full day to remember my little guy would bid farewell by saying, "Bye, Bye Turtle."

Lucy is almost done with preschool and we've had a tour of her school that she'll be going to next year for Kindergarten. I remember last year, talking to a mother on the playground about her daughter going to kindergarten. She thought for a moment and then looked at me and said, "it just feels like something special is coming to an end, you know?" I could tell it was weighing heavily on her. I sat back and watched Lucy pulling Josh up the slide by the hood of his jacket and thought to myself how happy I was going to be when Kindergarten started.

But now here I am, Lucy's Kindergarten screening in two weeks, and I get it. I totally get it. Lucy was in the tub the other day, trying to make fart noises with her armpit. I stopped and just looked at her and she thought for sure she was in trouble. Instead I jammed her hand into her armpit and tried to crank the other one, my attempt to facilitate the armpit flatulence. First she just looked at my like I was a lunatic, then she laughed and had a look of pure awe in her big, round, blue eyes and did her genuine high pitched giggle. It was bliss.

Josh is almost three now and it is almost unreal. His voice is the sweetest thing I have ever heard, his intonation, the way he pronounces tunnel as "TUnnEL" as we ride under the big city. It makes me smile from the inside out. Josh loves to imitate just about everything Lucy does. Since Lucy's school is studying planets, Josh is talking planets. I'll tell him, "You know how much I love you Joshy? To the moon and back," to which he replies, "You know how I love you Mom? To Neptune." Heart-melting goodness.

I could write about the endless times I've had to yell, "Get off the (fill in the blank)" or "Don't eat that (fill in the blank)" or "Don't hit your brother/sister with (fill in the blank)". But all of that goes with the territory - annoying the crap out of siblings and parents is a birthright I suppose. There are days when Josh and Lucy can't be together for more than like point five seconds, but when you separate them there is some kinetic magnetism that doesn't allow them to stay apart. I believe I have heard that this lasts for the next fifteen years or so.

But for tonight I choose to write about armpit farts and celestial declarations of love. It does feel like something special is coming to an end in some ways, but in many ways it feels like something special is about to begin.