second helpings, you betcha! please pass the ollie.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Sticks, Rocks, Grass, Repeat
This is what spring looks like in my house. Piles of sticks, pockets full of grass and wilted flowers, tiny hills of rocks. And when I don't have the cardboard nature box ready for the day's haul, it all goes right on the kitchen countertop. Handfuls of dirt and cups of worms and all. Glorious spring.
To my boys at bedtime, I say--and have always said--"I love you from earth to sky" with only slight variations. Cass comes up with some pretty amazing, if not winding and long-winded, always-changing variations of his own, involving traveling around the moon, the stars, several planets, into distant orbits, down infinite rainbows, until finally coming back to the earth.
In such classic Ollie-ness, Ollie has a much more succinct, never-varying response:
M: I love you from earth to sky. O: Like a rocketship.
It's his standard answer, tried and true, almost every night.
So when I asked him a few weeks ago what he wanted for his birthday, and he said "a wocket!", it packed a more emotional wallop than most three-year-old birthday rocketship requests. I spent a couple days building a cardboard rocket and space station for him and his buddies to play in, and our friend from Supino made a pizza shaped like a rocketship. The party was as wild as Ollie--in an intoxicating three-year-old kind of way. That night, falling into bed more exhausted and exhilarated than ever, he whispered "I love you like a rocketship" as I cuddled in beside him, and I knew exactly what he meant -- soaring, bigger than life, more than anything in this physical world. "I love you like a rocketship, too, baby boy."
A few notes about these matching Christmas sweaters:
1. They weren't both completely finished Christmas morning.
2. When I finally finished both--yarn ends tucked in and all--they didn't fit over their heads and I nearly gave up the needle forever. Do you have any idea how badly it sucks to spend two months making the most adorable sweaters, anticipation building with every ridiculously expensive skein of yarn, only to FINALLY finish them and the neck holes will not stretch over their heads, no matter how vigorously you try to pull, yank and rip apart? I'm surprised they are not terrorized by these hand-knit torture devices.
3. Once I finally pulled myself together and learned a better, looser cast-off (sorry for the technical details) from a friend, they did fit and are indeed as adorable as I imagined. The boys love them.
4. After wearing the sweater to school for the first time, Cass came home and lamented: "Mom, I have bad news: I can't fly!" I wrote a story for the boys for Christmas about two brothers whose mom made them magic sweaters that allowed them to fly. It seems silly in retrospect, but it never occurred to me that he might think there was some truth there.
5. The boys look identical in that first photo, above, don't they? And it has nothing to do with the sweaters. Look at those faces!
Cass came home from school with warrior paint all over his face. It was his teacher's birthday, and they also made hot fudge sundaes. She said that most kids just drew a few little pictures on their cheeks and called it a day, but Cass and his best buddy, Henry P., spent the better part of the afternoon making sure every bit of skin was heroically marked. God, I love Waldorf.
