weekends.

I am enjoying the weekends more than I ever have. Remember how weekends used to be full of party-hopping and concerts and cigarettes and some maybe-slightly-illegal activities?

Of course I'm not talking about the weekends of my youth. I read a lot of books. I went bowling. But I sort of imagine that's what normal, youthful weekends are actually full of.

The weekends of my now are about a trillion times better. We make carob cocoa with almond milk and agave nectar (SO delicious), we pull out the paint--and the buttons, and the stickers, and the pastels, and whatever else. We collage, we hula-hoop, we dance to the Violent Femmes. I make lists for the week ahead that I may or may not actually use. I journal with Hayden, in our respective notebooks (his green, mine a collage-y mess). We read. And if it's warm enough outside, which is actually has been, we venture forth into the world and stomp on melting snow, poke the sludgy milkshake-mud with sticks, and explore strange-looking back alleys and side-streets. 

We also struggle a little bit, just a little, on these weekends of ours. Hayden doesn't have preschool, obviously, so he's home--the best place for him to be, but have HIM tell you that...I think about you mama's out there reading this, and I wonder if you're struggling with the same things I am. (His tiny, bad temper, his tiny, rotten attitude, his tiny, defiant stomps across the floor, his tiny, determined assertiveness of himself. There are days I feel that my kid absolutely hates me, though I know instinctively that it's not so.) If you fellow mama's are struggling with any of this, my heart goes out to you, as I hope yours does to me. We need each other.

The days are beautiful--beautiful!--and yet they can sometimes drag on and on and on.

But let's just concentrate on the simple: it's still early, the sun is warming the day, there is paint underneath my fingernails, and my boy is asking for peanut butter toast. Amen.