On the afternoon of the 31st I decided to take my troops – all two of them – to the library. I had seriously run out of things to do and the library is a good way to kill an hour or two.
As we headed up to the second floor one of the girls alerted me to the tree standing in the foyer of the library.
For the childless reader, understand that offspring like to point out, like, EVERYTHING. And they’ll do it repeatedly, even when it’s something that is seemingly not very exciting and dare I say, inane. I can’t begin to tell you how many times, for example, Emma or Sarah have pointed to a squirrel on the lawn/road/tree. LOOK MOMMY, A SQUIRREL! A SQUIRREL! A SQUIRREL! And Every Single Time the sighting is a Brand New Experience. It’s as if they’ve never seen one before, or as if it’s a Siberian tiger is running up a tree trunk or an elephant hoovering up the seeds that fell from the bird feeder. You, as a parent, are compelled to stop what you’re doing, turn, and look. Every freakin’ time. When you have the patience, that’s great. You say, hey, that’s great! How great! But when you’re mentally dangling on the very last thread of a very worn rope, and you’ve stop turned and looked at 176 squirrels in one single day, well, let’s just say it’s hard to drum up the enthusiasm. In fact, you have to dig deep for a crumb of friendly and genuinely-expressed sentiment … which has suddenly proven itself to be as elusive as a dodo bird in Manhattan.
So we were at the library, walking up the stairs, and one of my children asks me to look. Ok, so I look. My darling actually pointed with good reason. My favourite ornament, this tree-topping angel, (pictured at the bottom of this post) was at the top of the library tree! How strange it was to see her there. She was a newer, cleaner cousin of the one we had at home. Obviously not as cherished as mine. But still – it was nice to see her. I thanked the girls for pointing her out to me. And inwardly, I chastised myself for my impatience.
