Happy Day

Echo is cleaning for St. Patrick's Day. We aren't Irish, or as parents particularly attached to this day, but when she heard the news she went racing down the hall in her green pants shouting in a baritone: PAPA! PAPA! IT'S ST. PATRICK'S DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And she's organizing the toys because it's St. Patrick's Day and she wants it to be all ready when we leave the house. I said: Oh yeah? Where are we going? and she said: Oh! Out into the WORLD!!!

It's one of those days. The kind where you shake your head and think where in the world did this marvelous being come from? So happy. So delightful. Right now it's sunny but the trees are dusted with snow. Beautiful. And Echo keeps saying: Mom. Look. Among the trees. Among them. Wow. and then skip jumping about because she can not contain her exuberant self.

I have things I'd like to "get done" but I keep gravitating toward her. Hunkering down at the table and assembling one of those plastic bead thingies that you melt with an iron. First I made a fish. Then a rainbow. For no reason at all other than to be in her orbit. Echo meanwhile composed a note to our grocery store complimenting them on the granola and decorated it with abstract designs.

Later she ran toward me. Mom! For the first time in my life I tapped on the window and someone walking by turned to look at me and waved!!!!!

It's like each moment is a postcard of "Ideal Life With Child". I won't grip it too tightly, I'm not foolish enough to forget tears and kicking legs. But I'm also not dumb enough to miss this part.