craving color

 
I'm sipping my second cup of coffee; I brewed decaf since it's afternoon, but I'm pretty sure the regular stuff doesn't have much of an impact on me, at least not to my ability to sleep. William is reading books, Henry is working on puzzles. I'm feeling itchy. Not the woolly sweater kind of itchy. The kind of itchy that makes me want to pack the boys up along with a suitcase full of swimsuits and call Patrick to tell him to meet us at the airport and jump on the first plane to Mexico, kind of itchy.
I'm craving color; the colors of sidewalk chalk on a warm sunny day. But we're buried under inches and inches of snow, so we settled for watercolors.

And instead of sitting bare toe-to-toe on the hot concrete outside, we sit elbow to elbow all around the table.


I watch Henry paint the strokes to make the names of our family. I wonder when he got so big; big enough to write, big enough to spell, big enough to call me 'mom'. He is so content in his house, with his family; it's his world. While I want to be sure as his mom to broaden his horizons, I also want to nurture his love of home and being cozy within these four walls. I know it won't always be this way, that he wants to stay home and is content with just being here.



Sitting here at the farmhouse, under the gray sky, well...it's not Mexico. But it's good. There's goodness in touching elbows and sharing paintbrushes and making bright colors appear on plain white paper. Goodness in huddling around the table, staying in, just letting the distractions of what's outside fade away. Until what emerges is really what is most important at the core. Our family; we're together and that is oh, so good.