Anyway

It's not that I don't have anything to say.

Lord knows that inside my head stands a towering stack of hastily scribbled descriptions of the days' events that touch my heart and bear remembering.

Scrawled on imaginary post-it notes and on the figurative backs of envelopes are word pictures of exuberant tots gathered around peanut butter and jam for a picnic outside the Smithsonian, and three subdued siblings snuggled under hotel sheets, gazing out into a Manhatten springtime night for the first time.

But these mothballed ideas are nothing but seeds meant to germinate and grow into longer stories. They, however, are already collecting dust and reaching their shelf life and I've no time to put them out here to grow and thrive and be beautiful for all to see.

***

She finally lost that stubborn front tooth on Sunday.

It had been stuck in an awkwardly protruding angle, hanging by the smallest possible contact of gum to tooth for nearly three weeks. At last, with a little help from a gentle yet persistent Papa, it broke free.

He has learned how to scoot on his pedalless toddler-sized bicycle. He deftly weaves between his two-wheeled big brother and sister on the street in front of our house. He can scoot almost all of the way around our bike loop, and can make it to the playground, if not yet home again, too. Just give him time.

After much prayer, weighing of pros and cons and deliberation, we've decided to send him to kindergarten in the fall.

He'll be 5 on Monday. He's ready for something else -- bigger than this house, and being second in line for everything. It may involve a big yellow bus, too, which is just too awesome to fathom.

***

Tomorrow I'll spill off the side of my mattress at around 7 a.m.

There's breakfast and coffee and the paper at first, then school -- we have four weeks to finish five weeks of math lessons, three chapter books and a handful of writing assignments and projects.

I'll pepper our school morning with laundry and dishes and the administrative duties, such as signing forms for classes and camps for the summer and fall and ordering supplies for Calvin's birthday party and Liliana's dance recital.

There's nature class in the afternoon, then dinner followed by the usual bedtime routine and an hour or two of working on the sewing project I'm working on for a friend. There, the day ends and a new one just like it is a sleep's day away.

***

One morning, decades from now, light will filter in through the bedroom window, signaling the start of my day. I'll have to focus bleary eyes on the clock to know the time.

I'll smell coffee wafting forth from the kitchen, and hear Nick pinching the crinkled corners of newspaper pages between his fingers in our otherwise silent home.

My mind will blink on and I'll ponder my options for the day. The choices of what to do and when to do them will be entirely my own. I'll have no need to wonder what anyone else will need from me that day.

And there will be plenty of time for writing. Will there be any good stories to tell?