Spring in Utah is an elusive thing. This year in particular illustrates how difficult it really is put your finger on a calendar date and say, "Yes, spring is here as of April 7th." It seems like each day as I pile the kids in the car for our ride to school, there's a weather dialogue and it usually goes like this:
"Mom, when is it finally going to be warm warm -- like summer?"
"Well, sweeties, it's spring right now and --"
"How can you tell it's spring, Mom, there's snow on the car!"
"Well, that's just the way spring goes. It might be warm for a day and then rainy and cold for a day or even snowy."
"That's what you say every day, Mom."
Now of course we are having some splendid spring days, but these serve only to create a false sense of spring security and a couple of days later my tulips are flattened by soggy snow.
The kids, however, seem to grow as if their bodies are in perpetual spring. Stella has grown more than five inches since her last birthday, and her intellectual growth is even more stunning; if I need something in our house, she knows where almost everything is and she's really improving her reading. Emerson is a full-fledged super reader who had to convince the school librarian to let him check books out of the second and third-grade sections. He writes these amazing, fully illustrated stories about our pet lizard, Bluee. Atticus is speaking in complete sentences -- all the time, even when I beg him to quiet down for a few seconds -- and is obsessed with strawberries ("strawbreeze"). I can't believe he's already two. He got a couple of guitars for his birthday and he loves to dance as he plays them. He's such an assertive little sucker who fully comprehends the noisy lengths a third-born must go to in order to get the attention he so richly deserves.
For the last couple of months, we've been trying to sell our house in order to buy a larger house around the corner. And although we've had a couple of close calls and 30 showings, we've had no offers yet. This means that my full-time job is cleaning. And I'm not talking putting toys away -- I mean floor-to-celing scrubbing and putting EVERYTHING away. I've officially been driven to obsessive-compulsive cleaning habits; I stare at the smallest speck of dirt like it's my life-long sworn enemy and I extinguish it's existence with ruthless efficiency. But with the deadline for the sale of our home approaching, I'm taking solace in the fact that no other houses are selling either and that at least our house looks the best it ever has.
