…it’s just that there’s all this WEATHER, fall slamming down on top of summer like a set change, the backdrop with its cold nights and hurricane-force winds thudding down on the seasonal stage — BAM! — to obscure summer with its clear blue skies and heat-thirst and exposed skin. BAM! Fall! We’re done, and stop snivelling in the corner over there about how you want if not just simply MORE summer then at least a GRADUAL shift from one season to the next. Buck up, Buttercup. AUTUMN! IS! HERE!

It’s jarring, like the alarm that woke me this morning, the alarm we will now set regularly, for the first time in six years. We just haven’t had to set alarms — notwithstanding the fact that my commute is a hallway or that our schedules are flexible, we’ve always have children to wake us well before seven, and if they didn’t we took it as a welcome surprise. But this year, with the start of first grade and twice weekly preschool and children who, miraculously, can be relied to sleep at least occasionally through the night and past sunrise, the alarm feels necessary. I’m grateful for it, if grateful is the right word. More specifically I am grateful for the perceived order it confers over the household, over enough time to shower and dress and eat and put together lunches and backpacks and get children to two different locations every single day. I have been fighting, in fact, for the alarm for a while now, fighting against Rachel’s laissez-faire attitude about getting up any earlier than we possibly have to. But last night, the night before the first day of first grade, when I suggested setting the alarm for 7:30, she actually countered with 7:00.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said.

“Every day?” I asked.

“Every day,” she said.

“Pinky swear?” I asked.

“Pinky swear,” she said, and we shook on it. And then I turned to face her and said very slowly and very carefully, “Okay, because I want you to know that I am fully and completely committed to setting the alarm and two weeks from now you can’t conveniently forget that we had this conversation and decide that you don’t want to set it. Because this is very important to me. I need you to understand that.” And she patted my head.

To be perfectly honest, the alarm didn’t actually wake me — my own internal, autumnal clock did just that. With some help from Isaac, who insisted, circa 6:30 or so, that Rachel go cuddle with him. I lay awake, in the dark, eyes closed, until the news came on and I learned that Australia does indeed have a Labour government and that a 90-year-old man was found alive in the bush in northern Manitoba and I thought how odd it will be to be somewhat informed about world events from here on in. And then we awoke and there was indeed enough time to shower and eat and dress and take two children to two different places. Just barely enough time.

And of course it had to rain, pouring down in grey sheets over me and Rowan as we picked through the puddles and made our way to the gymnasium for the handoff. He’s been fairly low-key about starting school this year, alternating between nonchalance and calm proclamations that he’s simply not intending to go, the way he might decline an invitation to a birthday party. But he hopped gamely out of the car and held my hand as we walked through the doors and through the hallways to the gym. “Oh look,” I kept saying, “here’s Jacob’s dad, and there’s Julie, and Erin and—”

“Mom,” he kept saying, “stop telling me every time you SEE someone.”

And then we were in the gym, and he was in line, and his teacher shook my hand and I caught glimpses of some of the other kids in his class and some of their parents and Rowan kept hitching his backpack up over his shoulders and looking very small and grown-up all at the same time and I caught a glimpse of one of his classmate’s mothers who looked like she was about to cry and you know, a therapist once told me that my tendency to cry so easily — my hyperemotionality — is a sign of a body in crisis, under stress, and to that I simply say, Pah! I am a Goldberg. We cry. Have you met my father? A cryer. Me? Cryer. My five-year-old son, who today started first grade? Two nights ago, after watching an airplane move its way through the sky, I sang to him the first few verses of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and he asked me, holding the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, to please stop singing, because it was just a little too sad.

Rowan did not cry. And, to my credit, I held it together until I exited the gym and another mother asked me how I was and I gulped. And then another mother came by and took one look at my face and hugged me. And then another. And then we all made our way, slowly, via the first-grade lockers, outside, where we stood making small talk, until I shuffled home, tears mingling with raindrops on my cheeks.

PS: One year ago today

PPS: Two years ago today

I guess I should write a post about how this image captures perfectly what it’s like to live with children. Something about how they get the soft white inside, while I’m stuck with the crusts.

But the thing is, I like the crust. It’s the best part.

On a good day, everything works out just fine, really.

Honestly, I stare at these things the way I used to stare at a couple of babies as they slept — sneaking back for just one more peek, scanning them for each new development; each unfolding, each unfurling. It’s addictively satisfying (or is that an oxymoron?), all that potential.

Rowan stares at them, too — his “beautiful seeds.” He pushed for flowers, lots of flowers, over vegetables, and now is the proud papa of an egg carton or two of giant sunflowers, pansies, and delphiniums. Me, I’m all about the beets, bats about the beets, nuts with the beets — you get the idea. Rachel seems to have a soft spot for the peas and beans. The plan is to raise property values by turning our front yard into a series of 16-square-foot, raised vegetable beds — square-foot gardening to replace our sea of anthills and dandelions. (Although, after reading this, I’ve been inspired to gather dandelion greens.)

I stare at the seeds the way someone else very little stares at his new lava lamp. Which is to say, adoringly and obsessively. Yes, of course it makes perfect sense for a nearly three-year-old to have a lava lamp: what could possibly be inappropriate about a toy that heats up to skin-burning temperatures, is made of glass, and filled with liquid? Still, he fell in love with it at a penny auction, and then won it, and now we turn it on at bedtime and at nap time, and he lies there, basking happily in its red glow, until he falls asleep.

And then I sneak into his bedroom and turn it off, but not before staring at him in his dinosaur pajamas for a few minutes, his thumb halfway out of his mouth, various bears scattered around the bed.

Far out.

The car is aging.

I mean that, of course, in the sense that the car is — like the rest of us — getting older. But I also mean that the car ages me. As in, I gain a couple of decades whenever I slide behind the wheel of our late-model, Big-Three sedan. It is — and I use this term fondly — a dad car, a car your father might drive, a car my father did drive for several years before upgrading and generously bequeathing it to us.

All my cars, actually, with the exception of the Chevy Cavalier my brother and I shared for two weeks one summer in our teens before it was stolen out of our driveway one night and later found on the outskirts of town with vomit and heroin works in the backseat, have been dad cars: the Pontiac something or other, the Cadillac Sedan Deville, the Dodge Intrepid, and now our current beast. The running theme, of course, has been the price. For me, “free” tends to trump “pride” when it comes to vehicles: if the price I have to pay for not going into hock over a car is that people assume that the carseats in the back are for my grandchildren, well, then, that’s fine with me. Our current car is popular with the seniors here in Thunder Bay. People tend to do a double take when they see me behind the wheel. “But she’s too young,” they must be thinking. “Hi Gramps!” my friend Daphne calls whenever I drive by. My friend Jody giggles whenever she sees it. “It just doesn’t … fit … with the rest of you,” she said once, and I wanted to hug her. (Or maybe hit her.) She, of course, drives a Harley. (Or is that “rides”?)

Still, I have a soft spot for our eleven-year-old car, partly because my mother also drove it. I can still picture her behind the wheel, faintly remember conversations we had while driving, and imagine she’d get a kick out of seeing me drive by, two kids in the back, barking, “Do I need to stop driving or can the two of you stop hitting each other?”

But the car is aging. We are entering, I fear, that period of increasingly rapid automotive decline, where repairs edge out maintenance and visits to the mechanic inch closer and closer together. It’s all the little things: the door to the glove compartment doesn’t close properly; Rowan’s seatbelt gave out last week, forcing us to move his booster seat into the middle (fortunately, he says he likes being next to Isaac, but you know that’s just a chicken fight waiting to happen); the brights don’t stay on unless you hold down the lever; every so often, the driver’s-side windshield wiper takes on a life of its own and whaps around the side of the car to smack the driver’s-side window. The paint is chipping, the shocks are iffy, the electronic locks work only intermittently, you have to hold up the hood with one hand while you check the oil, and the cup holder spring mechanism is busted. That said, it still looks fairly respectable and gets us from A to B without fuss.

There is aging, of course, and there is aging. Time passes by at the same rate for us all, I realize, but my children are growing, developing, becoming stronger, more realized, versions of their own selves. I, on the other hand, like the car, seem to be aging in the sense of getting older, where regular maintenance is designed to slow down the decline rather than actually improve things, where pain moves on a regular sightseeing tour throughout my body: neck, shoulders, wrists, knees, ankles. My forearms are shit. I have vertigo, just like my mother did, and it gets worse every year. I chew cold things only on the left side of my mouth. My lower back hurts. The index fingernail on my right hand is thickening and developing a permanent split. I’m going grey. My vision is still rock solid, but that’s only because I had laser eye surgery four years ago. I may be getting wiser, but I am losing nouns, names, just like they (I forget who) said I would. I can still touch my toes, but I worry that, if I skip a week, I won’t be able to any more.

I am told this is just the beginning.

That said, I  like to think I still look fairly respectable and I can get from A to B without much fuss.

In my head and my heart, I am a Prius girl, or maybe a Subaru Outback or even a Mazda 5 kind of driver. (In my slightly wilder dreams, I’m driving on the coast, any coast, in a red, two-seater, convertible MG.) In my head and my heart, I can stay out all night dancing, type like the wind, squat to pick up my toddler without grimacing as I straighten my knees. In real life, I’m hoping the current car lasts us until Isaac is in school full time and we can shift our child care budget over to car payments.

A week ago, I was performing the quintessentially Thunder Bay action of shoveling my front lawn — trying to even out the piles of snow so that we wouldn’t be stuck again in April with a fossilized mountain of ice and dirt in the northeast corner of the front yard. But today? It’s mid-March, and all the snow is already gone. I find myself feeling oddly unprepared, as though dinner guests have arrived early and the house is still a disaster, the oven still cool to the touch. The little feedback loop inside my brain is saying things like We don’t have spring jackets for the kids yet, and Rowan’s bike needs repairs, and I have not planted any seeds indoors yet, and these kind of things make me feel as though I am late, not that spring is freakishly early, literally sprung upon us, still sleepy-eyed and coming out of hibernation.

In other words, the weather is my fault. How’s that for self-flagellation?

Not that I’m not enjoying it, the slipping on of sandals and following Rowan down the street on the season’s first ride on his mostly usable bicycle. And the kids, for them it’s like winter never happened. They don’t stop to marvel, like Rachel and I do, about the sudden greening of the grass in the backyard and the ability to kick around a soccer ball and the no snowsuits — NO SNOWSUITS! They just do it, in the moment, stripping off winter layers and letting them fall into the spring dirt.

Yesterday, after lunch, I met up with Rowan and Isaac and their babysitter at the park. It’s March break — spring break (and, to quote Rachel over at 6512 and Counting, “a good thing because gosh, those preschoolers have a rough schedule, what with snacktime and recess every two hours”). I met up with them at the park because we had signed Rowan up for gymnastics camp for four afternoons this week, on the assumption that since he loves his weekly gymnastics class and said “Yes” when we asked him, four weeks ago, if he would like to go to said camp, that this was a good idea.

You know where this is going, right? Should I just stop right here and not write any more? What about this: those of you who don’t really need to keep reading to know that, of course, when I showed up to bring him to gymnastics camp yesterday, when I showed up at the sunshiny park where he was merrily digging in the thawed sand with his brother, he didn’t want to go anywhere near gymnastics camp, you guys just go get a coffee or check your e-mail or something for a minute. And then the rest of you can hear about how he refused to get in the car even after I tried to bribe him with a yogurt tube, and so I left him with his babysitter and his brother and came home, defeated.

What was I going to do, I asked Rachel over the phone, short of physically forcing him into the vehicle and hurling him, screaming, onto a balance beam?

In truth, I wasn’t surprised. Since his initial embracing of the gymnastics camp idea, Rowan has steadily backpedaled. “I want to go to the babysitter’s every day,” he kept telling us. “I only go to gymnastics on Thursdays. I don’t want to go to gymnastics CAMP — just gymnastics. On Thursdays.” Still, we persevered, hoping that he might have a sudden change of heart. Why we persevered, I don’t know. We’ve been here, with swimming lessons, with indoor soccer, and now with gymnastics camp: Rowan knows what he wants, and what he likes. As he said to us at the dinner table last night, more calmly than he had in the park yesterday afternoon, “I’m sorry, but that’s just how I do things.”

On Thursdays.

So, we’ve shelved gymnastics camp. And, for some period of time that I cannot quite specify just yet, I’m shelving the idea of signing him up for any prepaid, organized activity. Because, my kid? My kid does what he does, when he does it, and it’s not worth the heartache to try to force him to do things he doesn’t do, when he doesn’t want to do them.

Maybe I would be more worried if he spent all day watching TV, if he wasn’t thrilled to go to gymnastics (on Thursdays) and music classes (on Mondays), if he didn’t want to play soccer in the backyard with us (as opposed to on the Astroturf of the indoor gym) or ride his bike every possible chance he got, if he didn’t read dozens of books weekly. Maybe I would be more worried if I didn’t recognize so much of myself in him. Despite my mother’s exhortations for me to take up what she hilariously called a “social sport” (does pool count?) I never learned to play golf or tennis and I don’t regret that for a minute. I refused to go when she signed me up for baseball, although I managed to swim competitively for years and, like my sons, loved gymnastics. I did — and I do — things how I do things. Why? Because I’m not a joiner. Hi! Look at me! Working by myself in my home office! For the past dozen years!

Still, as much as I recognize myself in Rowan, part of me — and I’m working hard to get over this part — still gets so frustrated at his refusals, still feels as though if I were just a better parent, he’d play indoor soccer and skip off to swimming lessons and gleefully jump in the car to go to gymnastics. Part of me wishes we could spring new things on him — travel, for example? — and that he would rise, gracefully, to the challenge.

But that’s not my boy. My boy does things the way he does them, and, like the weather, he does them neither early nor late but right on his own schedule. It’s not my fault, or his — it’s just how things are. And I can fret about them, or I can revel in the sun on my bare arms, my feet in sandals, my son pedaling his bike down the street, training wheels hovering over the pavement.

 PS: That said, any stories of commiseration most welcome.

So that quilt I’m making? I’ve been doing the math. Some numbers for you: A queen-sized quilt top measures 83 by 103 inches. That translates into 437 individual blocks, each measuring 4.5 square inches. Each block, in turn, is made up of nine individual pieces. For a total of 3,933 individual pieces of fabric.

Each of those 3,933 individual pieces varies in length, from 1.25 to 5 inches, but they are all 1.25 inches wide. And so, for the past couple of weeks, I have been wielding my trusty Olfa rotary cutter as I watch episodes of True Blood and United States of Tara and Bob the Builder on DVD, cutting those 1.25-inch-wide strips from approximately 12 yards of red and pink fabric. Twelve yards, at approximately 36 inches per yard, means I need to cut approximately 346 strips.

I’m guessing I’m about halfway done.

(We will pause here for a moment to let it sink in, slowly, that my project is, as previously stated, cutting 12 yards of perfectly good fabric into approximately 4,300 pieces and then sewing them all back together again. Got it? Okay, let’s continue.)

It’s all going to add up to something beautiful. I know it is. But, in the short term what it’s added up to is this: My arms and shoulders are shot. My wrists ache and my palms and thumbs tingle. My forearms are dotted with painful little knots.

It’s not like I wasn’t perfectly aware that this could happen. I’ve written before about carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain disorder and the fact that I can no longer knit. Or type. Or bowl (not that that one is a huge loss, to me or to the world, but still). So why I decided that it would be perfectly acceptable to repetitively strain my upper limbs in 22- and 45-minute bursts is beyond me. Although, actually, it’s not. I was in denial. I wanted the quilt so badly, wanted so much to get going on this artistic pursuit, that I pretended I could do it.

Of course, the idea of the quilt is tied to the idea of writing the novel, of the two taking shape simultaneously, of the story, like the fabric, being broken down into its individual parts and breathtakingly reassembled. Yeah, yeah, so romantic. Of course my wrists would get right on board that.

Thing is, I don’t know why I decided I had to make the quilt in the space of a couple months when I’ve given myself permission to work slowly but steadily on the manuscript. My goal for the novel is 250 words each workday. (To put that into perspective, this post is pushing 400 words as of this sentence.) It’s not very much, but it’s doable even on the days when I feel as though, as Ann Lamott might put it, everything I write is “a stupid, self-indulgent sack of spider puke.” And it adds up, over time. Two hundred and fifty words is a page. A page each workday adds up to a manuscript in about a year, give or take. Especially on the days when, as often happens, I write more than 250 words. But not a lot more.

So, I’m backing off with the quilting. I’ll schedule a few emergency appointments with the acupuncturist. And then I’ll cut a few strips a day. I’ll write my few words a day. And I will complete both projects without compromising my body, or my sanity. At least, no more than they’re already compromised.

I’m quilting again, after a too-long break. I don’t know — something about having two children under the age of five just didn’t seem conducive to futzing around with geometry and sewing machines and rotary blades and tiny scraps of fabric and, oh, pins. Lots of pins, scattered, no matter how careful you try to be, on the floor. On which crawl babies. Who like to put things in their mouths. And so on.

Also there was the fact that I couldn’t find the pedal for the sewing machine. And then, for some reason, I decided that the sewing machine wasn’t working. And the idea of both finding the pedal (it was behind some shelves in the basement) and then actually hooking up the entire machine and running some fabric through it just to check if it worked — and then deciding what to do with it if it didn’t — seemed so overwhelming that I needed to take a nap and eat some chocolate every time I thought of it.

But, in the past few weeks, I’ve got unstuck. I suspect it has something to do with finishing teaching. For the past semester, I taught a course in creative nonfiction at the local university. And while teaching opened my eyes to about a zillion mostly fantastic things, it also seemed to consume vast swaths of my creative energy. It seems I can teach writing or actually write, but not both at the same time, aside from a few blog posts here and there.

But! I am done! And from the moment the last paper was graded, I’ve been on a nonstop organizational extravaganza. Filing, purging, list making and crossing-off. Alphabetizing the CDs. I even bought a label maker. I’m hard-core, man.

And, so, the sewing machine works. I’m not sure why I thought it didn’t, but it did a fine job of hemming the hanging-down curtains in Rowan’s room, which have been bothering me for approximately a year and a half. And then I dug out the beginnings of a quilt idea I had experimented briefly with a couple years ago — log cabin, but monochrome — and tried to figure out exactly where it stood.

I think I first got obsessed with quilting when I took Women’s Writing and Feminist Theory as an undergraduate. Read enough Alice Walker at a formative age, and I suppose that’s bound to happen. I remember creating a presentation on The Color Purple in which I mapped out all the characters’ various relationships to each other as patches on a crazy quilt. There was Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use,” which brought home to me the power of the artist: when one sister objects to her sibling actually using her family’s heirloom quilts as opposed to hanging them on a wall, their mother replies, “‘She can always make some more. Maggie knows how to quilt.’” Something about quilting’s combination of beauty and utility, the idea of disparate scraps of cloth coming together to create works of art, fascinated me.

And now, it appears, Rowan is fascinated, too. He stands by me as I feed scraps of material through the machine. His job is to remove the pins, which he does, carefully replacing them in the Altoids box that serves as their container. Then he helps me cut the newly sewn pieces apart, and then stands by the ironing board, inhaling deeply, while I press them. “I love the way it smells,” he says of the steaming fabric. For the sake of everyone’s self-preservation, I have not yet explained to him the function of the pedal. Just as he thinks the car drives itself, he assumes the sewing machine is powered by my brain. And that’s just fine by me, for now.

I think of Walker, in her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, describing the year it took her to write The Color Purple: lodged in a cabin in northern California, working on a quilt, spending time with her daughter. Scraps of fabric stitched together like words become sentences, paragraphs, chapters. The whole more than the sum of its parts. Her, trusting in her vision of what both would be before anyone else could see them.

All of which is by way of saying that I have dug out the novel manuscript, and I’m writing again. This is not so much a resolution as an affirmation: 2010 holds a novel manuscript and a queen-sized quilt top. Pins be damned. Yesterday, I bought more fabric. Along with the label maker.

Rowan doesn’t yet know what we’re making, has no concept that these painstakingly pinned and sewn and unpinned and ironed pieces of fabric, have any larger purpose. “But what is it?” he asks. And I try to explain: that we’re making a blanket; that each of these tiny pieces of cloth will eventually join together in a (hopefully) gorgeous design, the whole more beautiful than the sum of its parts. I show him the quilt I made for him before I knew him, had any sense of his possibility. We hang it on his wall, right next to his map of the world.

“Basically,” I said to him, “you take a [perfectly good] big piece of material, cut it up into a whole bunch of little pieces, rearrange them, and sew it back together again”: smaller, more intricate, stronger, more detailed. More work. More beautiful, for its scars. Kind of, some days, like my life, before and after him.

Ding, dong, the fridge is dead! And long live the fridge!

Okay, it’s not quite dead, but the Eaton Viking model manufactured sometime in the early years of the Reagan Administration that has been chugging away in our kitchen since well before we moved in is slowly dying. And we are more than happy to pull the plug.

We’ve been eagerly anticipating the fridge’s demise for a while. Each time something goes awry, we call Franz, our inscrutable appliance repair guy, and I cross my fingers that he’s going to take a look, shake his head, and say, “You know, I think it might be time to say goodbye.” But he never does. Instead he tightens a hose or replaces the timing mechanism in his understated way, as I hover and ask leading questions. He never takes the bait.

“So,” I’ll say. “When, in your expert opinion, do you think we should call it quits and replace this thing?”

“That depends,” he’ll say. “But, generally, when it stops cooling things.”

It’s not quite that I need Franz’s permission to buy a new refrigerator. It’s just that it somehow feels more responsible to go purchase a major appliance “because our appliance guy told us to,” rather than “because it’s an ugly relic of the early 1980s.” I mean, take a look:

Yes, yes, I know that the newer fridges are much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but I just would have savoured that little nudge from Franz in the right direction. (And, why, yes: those are white melamine cupboards! They go so nicely with the flowered linoleum floor, don’t you think? But I digress.)

In any case, Rachel and I noticed a puddle of water emanating from underneath the Viking a couple of days ago and decided enough was enough. We briefly consulted Consumer Reports, measured the space, hightailed it over to Sears and picked out a new — Energy Star–rated — model in basic black, in approximately 20 minutes. Our salesperson was an odd mixture of completely not homophobic and utterly sexist: got it right away that we were a couple, asked how many kids we had at home, compared notes with us on child-rearing, but also made fun of Rachel for being “a sarcastic woman” and me for being “an opinionated woman,” while suggesting that it was a good thing we had two sons instead of two daughters — “because four women in one household – hooo boy.”

It was oddly refreshing.

So, we buy the fridge. It’s going to be delivered the first week of September. And then I mention to Rowan later that evening that the current fridge will soon be gone, to be replaced by a new one.

And he loses it.

“I don’t want the fridge to go away,” he wails. “I don’t want a new fridge. I want this fridge. I love this fridge.” Tears, shuddering sobs, snot, the whole bit. I think he might have even hugged the old Viking. It took about 20 minutes to calm him down and distract him, with promises that the current fridge would still be there when he woke up in the morning, that everything would be okay.

So, what’s with the sudden passion for the fridge? I mean, of course, he loves to stand in front of the thing with the door open while I intone like a robot about wasting energy and all, but beyond that, I’ve never known him to profess any great love for the beast. My sense is that — of course — it’s about something else.

And that something else? Just a hunch, but this: Rob is leaving soon.

If you look closely, you can just make out the face of a man in two photographs tacked up to the side of the fridge. That’s Rob, with each of the boys as babies. Rob is our cherished friend, our sperm donor, a key part of the extended family, and Rowan and Isaac’s, well, their “Rob,” who currently lives and works in a different city but who has spent the past five weeks with us, playing Chase and Cat in the Hat and Princesses and Chutes & Ladders and Pokémon and computer games with the boys, holding slumber parties and sleepovers, babysitting and hanging out and cooking and talking and eating ice cream with us and generally being a mensch.

But, summer days are slipping away. Soon, August will give way to September and school and work commitments, and Rob will have to leave.

None of us — me, Rachel, Rob — can actually talk about the upcoming goodbye. The last time Rob left, I sat with two sobbing little boys on the front steps as the car pulled out of the driveway on its way to the airport, Rachel and Rob white-faced in the front seat. The plan had been for Rowan to accompany them to the airport, but he wouldn’t get in the car, as if that might somehow delay the inevitable. But the inevitable, it has a funny way of happening in the end.

So, it’s getting colder. The fall will come, and we’ll stick old pictures on our sexy new fridge — which will, undoubtedly, chill the milk much more efficiently than its predecessor. And try not to pine too much for, uh oh, those summer nights.

One of my favourite Bizarro cartoons depicts two kids, dressed in shorts and T-shirts on a summer’s day, staring quizzically at a snowman on the front lawn. “Okay,” says one, “I’ll give it one more week but if it hasn’t melted by then I’m tearing it down. It’s starting to give me the creeps.”

Witness the fossilized pile of snow-cum-dirt in the northeast corner of our front yard. I smacked it viciously with a shovel the other day and barely made a dent. Everywhere else, spring has sprung: the crocuses are budding and the snow has gone. Warmth spreads, but this one, intransigent lump remains. I imagine I will look out the window in July and shrug: “Still there. Hey, are the neighbours performing another exorcism?”

Can you see where I’m going with this? All these flowers and light vying against a hard little heart of stubborn iciness? Exorcisms? Of course: the terrible twos.

They have arrived, the toddlerific moments of ridiculousness. Almost overnight, it seems. Yesterday, during what is ambitiously known as “sharing time” at Rowan’s Kindermusik class, Isaac sat in the centre of a circle of bewildered four-year-olds, desperately grabbing at each instrument and shrieking, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” As I played an alphabet game with Rowan, Isaac kept up a steady chorus of, “My T! My Q!” Last night at bedtime, he insisted on pulling up my shirt to play with my (taut, taut, washboard) stomach. When I tried to get him to stop, he screeched, “My tummy! My tummy! More tummy! Mine!”

And, just in case we weren’t sure that he is hell-bent on world domination, this morning, he looked out the window and shouted, “My moon! MY Moon!”

Oh, honey.

I won’t deny that this new season of aggressiveness has its tiresome moments. But I feel for him. He’s just capturing his first glimpse of the vastness of the world and his relative insignificance compared to it all — not just his big brother or the hidden treasures of the kitchen cabinet, but the entire damn universe, moon and all. It must be a bit overwhelming.

But, like winter, it too will pass. I’m sure there will be moments where I wish I could take the back of a shovel to the two-year-old attitude. But one day I’ll look up and think, “Hey — where did that go?” Assuming, of course, that I have not been entirely beaten into the ground with four-year-old attitude. What do they say? Hope springs eternal.

Look what my girlfriend made!

I would say she just whipped it up in the midst of a particularly chaotic Saturday afternoon, but “whipped it up” would imply effortlessness, and this baby was a bit of a palaver. The making, chilling, and rolling out of the dough. The — literal and figurative — lemon squeezing involved in making the filling. The separating of eggs, the beating of egg whites into meringue. The assembly. The baking.

All told, it was a marathon of a pie. Rachel kept apologizing for attempting such a complex feat of baking on a weekend day, with children underfoot. Rangy, rangy, rangy children. “If I’d known it was going to be so much work,” she kept saying, “I never would’ve started this.”

Which kind of sums up how I was feeling about having kids right at that particular moment. Our morning had consisted of a series of tantrums, from adults and children alike, culminating in a tear-stained Rowan running down the driveway just as I was about to put the car in gear, screaming, “I am too going to the maaaaaaaaaaaarket!”

Minutes earlier, of course, he had refused to get into the vehicle, declaring loudly and repeatedly that under no circumstances was he going to the market. Rachel had finally thrown up her hands in disgust and gone back in the house with him, while I and a blinking Isaac, already in his car seat, were left outside. For a brief, shining moment I thought that Isaac and I might have a sweet little date together, sans four-year-old attitude. In the end, I strapped Rowan in, fed him a banana, did some deep breathing, and braved the public with both children, leaving Rachel at home for a blessed hour or two to stare at the wall or do Sudokus or drink herself silly — whatever she needed. She reciprocated that afternoon when I strapped Isaac into the stroller and wandered around the neighbourhood for an hour or two, listening to This American Life on my iPod. As I left, Rachel and Rowan were arguing about whether he could or could not stick his fingers in the mixing bowl while the electric beaters were running.

When I returned, Rachel and Rowan had reached some sort of truce. They had managed, together, to get the pie into and out of the oven. Then they played chase in the basement and read books. The kitchen was spotless. And this beauty was cooling on the counter — cloudy layers just obscuring the sunny sweetness underneath.