Pretty Pretty Pirates and More Snow

The brutal two week marathon of respiratory distress is a memory. We were so sick that Equinox is a blur- although the fairies came and it was lovely..Since then we look at the crabapple tree in the back yard, shivering , alive with goldfinches and watch snow fall. Right now Sophia is coloring mandalas and watching the flakes drift down quickly and silently.

At almost five years old she is not in a princess phase but a pirate one...Her speech liberally sprinkled with "methinks". She created an amazing pirate treasure chest out of cardboard and filled it up with construction paper coins-- "the gold doubloons of the pirate queen."Wearing an eyepatch she flips around on my (totally neglected) yoga mat as a "pirate gymnast". Honestly sometimes I hide the eyepatch so she doesnt freak out her vision...

Yesterday in our traditional approach to grasping at springtime it was chalk art time. I stood with the sun at my back, hands in my pockets with my shoulders scrunched up. Sophia stared at my shadow for a moment and then grabbed a stick of chalk and began to trace. I watched her hand move the chalk across the pavement tracing a perfect silouhette. I could see the darkness of my shadow filling up the space inside the white glow of chalk. Somehow I felt very dark in that space, very dark inside for a moment. Then she had me step away and she added a face. I felt lighter.

"It's Egyptian," she explained and began to embellish with pink, yellow, and blue until it was a perfect likeness of a jewelled sarcophagus. So I added Anubis ( I am better at cats than dogs though) and an anhk. Now all of that is under a lacy blanket of snow. Another one of those moments where only a tracing a color is left behind. Like so many mama moments...