Spring Has Not Sprung

(This is the quilt I'm making for the director of Our Fine Lower School. It kind of looks like spring, even if our weather doesn't.)

We are all getting a little impatient for spring around here. Usually by now we're basking in its warm, fragrant goodness, even if only for a couple hours in the afternoon. Instead, everyone is still bundled up in winter coats--except Will, of course, who wears shorts and a hoodie sweatshirt all year round.

Lots of stuff going on. Will had his first real Little League baseball game on Saturday. He pitched two innings and generally rocked the house. After a long and dismal basketball season with the Worst Coach Ever, I have to say that Saturday's 15-2 win for the Rangers proved quite a balm. Usually I'm not one for blow-outs, having spent too much time on the blown-out side (also, they're sort of boring), but just this once I was glad for such an overwhelming victory. Will needed it.

On Sunday, I learned an important lesson about reasoning with fourteen-year-old boys: Don't. Jack is tall, and he's a pretty bright kid, and I keep forgetting that despite the fact he can at times be quite logical, especially when planning World of Warcraft raiding parties, in general, the logical/reasonable/rational part of his brain is underdeveloped. I found myself in a middle of an argument with him about why spending fourteen hours in a row on the computer was unhealthy, and then suddenly, I stopped. It was just so much easier to say "no." I like saying "no." It's the most fun I have as a parent.

Today I went in for my annual skin check, and my dermatologist took off a suspicious-looking mole. No, not a mole--a freckle. The funny thing to me is, the moles and freckles I find suspicious-looking bother my dermatologist not one bit. It's the innocent freckles she goes after. "Let's just shave this off," she said to me, pointing at the cutest little freckle on my leg you ever saw. "Could we call it something other than 'shaving'?" I asked her. "How about 'biopsying''?" she replied. "How about 'benign removal of a cute little freckle'?" I countered, and she agreed that would be fine.

In the last month, I've had a teeth cleaning, a skin check and a mammogram. It's Lent after all. I'm not supposed to be having fun. Now all I have left is the annual visit to my lady parts doctor in May, and if I'm really up for a good time, a physical with my family doctor. Can't wait until I turn fifty next year, when I can add colonoscopy to my list of annual good times.

Right now I'm having a hard time imagining that it will ever be spring. There's a point in every winter you worry that maybe this year God has taken spring off the docket. The good news is, Target sells Easter candy whether it's spring or not. The bad news is, I'll eat it.