Sunday Slivers, 5/30/10

I've been thinking lately that "time flies" is an oxymoron when it comes to children: time flies when you realize that the child you were teaching to say "car" the other day now hovers behind you in his car seat and rattles off the brands of cars that pass outside the window--Mommy, that's a Toyota Prius! Tati, what kind of Mazda is that? Mommy, I just saw a Honda, a Chevy, and a BMW! I want us to buy a Honda Civic! Tati, what kind of eLexus is that? Can we buy an eLexus? (and no, he will not be corrected into saying Lexus); time definitely does not fly (more like creeps) when your seven-month old gets a vicious cold which keeps her awake day and night, her head so congested that she can barely breathe, and her chest heaving with the sludge which makes her choke when coughing..

I woke up today realizing that my camera had very few new pictures, mainly because the week was spent in the bondage of Raya's sickness. With the weather unseasonably cool and rainy, we spent much of our time indoors until pretty much...today. Except for a little outing last Sunday to an outdoor gathering where Sava spent an inordinate amount of time trying to learn to hoola-hoop (and again, no, he will not be taught)--

--today was the first day we ventured outside for an extended period of time; first to the neighborhood park:

--and then to the now-favorite creek at Shoup Park, where at first Sava played by himself--

--and then had about five times more fun when his good buddy Tyler joined us; I feel an irresistible urge to sing hallelujah and celebrate life whenever I look at the pictures of these two playing together; Sava was soaked to his waist after more than an hour in the water, and Tyler was shivering with cold, his lips a dark blue, but oh, the fun they had--

I get a pretty similar feeling of something worth a minor celebration whenever I look at our two kids delighting in each other, which these days happens regularly--

Raya is finally stable sitting by herself, so the love fests are sure to get only better.
*****
On our book floor this week (in the absence of enough bookshelf space or other storage system, we pile books on the floor), How a House is Built continued to be a bedtime favorite. Sava added to that another Gail Collins gem, Galaxies, Galaxies!, which is geared for older children but has a sufficient amount of graspable information for this four-year old, whose mind seems to thrive, like his dad's, on logic and classification. He is intrigued by the concept of gravity, and he seems genuinely concerned about the fate of stars; ever since our conversation weeks ago about dying, he seems to mull over the concept with regard to everything that is alive. After we read about stars dying and being born, and he learned that our sun is a star as well, Sava asked one night, Mommy, will it be dark when the sun dies? He got only more puzzled when we explained that none of us will be around to see the sun dying, and that probably people by that point will have figured out how to migrate to other planets. That is, if they have not destroyed each other and this planet first.