Heat

Since returning from Florida, it's been nearly 80 and sunny here every day. We've been walking around in stunned euphoria: eating ice cream, playing in sprinklers, wearing tank tops, embarking on a night run at 7:15 p.m. wearing shorts and a tank and coming home, sweaty, to drink a Blue Moon on the front steps. Getting back into the groove of regular life has been a little tough to manage in light of the sudden summer environment, and I confess that kindergarten forms may have been hastily turned in at the last minute, I forgot to get my allergy shot for a week, and doing anything besides staying at the playground after school pick-up seems annoying. And though the heat and sunshine for mid-March seems like the tiniest bit of bad karma (like, we might have to pay for it with an April where it rains every day), we are basking in the glory of every warm and sunny moment: Shamrock shakes outside on St. Patrick's Day, a Sunday hiking Dune State Park and picnicking at the beach, dinner eaten on a blanket on the front lawn.

Jemma continues to be her sweet, silly self. She is obsessed with my phone's Siri function and specifically wants to know what Siri's middle name might be. (We have asked; Siri has no reliable answer.) We have her spring conferences at pre-school on Thursday, and we fully expect to hear that she is ready for next year and the full-day challenges that it might bring. She reads more and more words every day, counts well into the hundreds, and loves to be given math problems to solve. (We are still working on her remembering to look before she crosses the street, though . . .)

Annie is, right this minute, at piano lessons, where she is working on Au Claire de la Lune. She has a million questions about everything, all day long, and she spends much of her time doing her hair seven times until the braid looks just right, jump-roping backwards on one foot, and eating adult-sized portions of everything at every meal. She loves writing to her new pen pal, Aunt Lisa, and telling anyone who will listen about how she gets to be a flower girl in her uncle Brett's wedding next winter. (After a mere fifteen years of dating, my brother finally got around to making it official with the woman our girls have always called Aunt Meagan. My mom has possibly not stopped crying tears of joy since the announcement, and nobody is mad that the wedding is going to be in Jamaica, either.)

I'm trying to fit the odd yoga class and lake run around a bit more freelance writing and a bevy of daily phone calls and emails with the list of various people working on our house project, which grows by the day. As of now, we've involved a seamstress, heating and cooling professionals, a dry basement company, a landscaper, an electrician, a painter, and a woman in NY state who makes slipcovers for the Pottery Barn rocker in addition to our general contractor and much help from Connie in the design department. I am looking forward to the final product, though I have no idea when anything about it will be final. In the meantime, I have started re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read it since my freshman year of high school. It calms me.