May 2013

Hi all,

I just love the quiet of the morning.  I wake up to tiny feet slowly stepping down the stairs next to our room.  Or to a little voice saying "RahRah, Whey ah you?" as he checks Rin's bed to see if he's up yet.   Or to two small voices downstairs and I can't quite hear what they are saying but just the fact that they are both up and spending their morning with each other makes me happy.  And almost every day, one of them will pop into our room after 7:00 to ask what's for breakfast or to tell us that it's time to get up.  Best alarm clock ever.  

And Bek has started to wake up himself from nap too.  I hear the little footsteps come down and his sweet face will peek around the corner with his cheeks still red from sleep.  He snuggles up to me on the sofa and asks, “My hab ting cheese?”(string cheese) in his angelic little voice.  And as he slowly has something to eat and wakes up, he leaves me and joins in Rin making Legos cities in the living room and beautiful works of art for our walls. 

These are the things that this now 40-year-old mom can’t get enough of.  Yeah, I’m 40.  MIDDLE AGED.  But that’s all right because my life is turning out to be pretty great.  I may not have figured out what I want to be when I grow up.  And I may never make the bed on a daily basis.  And I may or may not ever feel like I have truly figured life out but I have these three sweet boys and it makes my imperfections seem a little less important.  I might not do everything perfectly but that’s not really the point of life I don’t think.  I’m sure when people look at us they see all of the things that we aren’t- my kids aren’t perfectly groomed, our house is not perfectly clean, my kids (and me) are not perfectly behaved- but I don’t care.  I care what it looks like inside our family.  Because this perfectly imperfect life is just for us and it looks pretty darn good to me.    

  

We headed up to the lake for Memorial Day as usual and, as usual, had a great time.  There is this certain time of morning at the lake when my mother in law has taken the kids so we can sleep in (ahhhh…) and I am having my first cup of coffee.  The sun shines on the water and makes it look like someone has thrown diamonds across it.  It just sparkles.  But it's nothing compared to the sparkle in my kids' eyes as they tell me about their morning adventures- about the canoeing, the fishing, the digging in the sand.  This year, it was a little bit too chilly to swim at all but that didn't matter to them.  It’s the sheer different-ness of this place that's so fun.  It feels like a whole other world than the one we live in day to day.  In this world, we wear pajamas and bathing suits by day.  And in the evening, we give them their first taste of s’mores.  It’s a good kind of world.  

We were watching Yogi Bear for movie night this week and it reminded me about when we were suffering through the 7 weeks of waiting to go get our Bekkers from the baby house in Kaz and Rin and I went to his first movie ever in a movie theatre.  It was Yogi Bear and that is when I started calling to him “Hey, BooBoo!” to get his attention.  This has been extended to Bek now and Rin calls him BooBoo too.  Along with BooBoo there seem to be about a million other things we call them and so I don’t forget, I want to get this all on paper now.  So here is the list of things we call our sweet boys.

Rinat- Rin, Rina-chik (Russian diminutive like Spanish “ito”), RinCakes, BabyKeks (after the biter bicuits he ate in Kaz as a baby- one of the first things that I gave him), RinLoves

Aibek- Sumo, Bek, Bekkers, BekkerBug, StinkyPants, LoveChunks,

Both of them- BooBoo, Chickadees, LoveBugs. SweetChunks

I’m sure they will come up with some other choice names as time goes on and I will post those too.  Just didn't want to forget these sweet endearments.  See you later, Chickadees.

Love to all, -m