Miscellany of May

May brought with it the spring cleaning bug in a big way for the girls.  Eliza announced that she wanted to move the room around, got her sister on board, and they set to work.

Mid-move;  beds used to be together

 This required some team work on drawing up the plans for the new arrangement, measuring every piece of furniture in the room, and then eliciting some help in the final calculations to find that...yup! Within a few inches, it would all fit according to plan!

I was impressed with the way they worked together on this, encouraging each other, taking turns vacuuming under the beds, one measuring while the other wrote down the numbers, figuring out where the i-pod was going to go, having patience with misunderstandings and generally being really flexible.  Wow. 

The little bit of private space this arrangement affords them has been savored this week, each enjoying her own realm.  It speaks so much to who they are right now, both of them moving towards more and more independence.  Ani turns seven next week (seven!) and Eliza will turn ten in another month.  (Secretly I'm waiting for the masking tape line across the middle of the room, the tolls for looking in the room's one mirror, stuffed animals launching from one bed to the other....but so far so good.)

This is where we find Ani anytime she's upstairs alone. The perch.

 ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

It's raining tonight, as it has every night this week, but we've had some heat during the days.  I even took the girls swimming one afternoon this week, which was its own little nightmare - imagine our little selves in a sea of college students in their smallest bikinis and largest muscles, throwing frisbees, footballs, dogs (not really, but so many dogs on the beach, in the water, everywhere).  I asked Dan later if he had a large number of absences in his class, 'cause if he had, I knew just where they were...I had a moment where I was standing there, looking at the hundreds of young people on our beach,  dreading stripping down to my bathing suit in this living photo-spread of young flesh, when I realized that, while Eliza was in the water already, Ani had paused in her mad dash to come back to me and ask me, please please Mama, come in the water with us, come and playyyyyyyy with us.  Vanity be damned. I got in the water and played with them the whole time (which meant I was nearby to save them from the raucous huge boys lunging about in their attempts to capsize a frisbee or each other) and we stayed until the language and the cigarette smoke drove us out (plus we were ready for some ice cream.)

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

And of course, around here, May means a return to golf-in-the-woods...Dan won the first full game of the season!

Darth Vadar club cozy, anyone?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

May is so full already...scheduled full, green full, soaked in newness and lush. Sitting in the woods, I could hear the something under all else - a pulse of things flowing, dripping, buzzing, growing.  It tips me to a fine edge where I totter between diving into the drenching swirl of it - and -  holding myself still, heart racing half in anticipation half in an anxious sense of not being able to really slow anything down...I feel it more this time of year than any other, the drunken senses competing with my inner clock that says, slowly...more slowly. Please.