At Our House

Emma Grace came into the bathroom the other morning, fresh out of bed, with her index finger hanging on her lower teeth. Surprised by this uncommon pose, I had to ask: “What is it, Emma Grace?”

Her reply: “I have a loose tooth.”

We’ve been over this ground before. It’s hard to be the youngest, to watch the older ones enjoy those milestones while you are, always, still the baby. She’s had more than one “loose tooth,” and I’ve not known what to do: to pretend to rejoice with her, or to give her the disappointing truth.

This morning I paused, then asked to see it, calculating again in my mind the fact that she is, after all, five. We do teeth early in this family. The first one is cut at four months, the first one lost at five years. Could be….

So I checked, and sure enough, it wiggled.

And, along with the tooth, it is just about time to lose the Sparkle Shoes. I bought these for Emma Grace at Target last fall, and almost took a photo of them then, bright and shiny new as they were.

I would have given my eye teeth for a pair when I was her age. My friend Suzy and I had watched The Wizard of Oz, and she had a pair of red shoes, and I coveted them Something Fierce.

So when Emma Grace set her heart on them in Target, I Would Not resist. They were just $12, anyway, and she wore them past their sparkle. She Wore Them very nearly to Death.

The boys enjoyed a Cub Scout camping trip this weekend. Due to friends and family in town (and a paper due), Bill and I did not go along. But the boys went, and returned Sunday afternoon, dirty, fatigued and happy.

After a bath, after depositing dirty clothes in the hamper, after lunch, the boys retreated from their mother (who was working on her paper in the kitchen), and went to play in the living room.
They had been in there for some time when I realized that it was Awfully Quiet.
“What are you boys doing?” I asked, raising my head briefly from the computer keyboard.

“Resting,” came William’s reply, and I thought
that was good.

I didn’t check on them immediately, concentrating hard as I was. But when I did pop my head in a few minutes later, this was exactly how I found them.

I added the blanket after I snapped the first picture.