Easy To Love

It's easy to talk about how hard it is.   I have a bad day--or a bad bunch of days--and I run to Facebook or the blog and vent.  But when there's a stretch of easy we (or I, at least) tend not to talk about it.  Who wants to hear about how awesome your kid is?  Dave gets a lot of text messages exclaiming about how beautiful Willow is, what she said, how smart she is, how funny she is, while the internet is left thinking she's annoying and possibly insane.

Not so.  Most of the time, I think she's amazing.   And it's the details that make her so.  Yesterday we went to The Great Swamp Wildlife Refuge where, well, we didn't see many birds, but we saw snakes and turtles, and Willow refused to put down the taxidermied meadow vole, and even if we didn't see birds, we pretended to be birds, with such consistency that Willow asked for a wing ride instead of a shoulder ride, and ate seeds and said everything in tweets. 

This morning we read about penguins, and so we pretended to be penguins for hours, eating pear-shaped squid, hiding from orcas, and jumping on and off icebergs.  We even buried ourselves in snow and sat on our eggs to keep them warm. 

And then Willow told me a story about a tree who wanted to walk, and so he lifted his roots from the ground and walked up the side of the apartment building across the street, and then jumped down with his roots spread wide and landed with a thud.

Is any of this as amazing and fascinating to anyone who isn't her parent?  I have no idea.  I think probably not.  But to me, she's a show that I could just keep watching, because it is comfortingly sweet and yet wildly unpredictable.