“A portrait of my children once a week, every week, in 2015.”
Lillia: This week you played at your friend Anya’s house after school. I feel terrible because I am not very good at arranging for you to play with other kids. You’re kind of beyond the “playdate” stage of life, but I think that your introverted nature and your need for lots of down time, in combination with my absent-mindedness in this area makes it so that you don’t spend as much time with other kids as you should. That’s one of the drawbacks of living in a rural town, I guess. When I was a kid I lived in a big neighborhood and there were always lots of other children to play with — playdates just happened organically. I will try to be better about arranging for playtime with your friends, and hopefully you will also remind me!
Zane: In the last couple of weeks we’ve gotten a lot of snow so we finally got to build our snowman! You have been waiting all winter for this, and he turned out very cute (here’s a pic). I hope you won’t mind my sharing this, but I had to chuckle when you insisted that, in addition to eyes and a mouth, your snowman needed a bum and boy parts. Well, we can see what stage of life you’re at (potty training clearly having an impact on your psyche)! It has been very cold, so your snowman did not melt but he has, sadly, been completely covered up by the additional foot of snow we got this week. We’ll have to dig him out!