Run Fox Run

Rocketeers await the next launch

Our April highlight was a terrific visit from Grandma Jeanette, timed to coincide with Leda’s spring break. She and Grandma read stories, played piano, and allowed Daddy and Cleo to tag along to see Mary Poppins on Broadway. We continued to celebrate Cleo’s birthday with Grandma…and we all enjoyed seeing the second annual rocket launch at Rutgers. Pictures from all month long are in the April 2011 album.

Here in the northeast we have developed a somewhat distrustful relationship with the weather, this winter. So we are reluctant to acknowledge the current state — budding trees, chirping birds, shining sun — as actually being “springtime.” We have been punished before for our overconfidence: the snowstorms of Groundhog Day and oh, what’s that other important day, right, THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING have made us gunshy. Our clan spent Spring Break a few hundred miles south, in Charleston and Savannah — where it was warm and persuasively buggy. There, spring had come. We returned to snow and freezing rain. But now the evidentiary coup de grace has been delivered: Cleo Carver turned FOUR this week. As Cleo reminds me, her birthday is in spring; ergo, it is now spring.

Leda’s campaign to serve as her cousin Gary Mark’s flower girl began before he’d even proposed to Lisa…it involved enactments of the solemn and graceful walking, royal waving, and radiant beaming she would bring to the table. At the wedding March 12, she and Cleo shared the petal-scattering duties. Making the wedding even more special was the fact that Maya, Tommy, Alaina, Trey and Andrew came out a few days early to spend time hanging out.

Earlier this month one of Leda’s first grade pals had a rock-climbing party to celebrate turning 7. Watching Leda bravely attempt this new activity, ascending partially and then enjoying the “fall” back down on her belay rope, I was proud of her. Looking at this photo now, I am tempted to wax rhapsodic about my hopes for her continued courage, her willingness to challenge herself; to remind myself of the value of encouraging her always to Try, always to Figure It Out. (Her father has urged me to Keep It To Myself. He’s right: who needs the prideful meow of one more anxious Tiger Mom these days?) But life, as the bard says, moves pretty fast. And if you don’t stop and  look around once in a while, you could miss it. So I’m going to look at this photo, and the other ones in the February 2011 album, just a moment longer.