On Tuesday I had the chance to hang out in T.'s classroom for an end-of-year ice cream party. It still hasn't hit me that she'll be done with kindergarten today, and that the kindergarten year, so precious in many ways, is quickly becoming a thing rooted in the past.

Yesterday afternoon T. and I sorted through the big plastic bin where I keep all the bin-worthy school work and art projects from the school year. You do know, of course, that it's impossible to keep everything your child makes, no matter how much the hoarder in you wants to. At the start of each school year I buy a large, flat, plastic bin--long enough to hold large posters and oddly-sized artwork. When I pull a particularly charming or wonderful or brilliant piece of school work from her book bag, I put it into the bin.

In the middle of our three-day weekend, L. woke up one morning and told me his throat hurt.

"Oh no!" I said, the strep throat alarms going off in full swing. I am terrified of strep throat. While it has never affected my kids too badly, it knocks me flat out.

"Well," L. said matter-of-factly, "my throat has been hurting for weeks now."

Yesterday morning I sat on the low, stone wall at the local park where my son's school holds their end-of-year talent show. I was early--45 minutes early, to be exact. But I dropped L. off and rushed over to the park so I could get the best seat--the same spot where we have parked ourselves now for five different years, and watched all the kids perform songs and dances, and where I have always--every year--smiled and clapped through that big lump in my throat. Scott was going to be a little late, since he had to drop T.

My brother-in-law has a t-shirt that reads something like this: Three Reasons I Became a Teacher: June, July, and August. When Scott and I saw him with it, we laughed in understanding, but with a little shade of bitterness, too, because really very few teachers can afford to take off three WHOLE months out of the summer, given how little teachers are paid during the year--you're always trying to find creative ways to make a few extra pennies during those "off" months. But just as I was feeling sorry for myself, I thought about how lucky we are.

On Saturday morning, a spectacular day by all counts: cool like a March day, but the sunshine was warm--summer sun, not early spring sun--I sat on the back porch with my dad and watched the kids painting. My dad brought out a few blank “canvases” for them (pieces of flat boards you can buy from Home Depot—they’re really meant to put under vinyl flooring, but my dad buys them, cuts them to canvas size, and they are perfect for painting on) and the kids were creating abstract art masterpieces. I watched L. dab on stripes of green, blue and orange paint. He gave T.

A pet-related crisis that must have happened during the wee hours of Saturday night necessitated the unearthing of our steam cleaner from the crawl space and the removal of all the furniture out of the office and lots of fussing and snapping from two frazzled parents who couldn't get the soap canister to snap onto the cleaner just right.

In bed on Sunday night, after yet another chapter of Really, Truly Ruthie, T. and I lay in bed talking about family and growing up. We went through a lenghty list of all the various family members out there, and she counted them on all her fingers, and started over again. Then she asked, "What is YOUR family, Mama?"

I was confused. "My family is your family: you and L. and Papa, of course," I told her.

I've written a lot lately about how my kids just can't get along. They have moments when they do just fine--surprising us, as they did during the 12 hour plus road trip to upstate New York and Canada last week (and back again). It helped that they were physically removed from each other, but it also helped that L. spent many hours schooling T. in all things Ben 10, a new interest of his.

I remember reading somewhere that the memories we tend to hold onto from our childhoods are either painfully traumatic ones, or amazingly memorable ones. As kids get older, they hold onto more and more memories, and grow more and more capable of weaving those memories into their lives, so they become a part of who they are. I often wonder about this, because I remember so little from my early childhood--hardly anything, really, until I was five or six. After that, my memories are like snapshots--impressions, rather than true memories.