"You are in my heart of love"

Let me begin with the "poor me" blog edition: I have been sick, sick, sick - no voice, runny nose, throbbing head - and it's strange, but no one seems to give out sick days for moms. You still have to get up at 6 or whatever, make everyone breakfast, get everyone dressed, keep everyone entertained all day, and there's no little bank of sick time that you can draw from if you're just a big old mess. Luke looked at me on Friday morning and said, "Mom, why don't you just stay in bed?" Yeah. As if. Dave came home early tonight after I begged and pleaded pathetically by e-mail for him to rescue me...but now that he's home I actually feel a little better. Finally.

Sickness or no, we had a super-busy weekend. Friday night we hosted one of our favorite houseguests, Unk. Saturday morning there was a 5K right outside our house and Dave and Luke ran it while Zach and I opted to stay on the sidelines (this time - but next year watch out!). I was only able to take the most pathetic pictures possible, so I'll just include one as a sample. But they really did run it - I swear - and again they won first place in the stroller division. Their prize was the same as last year: some guy saying, "Hey, there's the first stroller!"

As soon as we cleaned up from the race, we took the monster wagon over to a nearby St. Patrick's Day parade (or as Luke calls it, "St. Practice Day"). Then on Sunday we had Daniel's first birthday party, and then we went out for a pizza dinner, and blah blah blah, you can see how the whole weekend filled out and added up to zero down time for us sick-heads. Why do all of these things when I'm just not feeling well? Some of this has to do with the fact that I missed all of these events (neighborhood 5K, St. Patrick's Day parade, Daniel's birth and bris) last year while I was in the hospital and it is sheer defiance on my part - I'm not gonna miss that stuff again.

Zach is astonishing us every day with his speed and agility. This afternoon at the park he crawled up the steps of the big play structure, much to my complete surprise, so we went down the slide, and then he wanted to do the whole thing again, again, again. If he's in the house and we leave the hall door open, he is off in a flash, crawling to his favorite spot in the house, the bathtub, where he stands up against the side and peers in (fantasizing about having a bath, we presume). The other night every time I moved him back to the living room and put him down, he was on his way back to the bathtub, which had Luke in stitches.

Today he was doing another funny thing while he sat on my lap eating an apple: He would take a bite, then move the apple up to my mouth for me to take a bite, then take another bite, then pass it back to me, and so on. Again, he had Luke cracking up. But where did he learn the idea of sharing? Not likely from his brother...

There are many, many ways in which Luke is a pain, and I don't have to enumerate them here. But the reason he can get away with it is that he is also an absolute, total sweetheart. I have a large heart-shaped stone paperweight that Luke found somewhere, and now whenever he knows I am mad or sad, he runs off to get the heart and hands it to me silently.

The other morning after I finally got Zach down for a nap, Luke curled into my lap and told me, "Zach is in my heart of love." Wow, I told him; I'm not sure exactly what that means but it sure sounds like a nice thing to say. "Oh, mommy," he said, "You are always in in my heart of love."

Dave explained to me later that Luke is distinguishing between the anatomical heart and the heart that does the the lovin'. I know it's mushy, but I'm just so happy that he is so freely affectionate. I know he's going to make a lot more hearts melt someday.