The New Backyard

Oh the drama of home buying!  We have the house, we lose the house.  Have it. Lose it.  Rinse, repeat.  We knew this property would be blessed with extra, erm, excitement, so its not sooo surprising to us.  But I am trying to shield the Little Man from the roller-coaster a wee bit.  Cuz he is sooo excited to have his own home.  And he keeps asking, "Nobody else can buy it now, right?"  I'm realizing shielding is not my most natural inclination.  I'm working on integrating shades of honesty, or editing if you will, into my parenting tool box rather than the straight up, occasionally over-informed variety.

Not my strong suit.  And a love for specific veracity may have thus been passed down to the Little Man.  As seen with the Easter Bunny business.  P's neighbor buddy came over chatting Bunny based plans.  Fortunately, P had just asked the day before, "Why are there bunnies for candy for Easter?"  "Because of the Easter Bunny, of cour...."  Insert head slap.  It was only then that I realized... we had missed this milestone.  I mean, he asks us to hide eggs and such, but we'd neglected to ever introduce the whole bunny-drops-eggs bit.  It just never crossed our (boring, adult) minds.  Whoops.

So when the kid from next door told P they would be hiking for their egg hunt the next day (oh how very Portland can you get?) I was tense waiting to see how he handled it.  The dialog was ADORABLE.  P, of course, wanted to know where they found these magical bunny eggs.  On a hike.  Same hike every year?  No, different hikes.  How do you know where to go?

"My dad goes ahead of us to check it out."

Anyone else above the age of five fall for this line?  It was at about this point P stopped asking questions.  I couldn't tell if he thought his buds were beyond lucky or beyond stupid.

And in the spirit of my (renewed, really, since Xmas) vow to cherish childhood and shoulder worry for the seven year old, I didn't ask him.

We, with E gone and unable to go track down big bunnies in the mountains, ahem, had a nice indoor hunt and then a backyard hunt.  Or two. Or six.  And P was glowing when he said that next year, his hunt would be in his own yard.  With his sister.

And, in celebration of this excitement, we make a little pilgrimage every day (its only four blocks) to the "new house."  A silly name for such an ancient building, but it has stuck.  And we go into the overgrown backyard (as it has no front yard, nor driveway, nor garage... oh urban living!  I kinda cringe when I think about it, its so strange to the little Kansas girl in me!) P is ecstatic.  He climbs his favorite tree (a lovely camellia), BB digs in the dirt, Zia eats leaves and gets her knees grubby and I make mental to-do's.  I'm so excited to get into that dirt and whip that yard into shape its silly.  (I was waaaay too pregnant to enjoy it last summer.  It was a labor of love towards P to plant in my third trimester with that varicosity, and I dreaded every bend.)  This year, assuming Peaches doesn't constantly choke herself on grabbables, P and I will dig and dream (and prune and weed and fill and clean...) together!

Until then, we'll just sit in the backyard we almost own and smile.