He is cute, I am not

Today while playing on the floor with his trucks Finn Said " Mommy I enjoy interaction!" The thing is someone on the TV just said that and he was repeating it but it cracked us up. It is true, he enjoys interaction and is always trying to get us to play with him.
A couple of days ago we were in the car coming back from the mall and I was feeling a bit defeated. We had gotten a bill for medical stuff that happened last year and should have been covered by the insurance that Kate had at the time but wasn't. It was the latest in pile of bills that come when you think you might finally be doing well. Anyway I was moody and quiet and trying to explain to Kate why while Finn asked question after question in the back seat. I told him to wait a minute while daddy was talking and he kept asking and asking. I snapped at him "Finn I need you to SHUT UP for 2 minutes!" and even before the words left my mouth I felt like an ass. Finn clammed right up, not saying another word for a minute and then saying to Kate, "Daddy says shut up Finn." I turned and to him and told him I was very sorry for saying that, I was wrong and should not have said that to him. He said "It's OK daddy." Later while we were driving he said "Sometimes daddy says no, and sometimes daddy says shut up." I wanted to cry, I know I will say and do terrible things but knowing that doesn't take the sting out of it when you have just done it.

Our Village

Sunday nights we have dinner with a growing group of people in our neighborhood. The meal is hosted by a different family each week and we are up to 9 different families who make meals. The host invites whomever they want to join the core group and the meals are always great. This past Sunday dinner was at the Aalsma's house which is one of my favorite places in the neighborhood. The Aalsma's are just so cool you could easily be intimidated but they are too friendly for that to last long. Their house is big with lots of great art, funky fold furniture, stacks of books, and toys for all kids of all ages. They had two tables set up in the dinning room and kids running around everywhere as parents took turns eating and watching each others kids.

Like I said the meals are always great but part of the magic of Sunday nights is community. The living of life in close proximity to each other. I got my haircut in the middle of the room where the babies were pulling every toy they could reach out of the box on the floor. Older kids ran around Tina as she deftly maneuvered her pregnant belly and scissored hands without hitting me with either. College Basketball played silently on the TV in the corner even though very few beside me cared what happened between Kansas and Kentucky. A friend of one of the families, who happened to be a pediatrician, stopped by to check on an ear of one of the kids. Around the table Kate was recruiting writers for the neighborhood paper and babysitting duties were traded like baseball cards.

Next week the dinner will be at our house again and it might be nice enough to be outside. I can't wait to see what happens, who comes, where the conversations goes, what gets broken. This week Kate and I will worry about what to make, not with any unhealthy pressure to impress, but with the desire to cook something fitting of the great people that will come. We will invite someone from Kate's work that she wants to be friends with and neighbors from down the block. It will be a great night and most of us will not realize just how great until years later. We don't often get a sense for how great something is until much later in life but lately I have had a real tangible sense of how great Sunday night is. There is something so beautiful about the time, the people, the whole event that I sometimes start to think about when it will inevitably end and can't help but get sad. But it is not ending this week, and this week we get to have our house over run with life and the energy of it lived in such close proximity and it makes me smile.