All those jazzy notes splayed out (11 snippets on a Wednesday).

Today is a today I can etch, despite its similarity with many others, into my memory - or rather, into this space to keep my memory reminded - because of the following: eleven snippets that made it special.

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Two boys, before 7am, hunch over the dining room table in the foggy blurriness of sleet visible outside, and like master watchmakers, create and assemble precious designs composed of hundreds of plastic…beads. I don’t even know what to call these things. They have provided great joy, and also provided great opportunities to practice picking up, as they possess the organically almost-alchemic ability, like guinea pigs or glitter, to metastasize and grow beyond their original number, and like cockroaches, to seemingly never die. The boys do this with somber attention and focus, and I am happy about that. Not so much about the carnage left behind. Oh, also, these creations will need the steady hand of an adult to help iron - literally iron - in order to solidify and melt together, so their creations can stand the long test of time, and never ever end up in a Goodwill discard bin somewhere. Oh no, they will anthropomorphize themselves into regular characters in our household and they will be around forever, along with their ten trillion cousins.

Simultaneously, long before 7am, a 12-year old rehearses chess moves on his Chromebook, giving an equal level of attention and focus to improving his ability. I marvel at the parts of life that move so quickly; that are tsunami in the force of their change. This boy-man is in one of these, leaving the first hyphenate further behind as his intellect, imagination, and body roar into each new day with fresh changes and evolutions.

There is snow outside. It is April. I head downstairs to start a fire.

Two boys follow and find a fresh location to begin new carnaging. Carnaging is a brutal description. They discover and create beauty where their footsteps lead. But just like a beautiful bouquet of fresh wildflowers will be beautiful in the present, it will morph into something else if and when it is discarded, left alone on a trail and surviving to groan its last existence decomposing as something less than…beautiful. This is an analogy and a metaphor and not a bad one. There are things that are always beautiful and there are things that are beautiful for a season and there are things that are beautiful in memory. But if you try to keep everything that is beautiful, in physical form stasis, at some point entropy will kick in and its beauty will die, or at the very least, change into another form, even if that end form is merely atoms. This paragraph got heavy fast. I love the beauty they discover and create.

I played indoor and hide and seek and tried to snap a picture - just one picture - but their blurry bodies were too blurry and I couldn’t do it. Even the masters fail sometimes. Me, the master of grabbing a moment, was unable to seize it, so now, I seize with my words to lodge into the Book of Happenings.

We drink hot chocolate on a cold day in front of a fire. I marvel at how much our daughter, our 10th grade daughter is able to figure out, with not-enough help from me, on Maths, as she plogs through an assignment on the 2011 MacBook Pro we gifted to her a while back that is showing its age.

The same two boys build a train set around their sister while she works.

A family of wild flowers, nested deep in water, is dislodged from its precarious positioning and finds a new home on the floor, splayed out and spilled, moved inadvertently and apologetically by a young plumb body in a Superman cape moving too fast through space. This is an opportunity for me to practice patience and understanding. Do I? I don’t remember.

We study a giant map of continents and oceans. Then we play memory game. Then all four kids watch an episode on PBS Kids of Arthur. I love how even our Olders get excited about this program.

There is soup and their Grandma’s homemade bread and more studying and another memory game and we go through the rituals we go through - brushing teeth and worship and pajamas and all those jazzy notes - and in aggregate they are a blur. But something can be a blur and still be special. Why do I write this? Because someday I want to be able to pick out the pieces of these days. Not all the pieces. But a selection, to carefully unravel and re-reveal the slices that end up in bulk memory.

I peek into Becca, sitting on the floor between two beds, holding hands across the gap, and can’t help but find happiness at this ritual. Also, my heart finds happiness knowing that now we can go watch a half hour of something fun on the telly with the older kids. The little things.

It was a day. A good one.