Thursday, January 27, 2011

How on Earth?

Somehow I got an issue of Budget Traveller in the mail this week.  I thought I had let my subscription expire but that is a whole other blog post.

So I am leafing through it on the couch and Spy is playing next to me.  He comes up to me, points to the cover and says "Farful Tower."  I looked at the cover and lo and behold it is the Eiffel Tower.  For a minute I thought, "Wait, how does he know this is the Eiffel Tower?" Then I realized the answer.  Ratatouille. 

Ah, Disney.  Thank you for making a world traveller of my 2 year old without having to leave the house.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Come on take me away...

Shocking that I have not posted a new entry since May...and here we are a new year ahead of us.  I find myself mostly in the same place as I was this time last year.  A few things are different.  Instead of student teaching I have a job as a preschool teacher.  I also work part-time at Restoration Hardware.  My little Spy is not so little any more.  He is embracing his 2-year oldness with a ferocity that is pleasing and yet shocking at the same time. 

I also have a new kitchen (yay!).

So today, as I tried to tidy up the dishes in my wonderfully deep sink with my fantastically modern faucet, Spy safely tucked away in his crib for a much needed nap, I was whisked back to a time and place I have not thought about in a long time.  The trigger: The Unforgettable Fire by U2.  The random shuffle on my impossibly small iPod Nano playing at mommy volume from my shiny red iHome landed on this song and poof! I was transported back to the summer of 1985.  I am 12 years old and I am sweating my ass off trying to manually clean our pool with what was then the "top of the line" pool cleaner.  The songs from this cassette tape were playing on my beat up old radio/tape player which I had received for my 9th birthday. 

This flicker of a memory lead me to a train of thought about my thoroughly modern kitchen and my beautiful son, who on most days stands next to me on his little stool playing with the fancy new faucet while I wash dishes.  What will the world be like when he is 37 years old?  Will he wistfully think back to the "old fashion" gadgets of his youth and laugh at how terribly difficult things were for him then? I think about that dreaded pool cleaner.  I had to drag it up and down the sides of the pool repeatedly to get the dirt off the sides and the bottom.  And I had to do it at least twice a week or else the pool walls started to turn green. I also remember thinking to myself, "There has to be a better way to do this!!!"   Who does this job now?  A little love bug of a gadget known in the pool world as a Polaris whom my family has affectionately nicknamed Herbie.

So I wrap up this first post of the new year with a reminder of how far we have come not just in one year but in the many that have passed.  I hope that this year brings all of us further along on our journey in this life, sometimes strange but mostly wonderful.  And I hope that Spy will be able to look back on this time - well what he may remember of it - and see how far he has come on his own personal journey.