gratitude soup

I'm soooooo naked Hank screams as he runs through the house after a bath. He leaves the yellow hooded duck towel in a heap and drips water through the dining room.
He spent the afternoon talking about his teachers and their classroom feast and his best school friend, Hugson. He regularly lists things that begin with the letter H, Hanky and Hugson and Hendrix and hot and hat and airplane (?) and hippo!

Tolliver has invented a nine pin game, using the same wooden tic tac toe pegs Hank likes to arrange in an H and eight million rolls of washi tape. There are stray pegs and abandoned rolls spanning the floor from the refrigerator to the front door, plus an imaginary score sheet hanging in the air, along with the words I win!
He's been wearing a Santa hat all week, simultaneously counting down the days till his birthday, and looking beyond it with eyes squarely set on Christmas.

Tucker has been working on a collection of comics using emoji stickers. My favorite, this evening, shows the sunglasses guy dunking planet earth into his coffee mug. Tuck said he'd already used the donut emoji and thought something unexpected was funnier anyway.
He's also been really into landforms, spouting facts and illustrating explanations and googling examples. And making me pop quizzes.

The boys are home for the next five days, and I am hoping for more sunshine. They spent hours on Sunday afternoon outside in the woods, jacketless and bicker-free. Just in case we can't spend the entire break in the backyard, I ordered extra emoji stickers and am prepared to build marble tracks and clean an enormous baking mess and assemble Lego robots and wipe runny noses and moderate sibling persecution.

The privilege of having three healthy boys does not mean that I can't find parts of parenting problematic. But I am not parenting while also trying to caravan to a new country, or parenting in a place where food is scarce. There are not wild fires threatening our home and we have a washing machine that works and more than one invitation to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal with family.

I am sooooo lucky I think, and it feels like a good time to remember that.