Marching into (early) Spring...

Yesterday was the first official day of Spring, according to the trusty calendar on the wall. But even without the paper-and-ink reminder, I could tell the season had changed. How? Oh, the usual--daffodils bursting into bloom in the backyard; shorts-wearing, soccer-playing boys tracking mud into the kitchen 10 or 12 times a day; gusts and rain showers in the weather forecast...and let's not forget the sneezes, itchy eyes, and gunky heads that Riley and I must endure as a result of the Prolific Pollen swirling about the Great Outdoors (as a woman, I can understand: it seems that even for Mother Nature, beauty must come at a price)!

However, I can tolerate the perpetual nose-blowing for a month or so, when taken along with the considerable upside of Spring. For example, although I won't go so far as to break out the Bermudas, I am feeling wild and crazy enough to...leave the house without a coat! Okay, sometimes I take a step out the door and immediately turn around to go back and grab my fleece. But I draw the line at gloves! So there!

Even better, now I can delegate one of my least favorite chores--cooking dinner--to Grillmaster Husband! It's no longer dark and freezing when he gets home from work, and (dare I say it?) the possibility of snow diminishes every day we creep closer to April (NOT to jinx us or anything)...so let the Carnivore Club have their flame-seared meat! (While I relax inside with a martini and a magazine. Or am I confusing my fantasies with the Real World again?) But...Friday evening Husband arrived home, fully prepared to grill hamburgers for the Male Meat-Eaters. I left to take a pre-dinner stroll. When I returned, Husband greeted me with a thrilling tale of how the grill had been...set ablaze in my absence. Evidently the coating on the metal had caught fire and begun to melt off, while also sparking the dry leaves on the ground around the base...it sounded like quite an invigorating...Near-Miss-Disaster. But I took a quick glance around and noted with relief that the entire house seemed to be intact, and there certainly weren't any firetrucks in the vicinity, so I assumed all had ended well. Except, no grilled dinners for a while, obviously. (Hey, maybe I'll get him a grill PAN, and still put him in charge of Meat Duty...I can make this work!)

Speaking of culinary concerns--already, with the lengthening daylight hours, and the slowly-warming temperatures, it's becoming tougher to convince the boys to step inside for such mundane reasons as, say, dinner. (And when Derek resists food, you know he must be having a blast!) In fact, the only way to know my beloved sons have safely returned home from school is the daily occurrence of the following routine: SLAM (door blasts open to admit children...why they are incapable of quietly turning a knob and entering the house is a Boy Mystery, beyond my power to comprehend), THUMP (backpacks land on kitchen floor); SQUEAK (pantry door slides open); CRINKLE (cereal bar is grabbed); SLAM (outside door bangs shut behind the exiting dervishes). No "hi, Mom, we're home!" anymore. No "how was your day?" conversation. No heartwarming chats about school and life and whatnot. Nope, unless someone gets hurt or we happen to bump into each other when one of them comes in to use the bathroom, that's the last I'll see or hear of them until I drag them in for a meal. Then, if I insist they--gasp--shower off the thick coating of dirt crusted on their knees and elbows before sitting down to eat, their protests are as vehement as if I'd...banned video games for life, or something. And after all that drama? I get to enforce the ever-popular Homework Time! Yay! (Next week it gets somewhat more complicated, when soccer starts back up for the next several months and we get to add in practices, and games, and even more frequent cleaning of the sweaty, grassy bodies...)

So, Spring has flown in and wrapped us all in her busy, breezy embrace once again...and I must say, despite the puddles and the sniffling, it still beats Old Man Winter any day!