John and I are afraid the mice will attract snakes like the one I discovered on our front porch last year, like the one that surprised me this spring as I was unfurling the garden hose and turning the spigot on to fill the little plastic pool the neighbor had dragged across the grass, into our backyard. But Archie, Kit and Jack are simply excited to see those mice running from here to there, and then back again.

“I saw another mouse on your porch,” my mom told me this morning when I got back to the house. She’d been watching Kit and Jack while I was at the gym.

I sighed and rolled my eyes before I answered. “I know. John told me to call our exterminator.”

That’s when Kit, who was standing in the kitchen and looking out our patio doors into the backyard, spoke up. “Excuse me, Nana?” My kids never address me when my mother’s around. They prefer her attention to mine when it’s theirs for the taking. “I have a good idea.”

Kit still stutters when she’s got a complex thought to share, so it took her a while to get the next little bit out. “Why don’t we make a pie and put it outside and when a mouse comes to eat it we can just get ’em?” She jumped up in the air as she finished her sentence, my daughter did, and pulled her arms and hands in close to her chest as if she were plucking something out of the air right there in the middle of our kitchen. She laughed, and Jack laughed, and my mother and I nodded at each other with our eyes opened wide before we agreed aloud that Kit’s idea was, in fact, a good one.

Although Kit and Jack still have a couple weeks before they begin their new school year, Archie started classes last week. I gave both Kit and Jack one of those snack packs of pretzels to eat in the station wagon this afternoon as we left the house to pick up Archie from school. Sometimes they’ll fall asleep on our drive across town, and when that happens it usually means Kit and Jack will cry and whine and throw their flailing bodies all over the hallway while we’re walking to Archie’s classroom to bring him home from school. But those snacks, sometimes they’ll stave off the sleep.

So today I’m driving and the twins are eating their pretzels, and I’m stopped at an intersection when Jack holds up a pretzel in a way he knows I’ll be able to see it by looking in the rearview mirror. “Hey, Mom. This pretzel looks like a letter B.” A beat or two later Jack spoke again, correcting himself, “No. I think it really looks like a number 8.”

Later, when we’re home again, Archie retreats to the kids’ playroom upstairs, turns on the television, and then closes the room’s double doors. A little later I go into the playroom to check on him and that’s when I find that Archie has tossed the trains and trucks to and fro, dumped the dolls across the floor, and toppled the table in the corner of the room. When I look to him for an explanation, before I’m able to utter a word, Archie says, “Is it funny?”

“The mess?” I want clarification.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“No, it’s not funny.” I am not laughing, but he is so hard that his sides are shaking.

Before I leave the room I want to know how his day went at school. I’ve read the teacher report in Archie’s folder and saw that he “had trouble following directions today.” But all Archie has to say about my inquiry is, “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Would someone please tell my oldest boy that he’s going on six, not sixteen?

Kit and Jack’s birthday is on Sunday. They will be four years old. We were at the beach, on the Isle of Palms, a few weeks ago and I wondered where my babies had gone while watching my youngest two children play in the sand. Jack played swamp wave with his cousins in the surf, and Kit made friends with a little girl who was swimming in the same tidal pool we’d discovered. “These are my parents,” she told the girl as they made their way around the edge of the water together. “And this is my grandma,” she introduced my mother, too, moving a cupped palm in her direction.

And Archie… My God, Archie. He faced the sea like its fearless foe. He’d stand in the surf, staring out toward the horizon, walking forward, and when a wave managed to knock him down he’d get right back up and charge on again. I don’t know what he was doing, or where he thought he was going, but he was committed and courageous and humored by it all to the point of hilarity.

My parents rented the beach house we stayed in, and John cooked our meals, and we moms and dads, aunts and uncles, my parents, too, shared childcare responsibilities. The kids were mostly happy, and Jack kept asking again and again where John’s parents were. He wanted to know why my parents, his grandma and grandpa, would do all these things for him, but why he didn’t know John’s parents at all.

“Because they’re dead,” John tried to explain to Jack, but still Jack didn’t understand.

“What does dead mean?” he pressed.

So one afternoon John and I piled Archie, Kit and Jack into our station wagon and drove over the bridges and down the roads that connect the Isle of Palms to James Island. John showed the kids where he lived, where he played, where he went to school. And then he told them stories all the way to the cemetery where we got out of the car, where we took our children’s hands, and picked our way through the headstones until we found the ones we were looking for. John explained that this is where his parents were, where Archie, Kit and Jack’s grandparents are, and John showed them his grandparents’ graves, too. The kids had questions, of course, and John and I tried to sum up those questions with a simple explanation, “Well, they’re with God now.”

“You mean they’re in our hearts?” Kit wanted to know. That is what she’s learned at school about God, after all.

“Oh! I have them right here in my heart!” Jack hollered, his hands against the center of his chest as he jumped up and down, up and down. His excitement was palpable.

Archie repeated quietly, “Heart.”

Where have they come from, these children of mine? The babies they were are long gone and we are marching forward, moving on. Thank God, wherever He is, whoever He is, we are still here, the five of us, putting each foot in front of the other.

I wonder if you’re aware, Archie, that your dad and I always check on you every night before we crawl into our own bed. Sometimes we stand in your doorway together, the both of us moving this way or that so our bodies won’t block the light from the hallway, the one that cuts through the dark stillness enveloping your room and falls upon your bed where you lay soundlessly breathing through an open mouth.

Sometimes, on the nights I go to bed earlier than your father, I check on you alone. Those are the times I straighten you as you slumber, moving your head from the foot of your bed to your pillow and then tucking your blankets in all around you. This summer I’ve straightened your nightgown, too, pulling it down from your armpits and untwisting it from your torso.

It doesn’t matter, though, how we check on you at night, Archie, because the question your dad and I ask each other is always the same whether one of us calls up the steps or whispers across the hallway. “How’s my Archie girl?” we both want to know these days, and what I want you to know when you are older, Archie, is that your dad and I will always allow you to be the person you want to be, the person you are, that we’re letting you show us the way.

Jack, someday when you are older and confronted by a situation neither you nor I anticipated, I hope you remember the time you bit your brother on the back so hard that your teeth cut into his skin because he was playing with a ball you wanted, and how your dad and I punished you by not permitting you to eat sweets for a whole week. You cried and whined every time your sister got a cookie or candy and you didn’t, but your dad and I didn’t waver in our resolve. I even sent a note to school in your lunchbox so your teachers would be informed and have patience with you as you gnashed your teeth and rolled your eyes while your classmates, your sister included, got a treat from the ice cream truck that comes on Wednesday and you didn’t.

It wasn’t easy for me, Jack, to watch your heart break every time you missed out on dessert. I wanted to give you a cookie, too, to pull a popsicle from the fridge for you like I did for your sister, but I hope you know I remained adamant about following through with your punishment for your own good. When you are older I hope you’ll remember what your dad and I are teaching you about actions and consequences. Life is chockfull of gray areas, Jack, but I want you to know that there are unwavering truths that make up the black and white spaces with which we all define our own silhouettes.

Kit, someday when you are older and confronted by a situation neither you nor I anticipated, I hope you remember that one weekend long ago your dad loaded you and your brothers into our station wagon so you could help him run some errands before picking up breakfast at the bagel shop, and that on your way home, in the middle of that road that crosses in front of our neighborhood, you passed me as I was running along the shoulder, underneath the tree branches that hung out over the asphalt.

I hope you’ll remember how your dad slowed down and how he rolled down your window because your car seat was closest to me out there on the road, and I that I waved at you when you passed and then lifted my legs higher so I could run faster and chase our car up the hill, all five of us almost home. Your blonde hair blew in the wind as you strained against the chest straps of your car seat to look as long as you could out the car window at me, to turn your face in my direction until I fell too far behind.

I’ll remember how your eyes flashed and how your smile started at one end of your face and didn’t stop until it reached the other, and how flattered I felt to know you were awestruck watching me, how it felt to feel your pride reach from our backseat to the side of that road. And I’ll remember, too, how later that morning you insisted on wearing your sneakers, the ones that you think look like my running shoes, because you wanted to be like me, you said. I’ll know how that made me feel, and how I think it made you feel.

I’ll remember that morning and those things and I hope you will, too, when you’re older so you’ll know a little bit about what it takes to get a job done and how to do it well. Because if there’s something you’re going to have to know, Kit, it’s going to be how to preserve no matter what. That’s a promise I can make and keep, one I anticipate you’ll know intimately someday out there in this world of unknowable things.

Like maybe Archie, Kit and Jack were non-stop hounding me to take them to the pool, or maybe the little boy up the street rang our doorbell and I had to go outside and sit on our front stoop while my kids played with him. Or maybe Archie wanted me to read another book to him, or maybe Kit asked me over and over again until I finally agreed to color with her, or maybe Jack talked me into building another parking garage with the three tubs of wooden blocks sitting on the rug outside my office door.

And then there’s the laundry, and the housework, and the yard work, and that ear infection I had. I’ve had butts to wipe, and errands to run, and some days it’s just so hot and humid all I really want to do is sit on the couch with Archie, Kit and Jack tucked in around me and watch cartoons on television.

There was that holiday, too, and John was home and we had things to do, and I’ve got e-mails to answer and web sites to read, and then there’s always facebook with its endless list of status updates that usually just serve to piss me off so why I waste my time reading them I’m not entirely sure, but… there it is…

Yesterday was the first day all three kids had something to do away from home at the same time since school ended in May. Archie’s enrolled in summer classes at his school, and Kit and Jack are enrolled in summer camp at their school, but with all the breaks and staggered starts neither schools were in session at the same time until yesterday.

When I dropped Archie off he was downright gleeful to see Miss Janelle, one of the assistant teacher’s in his classroom, when she came out to the parking lot to help him from our car. When I took Kit and Jack to their school they were immediately put to work making lion faces out of paper plates for safari week, their classes’ theme for the next few days.

I watched them painting their plates from the window after I’d left, those twins, before I got into my car. Kit, who calls herself an artist, appeared to be thoughtfully working. Each meticulous stroke of her paintbrush looked deliberate, well planned. But Jack was making a face as he painted, his nose scrunched up into his eyes, his lips pulled back far enough to lay his teeth bare. At first I thought that face meant Jack would rather not work on the project, but when I noted the ferocity with which he pressed his brush against the plate I suspected that he was actually affecting his best inner beast for inspiration’s sake. I shook my head and laughed as I walked the rest of the way to the parking lot.

When I went back to school a few hours later to pick Kit and Jack up, I got to laugh again as both kids held those lion faces in front of their own as we walked from the classroom to our car. All three of us roared a few times, and one of the other mothers we passed along the way feigned fear for fun, and I’d be lying if I told you that the little things like that walk to the car yesterday afternoon didn’t make up for the three times I had to put both kids in timeout two mornings ago.

Then there was this morning’s drive to school, too, when Archie called out the names to the songs from my iPod that I played over the car stereo. “That’s Human,” he said first. And then later, “This is Airstream Driver.” But Walcott received his most enthusiastic response. “Oh! There it is!” he proclaimed before he placed both palms atop each of his knees and began shaking his head from side to side in time with the beat. I’m unsure from where Archie’s proclivity for music comes, but knowing he likes the same music as I do makes those shortcomings over which he has no control feel like less of a kick in the teeth.

Yesterday afternoon, after we got home from school, I sat beside Kit on the couch in the playroom. She watched me write in the notebook in my lap, her head resting on my shoulder. “What’s that spints?” she wanted to know. When I asked Kit what she was talking about she pointed to the word I’d printed across the top of the paper.

“Did you read that word?” I wanted to know and Kit answered by shaking her head up and down, up and down.

To be honest, I’d written spinx, not spints as Kit had said. But still.

Brian, my trainer at the gym, knows that Kit floats when she runs so when I told him today the story of her reading that word in my notebook Brian remarked about how awesome it’ll be if one day Kit tears it up out there on the track and I can tell her that the first word she ever read was the first entry in my training log for my next race, the Spinx half-marathon in October.

Do you know what else is awesome? On the Fourth of July Kit woke up and declared that she was done with her pacifier. Finished. As in, “Please throw them all away, Mommy.” She was only allowed to use her pacifier at night, in her bed, and Kit knew that John and I were going to make her give up her collection of pacifiers on her fourth birthday, ready or not. Kit wasn’t enthusiastic about that deadline, I know, so it surprised me when she declared her independence from that little plastic nub on Independence Day. It surprised me, but I was happy for it and all together amazed when Kit only cried for a little bit that night at bedtime before she fell asleep. She hasn’t mentioned those pacifiers since.

Finally, finally we are moving forward around here.

Together with their Uncle John those nieces and nephews manufactured a lot of memories surrounding family trips, triumphs and tragedies. My arrival heralded a new dynamic in John’s relationship with his sister and brothers, his brother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and all those nieces and nephews. The brother and uncle everyone knew disappeared and was replaced with someone who had to consider his wife, and in short order his children, too, before he could carry out the sort of commitments he once did. Maybe this is why only some of John’s siblings’ children occasionally refer to me as their aunt, and I don’t have the type of relationship with them that their other aunts enjoy.

Whatever the case may be, the truth is that it took me a long time to feel comfortable around John’s family, and that eight years into our marriage and three children later I still don’t feel like a true part of the Moore family. That may be my own misinterpreation of our family’s relationship, I admit, but I’m just saying.

I’m telling you all of this as a round about way of explaining that while we enjoyed our weekend in Charleston with John’s family, it was still a weekend in Charleston with John’s family. And I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying that, although I suspect everyone who knows anything about it all would expect me to say exactly this kind of thing.

2.) My parents took Archie, Kit and Jack to Charlotte to spend the weekend with my brother, my sister-in-law, Camille, and my nephews Hayes and Rhys. If you click on that link you’ll see that my children enjoyed their weekend wholeheartedly. And because it was Hayes’s third birthday, Archie, Kit and Jack’s time with their cousins was extraordinarily special.

3.) When John and I got back to our hotel on Friday night after the rehearsal dinner, we rode the elevator up to the rooftop bar and holy cow was that place packed. We ordered a drink, found an open spot along the wrought-iron railing lining the roof’s perimeter, and enjoyed our stories-high view of downtown Charleston.

It didn’t take very long for John and I to agree that we felt old and out-of-place and entirely not cool enough to hang with the bar’s late-night crowd so we finished our drinks and called it a night. Before that happened, though, I had an opportunity to take a long, hard look at the Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River, and from my spot on that roof I could finally see how damn steep the bridge’s incline really is. “I ran that mile in about eight minutes,” I reminded John, pointing to the steady climb on the Mt. Pleasant side of the bridge.

“That’s ’cause you rock,” my husband replied, and I’ll confess right now that it took a beat or two before any sort of self-depreciating thought crossed my mind.

4.) I think there’s something wrong with me because I still woke up at six o’clock Saturday morning even without my children there to coax me out of bed. I thought about walking down the hall to the coffee urns and plate of pastries I remembered the hotel staff sets up outside the elevator on each floor of the hotel, but decided against it when I realized I was still dressed in my pajamas.

So I turned on the television instead and discovered that TNT airs back-to-back episodes of Angel on Saturday mornings. You better believe I was all over that, and you ought to know, too, that when John woke up and saw what I was watching on television he rolled his eyes and moaned, “Oh, God. Don’t get obsessed with this again.”

5.) It took a little doing, but I convinced John to run with me Saturday morning. Before we left for Charleston he was all yeah-I’d-be-happy-to-run-with-you, but when it came right down to it John had a last minute freak-out and snipped at me for a while before I started to act like he had no choice and changed from my pajamas into my running clothes. That nearly backfired when I realized the bellhop had left my shoes, all wrapped up in a blue plastic BI-LO bag, in the back of our station wagon when he’d unloaded our car upon our arrival at the hotel.

6.) We did eventually get outside to run, John and I, and I promised John I’d run his pace, no matter what. So I did even if while doing so I longingly watched a pack of guys pass by us, headed in the opposite direction, running at what looked like my pace, and I managed to stay just a few steps in front of John even when another couple passed us on our left and I knew I could surpass them in no time at all if I could just take my foot of the breaks for a few blocks.

Once while we were running beside Battery Park I dropped back behind John, matching my stride to his cadence, and said, affecting my best brogue, “I don’t enjoy breathing like a pregnant walrus.” I was reciting a line from this commercial, and John knew it so he started to laugh which only made it more difficult for him to catch his breathe. That commercial is part of a joke John and I share so when I said it I knew what would come next.

7.) Later that morning I went to the bridal luncheon which was hosted at the home of a close friend of the bride’s family. The house was old but regal, situated at the end of an unpaved stretch of Coburg Road, lined on either side with live oaks. For a moment or two I wondered if Scarlet O’Hara would answer the door, but she didn’t, obviously, and before the luncheon was over I found myself seated to the right of a woman I didn’t know who was gossiping with the woman seated to her left. Maybe she didn’t see the place card marking my spot at the table, and maybe she didn’t care, but somehow she’d entwined my life with my sister-in-law’s, insisting that, “She adopted all those kids because, you know, she lost that Down’s baby…”

Um, no and not really, I thought about saying, but instead I lifted my chin way up high and smiled hugely at my sister-in-law seated across from me on the other side of the table. A few years ago I would have eaten that woman for dessert, but I’m happy to have finally learned who’s worth contradicting, and who is better off ignored.

8.) John and I spent the remainder of the afternoon visiting the shops along King Street. Before we went back to our room to get dressed for the seven o’clock wedding ceremony, John and I went to Magnolia’s on East Bay where we ordered appetizers and a drink, or two. We probably wouldn’t eat until late, John and I assumed, and if this wedding reception was like most Southern wedding receptions with seven hundred guests and appetizer-lined buffet tables we probably wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to eat anyway.

Our assumption was correct after all, but John and I wouldn’t know as much until after my husband squeezed my thigh, hard, during the wedding ceremony as the bride’s vows included the word obey, hot on the heels of at least two readings that asserted a husband’s dominance over his wife, and I breathed aloud, “Really?” Because, really?

9.) At the reception I ate two pieces of wedding cake, and danced to a big band with John whom I’m reminded each time we’re required to dance together learned a lot during his days in Cotillion and you have to believe me when I tell you that something about that always, always, always makes me laugh.

10.) My father answered my mother’s cell phone on Sunday morning when I called to check on Archie, Kit and Jack. My grandmother had died Saturday night, he explained.

When I talked to my mother Saturday morning she’d told me that Grandma had been transported from the nursing home to the hospital and that no one expected her to last much longer. John and I offered to come back early so Mom could catch a flight to Pennsylvania, but she asked us to leave when we got up on Sunday morning instead. I checked in with my mother a few times on Saturday, but her request remained the same.

Grandma turned ninety years old last week, but she didn’t look a day older than sixty at her funeral. They’d painted her face with make-up, and put her in a push-up bra, too, even though no one can remember Grandma wearing make-up or a any sort of supportive undergarments. Her daughters, my mother and her sisters, couldn’t believe how gorgeous Grandma looked. The priest called her stunning.

I bet she’s stunning now, too, wherever she is, wherever we go when we die. She was smart, and strong, and beautiful, and I will consider myself a fortunate woman if I am those three things myself when I’m ninety years old and leaving this place to find out what it is that comes next.

I wanted to begin writing this post two days ago as I was waiting for the plumber to knock on our front door, but when I sat down to share my thoughts with you Kit and Jack announced that they were hungry and wanted a snack. The plumber arrived before I had an opportunity to sit down in front of this computer again, when I had to stand sentinel at the bathroom doors to keep my children out of his way as that plumber worked to fix our toilets, one upstairs and another downstairs, because it is always two things at a time that break around here.

And I wanted to begin writing this post on Monday afternoon as I was waiting for John to call me, to tell me it was time for Archie, Kit, Jack and I to pick him up from work. His car was in the shop and he’d need our help to pick it up, to bring it home.

We were driving around Friday night, John and I, scouting out the course for Saturday morning’s race when I told him I smelled something burning. I’d rolled down my window, my elbow resting on top of the glass, and the fiery smell was so acrid it filled the car before I was able to finish my sentence. “Whoever’s car that is, is gonna be in trouble!” John replied, nearly shouting.

By the time we pulled into our driveway there was smoke billowing out of the car’s right wheel well. A neighbor walked across the street to help us. John pulled the green garden hose from the side of our house, from underneath the blooming hydrangea bushes, and turned its water on the smoke.

I tried to write this post again yesterday, but I was tired and the kids were whiney and I had clothes to iron and Archie wanted to finger paint the Kraft-colored paper we’d bought earlier in the day to wrap my nephew’s birthday presents. So I did what I needed to do instead of what I wanted to do, and suddenly it was bedtime and I was tucking Archie, Kit and Jack into their beds, under their blankets, and I was done. I was done.

I know I won’t finish writing this by the time John gets home.

I hope I’ll find the time to finish it today.

Yesterday morning Rachel came over with Sophia. Our children played upstairs in the bonus room filled with toys and children’s books and all sorts of nonsense while Rachel and I huddled around the island in the middle of the kitchen and talked about all sorts of things. I tell Rachel things I’ve traditionally kept to myself, but she never balks so I just keep telling her. She’s my failsafe that way, offering her opinion when I need to hear it, setting me straight again.

The other day Rachel was talking about Sophia’s lose tooth, her first, and told me that her mother kept all the baby teeth belonging to Rachel’s siblings and herself in a jewelry box. I told her that I have Archie’s hospital identification bracelets in my jewelry box, every last one of them.

“They are treasures,” Rachel replied. She understood what I meant.

Encouragement often comes from friends, but sometimes it comes from unlikely places, too. On Friday the man who came to clean the rug underneath our kitchen table, the ottoman in our family room, talked to me about his uncle who has Down syndrome. Last week an older woman sitting on the front porch of her house, watching her cat leap through the tall grass from one side of her lawn to the other, pumped her fist in the air as I ran passed. “You go, girl!” she shouted as I waved back. I’ve never seen that woman before even though I cross in front of her house every time I run. I hope I see her again.

While we were cleaning up the dinner dishes on Saturday night John turned to me and said, “Happy anniversary.” I stared at him and blinked hard. A few beats passed as I ticked off all the important dates that bookend our lives together inside my head.

My bewilderment amused John, but he left me off the hook when he explained what he’d meant. “Remember when you said all you wanted for our anniversary was for me to run the 5K?” he offered. “I gave you more than you asked for, and you got your gift a little early, too.”

A few months ago I told John the best gift he could give me to celebrate our wedding anniversary in October was to prepare for and race in the three-miler at the Spinx Run Fest. He took my request to heart, found a beginner runners’ training program, and got himself up to speed in time for the Sunrise Run 8K last weekend. Along the way John improved his base fitness level, lost a significant amount of weight and discovered that he, too, really enjoys running. John’s success showed when he crossed the finish line in 51:49.

My parents kept Archie, Kit and Jack while I ran the race as well, crossing the finish line in 38:26. I was the 20th female finisher of 618 runners, and was the seventh fastest runner in my age group.

John’s run was one unexpected gift, but I have another one to tell you about, too. I was sitting with Archie one afternoon last week when he asked me to rub his hand. This is something we do, he and I. He asks me to rub his back, or leg, or neck as he cuddles into my lap, against my chest, and I always oblige.

If you know anything about Down syndrome, then you’re aware that there are a handful of physical characteristics common to children and adults with the diagnosis. One of these characteristics is a single, deep crease across the center of the palm of the hand. Only one of Archie’s palms has this crease, and that is the one he offered me on this particular afternoon last week.

I’d forgotten about Archie’s crease so it surprised me anew when I saw it again. “Oh, Archie! Your sweet hand!” I exclaimed as I traced that crease on Archie’s palm with my finger.

Jack was in the room, too, watching us and he wanted to know what I was talking about so I showed him Archie’s hand and told Jack about Archie’s special Down syndrome line. Jack insisted that he wanted one as well, a Down syndrome line, but I told Jack that the line was something unique to Archie that makes him extra special to us, and then I reminded Jack that he has characteristics that make him extra special to us, too. Jack went away then, and Archie, who’d already tired of our time together on the chair, followed his little brother out of the room.

A few days ago on our way home from dropping Archie off at school Jack announced, out of the blue, that Archie isn’t human, he’s Down syndrome, and then added that he wished he had a hand like Archie’s so he could be Down syndrome, too.

I corrected Jack’s syntax, as well as his reasoning, but that exchange Jack and I shared in the car on our way home has left me thinking these past few days, filled as they have been with chores and obligations and bills and realizations, that maybe we are doing something right around here after all.

Last week John’s sister, Kate, rearranged the rooms in her house again. She lives in a ranch-style home behind her business on busy Haywood Road with her husband and six children. Kate needed to make more space for growing boys, she explained, so she had an auctioneer’s lot of family heirlooms that needed a new home and she wanted to know if anyone wanted anything. This is what the Moore’s do when they’re ready to part with a piece of that houseful of furniture Bill made them carry away; they offer it to each other first before they give it to someone else.

Nearly each piece of furniture has someone’s name written on a scrap of tablet paper taped to the back or bottom of it. John’s mother made the labels when she knew she was dying, and with them she took great care to divvy out her things to her children so they wouldn’t have to do it themselves. I’m not sure where Bill was while all this was happening, but I know he honored her decisions and left those scraps of paper on all of Ann’s things until their children came to take them away. We’ve done the same here in our home. Everything we have that belonged to Ann still has its label with John’s name written in her hand affixed to its bottom or backside or base.

So this time Kate’s rearranging brought us a small collection of things including an old clock John remembers from the fireplace mantle in the James Island house on Jim Isle Drive. Right now that clock is to my right, in the bookshelves in our office, and it’s tick-tick-ticking, tick-tick-ticking. John winds that clock with its tarnished brass key every morning, and even now after all these years it still keeps good time. Before it was his mother’s clock it came from a grandparent, or maybe one of the great aunts who lived on that farm in Wisconsin, and it smells a little like the musty plough mud lining the marshes of Ellis Creek, the same dark, soft stuff John and his siblings played in during the summers of their childhoods.

I listened to that clock as it marked this morning’s five o’clock hour with its old gears creak-creak-creaking before they softly ding-ding-dinged. I was drinking coffee while sitting on the floor with ice packs resting on my shins, all the while lacing up my running shoes and waiting for John to return from the gym. I was thinking of what I could do today with Archie, Kit and Jack, and I was remembering the fun my children had last night when they, dressed in underwear and white t-shirts splattered by dripping ice cream, stood on the slope behind our neighbors’ house and counted backwards from ten to one then jumped forward, down the slope, landing in the grass at the bottom of the hill on their hands and knees.

Lying in the grass at the bottom of the hill Archie, Kit and Jack would laugh and loll about, sharing their fun with Sophia and William. Sophia’s backyard is caddy-corner to our own, and William’s backyard sidles up to hers making these five friends neighbors, too. I was thinking this morning that watching all those kids have fun together last night reminded me of summer evenings when I was small, the ones when my brother and I played outside with our neighbors until bedtime had come and gone. I remembered how I was then, watching them last night, and it occurred to me how they may someday be. When Sophia’s father took a photo with his camera of the five kids on top of the hill I mused out loud, “Someday one of them will get married and that photo will be included in the collection displayed at the rehearsal dinner.”

By the time John and I collected our kids and brought them inside again the gears inside our new old clock were grinding into place, creak-creak-creak, and then the chimes ding-ding-dinged to mark the half-hour, one full hour passed Archie, Kit and Jack’s bedtime. I tossed a load of laundry into the washing machine downstairs as John took our children upstairs to give them a bath and put them to bed all soft and all warm just like the characters in one of Archie’s favorite storybooks.

The melting ice cream and the lolling in the grass, all that laughing while game-making-upping, those are the sorts of things Archie, Kit and Jack have been enjoying these first few weeks of summer. In the mornings Archie sits in the leather chair in our library and recites aloud a pile of storybooks with characters so familiar they feel like family while Kit paints with watercolors at the kitchen table while Jack stands sentinel at the window, waiting for the black birds to swoop into our vegetable garden, or perch atop our bird feeder. When they do Jack surprises them by banging on the glass and hollering through it, “Go away, black birds!” just like John taught him to do a few weekends ago.

In the afternoons Archie, Kit, Jack and I play something or play with someone or go to our neighborhood pool. They’re learning to love the water, these three children of mine, and I suspect this will be the year they begin to swim. When we get home from the pool I pick up around the house or mop the floor or fold the laundry while I listen to the clock in the office mark our hours in fifteen-minute increments. It seems silly to say as much, but this is the first summer I’ve spent with Archie, Kit and Jack that feels familiar to me, that seems like the ones I knew myself when I was young. Saying as much is the sort of admission that both surprises a parent and puts things into perspective at exactly the same time. My children are growing up.

Each time John and his siblings swap their mother’s furniture some sort of squabble transpires. Someone thinks it’s unfair that one sibling should get Helen’s table, or the drop leaf that belonged to Mary Mills. Someone else says another sibling shouldn’t be given both Gigi’s spindle-back rocker and that grandfather clock he made from the kit that one summer in the garage out back. Phone calls will be made, and e-mails will be written, and sooner or later everyone will agree that the furniture belongs with someone who will take care of it. This time, the one that brought us the old clock, Kate summed up the dialogue when she wrote an e-mail that read, “I think it is neat that the pieces keep traveling around, like Mom is visiting us all.”

Archie cried when I dropped him off at school today. He takes summer classes in the morning and then comes home to play with me, with Kit and Jack, in the afternoons. My boy who loves his teachers and classmates and school-time activities preferred he stay home instead. Kit sleeps late in the mornings and when she wakes she tells me that she’s tired from all the things we did the day before. Jack explodes in professions of adoration for me at least four times a day. He’s the kind of kid who does this when someone captures his attention with a novel activity, the kind of kid who loves you best when you’re engaging him and he mistakes it as getting his own way. Right now our days feel full and fun, but I know they’re fleeting, too.

These summer days that run together, the ones that leave my children drunk on the season’s humidity and heady with its absence of routines, their minutes are collected here in my office in creaks and dings. We carry on and an old clock marks our time together when someone remembers to wind it with its tarnished brass key.

It’s hard to remember, really, because it feels as if there’s no time now for reflective thoughts.  Archie, Kit and Jack are all finished with school and so far this summer vacation we’ve enjoyed picnics, and pool parties, and play dates.  It’s time consuming, all this fun, and our comings and goings have left me with little time to sit here, in front of the computer visiting with you.

On the last day of school Kit and Jack took bouquets of fresh cut flowers to their teachers, Katie and Melissa.  I tucked a gift certificate for a lunch date into those bouquets’ cello wrappers, too, and included a personal note to each teacher, written on pieces of paper folded in half that had been decorated by Kit.   “Last night as I was taking apart your bouquet so I could place all the flowers in water, Kit insisted I allow her to set up her paper and crayons right there, right next to the vase on the counter, so that she could draw what she saw,” I wrote in Katie’s note.  “I’m telling you this because when Kit and Jack started class with you and Melissa last fall she didn’t draw like this, and neither she nor Jack could write their names.”   

And then I continued, “But last night Kit drew your flowers in a vase, and beside it she colored the two plastic bowels I placed on the counter to hold the stem reservoirs until I needed them again this morning when I’d reassemble your bouquet.  She drew in the rectangular kitchen cabinets above the counter and the circular jars on the counter, in the corner, right behind the vase of flowers.  ‘This is for Katie,’ Kit told me when she finished, all proud and pleased with her work.” 

I wrote another paragraph in Katie’s note, too, one about how much I appreciated all she’d done for my children this year.  I did the same for Melissa as well, but tailored my notes’ introduction to the drawing Kit created specifically for her.

My note to Melissa began similarly, but I ended the second paragraph of the note like this: “Kit took great care to draw your flowers in a vase, each and every one of them, and then she printed her name in the upper right-hand corner of her picture.  ‘This one has good flowers and it’s for Melissa,’ Kit explained to me, and so it is.”  

Archie delivered hand-tied bouquets of pink roses and yellow gerbera daises to his teachers on his last day as well, and he also took Nardia, his classroom’s lead teacher who is getting married in a few weeks, a gift from her bridal registry.  Archie told me he wanted to give Nardia a Backyardigan toy, but I suspected she’d appreciate something of her own choosing that she could use for a long, long time and each time she did the piece may remind Nardia of her time in the classroom with Archie.

I didn’t write Nardia or the assistant teachers in Archie’s classroom a note of appreciation.  I’d just done as much a week ago as part of a thank-you note writing initiative celebrating staff appreciation day at Archie’s school.  I wrote those notes to Archie’s teachers and therapists and then Archie made them his own by signing each one with his distinctive letter “A.”  In those notes Archie and I thanked each staff member for her patience, and confidence, and love.

So school is over, our teacher gifts have been delivered, and we are home, the kids and I, and together we’re marking our days in little things like shared walks to the mailbox and big things like the one last Thursday that put my parents on an early flight to Pennsylvania Friday morning.  My eighty-nine year old grandmother had an awful day on Thursday that culminated in her being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. My grandmother lives with my Aunt Peggy, and when she called for that ambulance my aunt wasn’t sure my grandmother was alive.  

Grandma is wearing out.  She knows this and she’s made peace with her place in this world, so she and her doctor wrote a living will with specific advance care directives not too long ago and what Grandma wrote and how she wrote it kept my aunt from calling for that ambulance until she finally did.  After she called the ambulance Aunt Peggy called my mother, who then called me.  When my mom called she was crying and our conversation that followed was a variation on a theme my friend Rachel and I discuss often, the one about us becoming grown-up’s who occasionally find ourselves in the position of parenting our own parents. 

In the case of my mother’s phone call the roll reversal felt right.  It felt like the normal turn of events, much like I’m sure it feels for my mother and aunt today in Pittsburg where they’re caring for my grandmother who yesterday was moved from the intensive care unit to her own room.  “Great Nana just sat in a wheelchair and rode up and down the hall,” my mother reported to me a few hours ago during a phone call.  “How about that?” 

The notes I wrote to my children’s teachers, they marked the passage of this past year.  That note my grandmother wrote with her doctor’s help, it marked the passage of her life.  My mother taught me to write, and her mother taught her to write.  Now my children are learning to write, too.  All this writing makes me think about what may come next, of what each of us may mark down this week, this month, this year. 

If my children become parents I hope they’ll write notes on behalf of their sons’ and daughters’, too.  My mother may write a note like my grandmother’s one day, and I may also do the same.  But whatever we write, all of us, I hope we won’t do it to benefit ourselves.  Instead I hope we do it for each other, in the interest of what is right, as an impetus for forward movement.  How about that?  

“I saw my buddy Archie!” Albert hollered at me across the apples and oranges and tomatoes and sweet potatoes. “He’s famous!”

Albert is the produce manager at our grocery store, and when he called out to me he was talking about the BI-LO weekly circular that hit the newsstands this morning. Albert knows Archie as the little boy who once plucked his mother’s Venti-sized-Breve-Latte-with-one-shot-of-vanilla-please out of the cup holder on her cart and threw it on the floor, right in front of the peppers and prepackaged lettuce. Albert was the store employee who got a mop and bucket to clean up the spilled coffee after I took Archie by the hand and marched him to the front of the store to explain what he’d done, to apologize for the mess he’d made. I remember that Albert listened patiently to Archie’s explanation. I remember, too, that he allowed Archie the time he needed to find his words, and that Albert waited for me to interpret Archie’s stumbling sentences only after he tried a few times to do so himself. So that is why I smiled hugely when I replied to Albert, calling out back over the fruits and vegetables, “Or maybe infamous!”

This week, beginning on page seven, the supermarket chain’s circular celebrates the BI-LO Charity Classic, an annual charity golf tournament that has raised over $44 million in its twenty-five year history to benefit charitable organizations located in the South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee communities served by BI-LO grocery stores. I didn’t know Archie’s photo and story would be used for this advertising circular when I took him to that photo shoot in February, but I’m happy to tell you how surprised I was when John called me over to look at his laptop a few Friday evenings ago and showed me a rough draft of the circular, one a friend of his in the charity’s department had attached to an e-mail. The friend wanted our permission to run the ad, and John and I were so pleased and proud that we granted it immediately.

It turns out that Archie’s image is also being used on the tournament’s golf ball sleeves, and that the photo of Archie on the swing, in the park, was placed right up front in the player’s book alongside a quote from the Meyer Center’s executive director.

John was asked to have Archie and Kit, whose photo also appears in the publication, sign those player’s books that would be presented as keepsakes to a few very important people. So one evening not too long ago I sat at our kitchen table watching Kit effortlessly pen her name in each book next to her own photo, and then stood up to reach around Archie’s shoulders, to steady the page while he worked long and hard to mark his photo with a letter “A,” scribble-scrabble style.

When John came home from work the next day he told me a friend in the charity’s department told him one of those very important people got more than a little choked up when they saw Archie’s signature, right there on the page beside his photo. That touches me in a way I find difficult to explain here, but at least it reminds me that I’ve got company. The truth is that when I saw the rough draft of the ad circular on John’s laptop that Friday evening my throat felt full, too, and I had to put my hands against chest, right over my heart, to hold in all my joy.

I also wanted to write something about all of that joy here, before I close this post. You may remember that John and I attended the Charity Classic’s President’s party last year and that I shared with you how talking with Archie’s oncologist that night granted me an insight I hadn’t yet perceived. Turns out that Archie’s involvement with this year’s Charity Classic has offered me another opportunity to write a new definition for another frame of reference affecting my life.

I recently shared the news about the ad circular and Archie’s involvement in it with a friend. She wanted to know how I felt about Archie’s image and story being used this way. “Great!” I told her unabashedly. But she persisted, explaining that she wondered what it was like for a mother whose child is being used in an ad pertaining to disability and the necessity for aid. I stumbled over my own words trying to answer her question that day in the park, but what I should have said was this: It doesn’t bother me at all.

Archie is what he is, and his needs are what they are. I don’t want to live a life filled with denial. It’s true: Archie is disabled, but not unable. I believe that by acknowledging Archie’s strengths and weaknesses I’m ultimately empowering him. I believe that celebrating who Archie is grants him the confidence he needs to be his best self. I don’t define Archie by his diagnosis; rather I strive to accept it as an undeniable part of his identity.

I understand that each family of every child with a disability has their own outlook and that those outlooks differ greatly. I respect our different opinions and am happy for them. After all, we are all trying to do our best by our babies. In the end, through our own, individual efforts we’re only helping each other move forward one day at a time. And I guess that’s why in our home we’re so enthusiastic about this circular.

My oldest son, my first child, has Down syndrome and attends a special education program at a preschool for children with disabilities. For now, he rides the short bus. I’m not ashamed of that, and it doesn’t bother me like I feared it once would. I never expected to be glad for it either, and I never anticipated feeling as grateful as I do, every single day, for a school that celebrates Archie’s abilities but also works to help him overcome his disabilities, and for all the organizations and individuals who support his school.

He is my biggest boy and I’m so grateful for who he is, for who he’ll become, for each extra chromosome in his body.

Last Friday night I ran the inaugural Greenville Hospital System’s Swamp Rabbit Trail 5K in Travelers Rest. This event was the first official race on the newly-paved trail, but I ran a few miles on the trail’s stretch through downtown Greenville when I competed in the Spinx Run Fest’s half-marathon last October.

The first thing you should know is that I haven’t run in the evening since I finished the Greenville 5K Candlelight Run last June. I train in the mornings, usually beginning my runs around 6 o’clock, and I prefer to compete in the mornings, too. That said I realized last Friday evening early on in the race that I hadn’t eaten or hydrated properly to ensure I was prepared for optimum performance. And then there’s the fact that caring for three little kids all day long drains a mother’s energy even if that mother is doing her best to “take it easy” before her evening race.

The other thing you should know is that nearly 2,000 people showed up for the race. That was a large number of people to funnel down a footpath. The race’s start was congested, and it took much longer than usual for the crowd to thin out as we made our way down the trail. Weaving was inevitable, and then there was this one turn when the girl two footfalls in front of me completely stopped in her tracks when she realized she’d cut the cone and had to double back to avoid being disqualified. I ran right into her back.

It didn’t help either that more than one runner pushing a double stroller positioned him or herself close to the starting line, in the middle of the six-minute milers. Sure, the corrals were informal, marked only by cardboard signs with handwritten titles like, “6-minute milers,” “7-minute milers,” and “8-minute milers,” but I’d hoped the race organizers would have at least asked the runners with strollers to move back, please.

So the first mile was congested, the second mile included a sharp, steep climb up a hill in Grandview Cemetery, and the third mile sent us runners back the way we came, down the same trail we’d already traveled and into the runners and walkers who were still working their way toward the cemetery. That made for a special kind of congestion, for sure.

My first mile split was 7:51. That wasn’t ideal, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I did the best I could under the conditions. There was no two-mile marker so I didn’t get a split, and I don’t have a three-mile split either. I have ordered another Garmin, however, since my husband recently commandeered the one I bought last summer so I shouldn’t have these sort of record-keeping issues in the future. By mile three the heat and humidity was really bothering me, and I found myself repeating the lyrics from one of the Yo Gabba Gabba! song Archie likes so much, “Don’t stop, don’t give up. Keep trying, keep trying. Never stop, never give up.”

I finished the race in 24:10, which is the slowest I’ve run a 5K in a long time. There were no timing chips, though, and it was a gun-start race so who knows what my personal race time really was anyway. I did end up placing third in my age group, which is encouraging, and I finished 154th overall out of 1,606 runners who completed the course.

I also want to confess that this 5K was the first race I’ve ever run without earphones and music. I did so purposefully because I felt confident in my ability to cover the distance without needing the music’s distraction, and I’m glad I made the decision I did. The race took on a new dimension for me, and it was a true treat to hear the cadence simultaneous footfalls can keep when similarly paced runners find each other and hang together out there on the trail.

So there’s that, but then there’s this, too. I’d planned to forego the gym the morning before the race so when my alarm sounded I took a shower, dried my hair and dressed for the day. I chose something nice to wear, too, because I was expected at Kit and Jack’s school around lunchtime for a Mother’s Day celebration.

Most mornings I’m walking in the front door from a run before my children see me for the first time each day. I’m sweaty and smelly, and I’m wearing running clothes. I’ll exchange those clothes for another set of workout clothes before we leave for school, the kids and I. If all three kids have school I’ll go to the gym and workout with weights before I go home and shower. If only Archie has school I’ll wear my workout clothing until I have an opportunity to shower. I never know when it’ll come, that opportunity, since my day’s accomplishments are often dictated by my children’s play dates and appointments.

The Friday morning before the race I was emptying the dishwasher when Jack spoke up and wanted to know, “Where’s my other mommy?”

“What do you mean, your other mommy?” I asked in response even though I could anticipate Jack’s explanation.

Jack got embarrassed then and stumbled over his answer, stringing together words and mumbles that only halfway made sense but still I understood what he was trying to say.

“Do you want to know where your stinky mommy who wears old workout clothes and doesn’t comb her hair is? Do you wonder where this mommy who’s clean, and who’s wearing make-up, and who smells good came from?” I laughed as I spoke and Jack did, too, because what I said, that’s exactly what he’d meant.

I’ve been thinking of that conversation I shared with Jack in terms of what I’d write about here pertaining to last Friday’s race. We parents are all people will multiple interests. Some define us for our children, and some pass them by unnoticed. We find friends to compliment each of our life’s endeavors. It isn’t until our children are older that they can see how their parents parse out their personalities in so many ways. It takes a while for our children to learn that we’re the same person in all aspects of our lives, but yet we’re different, too. But some days, like last Friday, we get to show our children how we overlap.

When Archie was small I’d have to catch him before I could clean his ear with a warm washcloth, before I could put those prescribed drops into his ear. I tried to schedule the doses for times during the day when I knew I’d have another adult around to help me. One of us would have to hold Archie down while the other one made quick business of his treatment routine.

If I was alone I’d try to lay on top of Archie, or pin him between my legs while I finished what had to be done, but that never really worked because Archie, in spite of his muscles’ poor tone, would break free of my stronghold every, single time. It’s true: No matter what approach we used to administer Archie’s medicine, I’m sure we wasted more eardrops than we used. The whole process frustrated me, and it terrified Archie. During the days or weeks his ears were gunky, I’d often find myself standing in our kitchen and picking at my cuticles, wondering at the value of it all.

But this morning Archie came to me without complaint when I asked him to, when I told him it was time to clean his ear and do his drops. “My ear is gunky,” he told me, searching my eyes for confirmation.

When Archie looks at me that way, the one in which he locks his eyes onto my own with an intensity that seems nearly palpable, I always feel as if Archie is looking way down deep into the truest part of me for a sort of assurance he knows he’ll only find there. If I say it’s so he’ll believe it, no matter what. And I think I should admit right now that sometimes Archie’s unwavering trust feels like a heady sort of power, but that sometimes it feels like a heavy weight to bear.

“Yes, your ear is gunky,” I answered this morning when Archie inquired, and then I waited for what would come next. To my surprise Archie didn’t protest at all; instead he laid his head in my lap, turned to the right so that I could look down into his gunky ear. As I cleaned Archie’s ear he whined a little, but that was all. He whined a little more loudly when I put the drops in his ear, but he held his head still and didn’t fight against the weight of my hand against his shoulders, or the way I tugged his earlobe to encourage the drops that had pooled in the top of his canal to drain in towards his middle ear.

Yesterday afternoon I marveled at how big Archie looked as he walked toward me in my friend’s driveway. She and I were standing beside each other, watching our children play. He’s grown tall, my Archie, and I find that I’m regularly struck by what a boy he’s becoming when he, dressed in shorts that accentuate the length of his legs, ambles around outside with his siblings, his friends. When that happens I can see that Archie’s baby-self looks as if it’s long gone now. I can see that he’s growing up.

I write that, but then there’s this, too. Archie may always look like a big boy, but he doesn’t consistently act it. The comparison creates a cognitive dissonance, I know, and sometimes it’s challenging to determine how to strike a balance between Archie’s appearance and his actions. As his mother, I struggle to find a way to help Archie fit together all of his personal parallels.

But then time rolls on and suddenly, without pronouncement, there are mornings like today’s when Archie’s actions defy my expectations and I find myself encouraged and hopeful. My biggest boy is showing me that we’re moving forward. Here’s the proof, I acknowledge silently way down deep inside the truest part of myself. He’s closing the gap.

We just took Archie to school, Kit, Jack and I. While we were there we collected gift baskets from the PTA president, ones we’ll distribute tomorrow morning to the school’s teachers, therapists and staff in celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week a week late. It’s the thought that counts, I say, even when you think it a little late.

On our way home from school we stopped by the grocery store so I could buy myself more yogurt and so Jack could collect a hug from his friend David, one of the baggers. I mean it when I tell you that man is always, always, always pleased to see my children. When we’re missing a child, any of the three, David will always ask about their whereabouts if he doesn’t already know where the absent one is. “Is Archie at school today?” he asked this morning even though he already knew the answer. David has memorized our schedule, I’ve concluded, and there’s something comforting to my children and I in the intimacy that familiarity brings.

The twins rode their tricycles ’round and ’round the driveway when we got home from the grocery store. I was carrying the gift baskets from the back of my station wagon to our dining room table where right now all thirteen are lined up side by side, wrapped in clear cellophane. I’ve made little piles on my sideboard, too, of thank-you notes penned by parents. Each pile represents a department or classroom and it’s kind of sad, I think, that every therapist or teacher isn’t represented by at least one note. We’d asked all the parents to send in thank-you notes and they should have even if they didn’t.

As I type this I’m listening to Kit and Jack chatter, chatter, chatter. They’re sitting at the kitchen table, using markers and crayons to fill coloring books they remembered Santa brought them for Christmas. One of my favorite things to do these days is initiate an activity with Archie, Kit and Jack, to get all three children interested in something and started on a project, then disappear to eavesdrop on their conversation from a room a wall away.

When they’re coloring they talk about sharing crayons; when they’re playing with dolls Kit calls Jack the brother daddy and together she and he occasionally leave one particular baby in Archie’s care. He’s the babysitter, they say, and it’s gratifying to observe how thoroughly he cares for his charge.

Last weekend I found all three children sitting atop Archie’s bed. Kit and Jack were listening intently as Archie recited One Duck Stuck, word for word, page by page. I reveled in the twins’ attentiveness, and marveled at Archie’s careful annunciation of each pages’ animal sound.

Standing there in the doorway I felt like a single person split in two. Part of me, the analytical self who has sat through conferences with teachers and therapists and reviewed the research and dealt with the doctors and their diagnosis’s, wondered how it is Archie does that, why it is he can do that. The other part of me, the illogical self that is mostly a proud mother, felt sorry for my first self, the one that was searching for some sort of clinical explanation. The answer is simple, this second self wants to believe. It’s just because he’s smart.

Right now in the other room Kit has abandoned her crayons and is leaning against the couch, her two feet still on the ground, watching television. Jack, who is walking in circles, has a plastic yellow kazoo in one hand and a rubber chicken in the other hand. He’s mashing the chicken’s inflated belly with the kazoo and every time he does the chicken emits this asthmatic expiratory wheeze. It’s funny, really, to hear that bird’s comical squawk juxtaposed against Jack’s expressionless face.

Later today, after school, I may take Archie, Kit and Jack to the park. While we’re there we may play monster. When we do we four stumble around lock-kneed, rocking from one foot to the other, our arms stretched out in front of us affecting our best Frankenstein impersonations. Archie delights in this game and I can’t help but think that’s because he’s discovered this particular pretend play is one in which his success is predetermined. Archie has discovered that he’s chromosomally predisposed to move speedily on shaky legs, and he’s learned that this game is one that celebrates that tendency.

We’ll take it, of course, the twins and I, and all three of us will laugh and squeal at Archie’s impeccable impersonation until his feigned growls become rolling guffaws, the kind you only get to laugh when you really get it after all.

John and I had struck a deal with the kids: Good behavior in exchange for a new book of their choice. Archie, Kit and Jack had made good on their promise so it was John and my turn to uphold our own.

But when we arrived at the bookstore Archie was overwhelmed by the rows and rows of brightly-colored books, or the shoppers who got a little too close when they passed us by, or the low hum of voices bouncing off the stacks and shelves. He was overwhelmed and it was beginning to show so I decided not to stop Archie when he dove to the ground in front of the Step Into Reading book display and began pulling all the books with characters he recognized on their covers off the shelf, then stacking them in a pile between his legs.

I could see that Archie intended to hoard the books, to find comfort in their familiarity as he shuffled through the pile one book at a time, reciting aloud the titles he’d already memorized and asking me to help him learn the titles he didn’t yet know. Experience has taught me that this behavior of Archie’s, the repetitious stacking and shuffling of books, the way he insists that either he or I say it each time he picks up a new book with a new title, will at best allow him to alleviate his anxiety. At worst, I’ve learned, this self-stimulating behavior is just a precursor to an impending meltdown. So there at the bookstore I tolerated it because I was hoping the moment would pass, that Archie would find his equilibrium again and I wouldn’t end up dragging my oldest son out of the store as he carried on and on, turning heads as he and I made our way from one end of the building to the other.

While I was watching Archie’s constitution unravel before my eyes, a lady was sitting on the stage at one end of the children’s books section reading a copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. There were parents and children sitting on the benches arranged in front of her, all of them pressed up against each other, and I knew they could hear Archie as he recited the books’ titles loudly and hemmed and hawed, but I hoped that they wouldn’t mind, that they’d understand I was doing what I could to help Archie over the hump.

I was thinking that when Archie saw them, too, and that’s when I knew it was all over. Just the other day my father took Archie for a haircut and when they got to the barbershop and walked through the door Dad and Archie found themselves in the middle of a crowd of waiting customers. My father said that Archie looked at the people on one side of the room, and then he looked at the people on the other side of the room. After he finished all that looking Archie took a few steps forward before he declared loudly and with authority, “I’m nnnnnneeeeeext!” He’s just that way, this oldest boy of mine. He thrives on spotlights and audiences and I can’t say I blame him for it because it isn’t as if that apple fell too far from this tree.

At the bookstore, in the children’s section, Archie collected his books and lurched, arms full, toward the stage. When he got there he sat down, front and center, then began shuffling through his stack. He looked at me and I held my finger to my lips to make a shushing face. Archie smiled and then, in deliberate defiance of my request, lifted a book over his head as he insisted loudly and with authority, “Momma, say it!” That’s when I excused my way through the crowd, grabbed Archie’s arm and then dragged him, kicking and hollering, from the stage.

I put Archie’s stack of books back on the shelf, and then I hollered to John that our time was up. He was with Kit and Jack and the three of them were just feet away from us in the opposite direction of the stage, but somehow that husband of mine was oblivious to Archie’s outburst. John what and how’d as he turned his head this way and then that way, blinking hard in both directions, before he shrugged his shoulders and acquiesced to my assessment.

At the front of the store, in the checkout line, Archie was still yeah-yeah-yeahing with one hand shoved all the way inside his mouth. He wasn’t kicking and hollering anymore, but his legs had gone wet-noodle and I was holding him up off the floor by his other hand, the one not stuffed between his teeth. That’s when I remembered that there was a magazine I wanted to buy so I lifted Archie onto John’s feet and deposited him there, all limp and floppy. “I’ll be right back,” I promised.

I could still hear Archie’s whining when I was standing in front of the magazine rack, scanning the titles for the one I wanted. He was loud, for sure, but his vocalizations were controlled, nearly rhythmic. What I mean is that by now the noise Archie was making really wasn’t that big of a deal and if it bothered the other people waiting in the check-out line they weren’t making their discomfort known. But the woman standing next to me in the periodicals section wearing rolled-up Capri jeans and talking to her daughter, she was.

“Do you hear that?” she asked her daughter who couldn’t have been any older than ten. “It’s soooooooo annoying! What an awful noise that child is making!”

When a child is acting out in a public place and we mothers look away, ignore the tantrum and forego passing judgment because we knew we’ve been there, too, that our own children have acted out like that before as well, that’s what my friend Rachel calls the mommy pass. I guess the woman wearing rolled-up Capri jeans knew as much about the mommy pass as she did fashion because it was obvious: She was judging the child; she was judging his parents.

I weighed my options as I listened to her complain. I don’t think the woman’s vantage point enabled her to see that Archie has Down syndrome. I’m not sure if knowing as much would have changed her mind about speaking out; I don’t know. I do know that she, up here at the front of the store, had no knowledge of the back story behind Archie’s whining, and I wondered if I could set her straight about it all without sounding as if I were making excuses. I was angry. I was hurt. My mind whirred and I thought of several things to say, but in the end I said nothing. I just walked away.

But I was upset enough when I got back to the counter at the end of the checkout line to loudly announce, “That woman over there near the magazine rack is saying rude things about Archie.” I wanted more people than just John to hear what I had to say.

John wanted to know if I’d said anything to her, to the woman filled with rude comments. I told him I hadn’t because I was too flustered and afraid of what may come out of my mouth. The cashier listened to all of this and then offered to say something to the woman, and I hope he did, too, after we left.

It has been a few days since we’ve been in the bookstore, but what happened there is still bothering me. I’m not entirely sure why, but this I do know: Once upon a time I was such critical person that my comments often earned a chastisement from my father to keep my opinions to myself unless they were kind. He’d warn me as much, and then he’d preach tolerance over and over again. But back then I rarely listened to him.

In the end it took an extra chromosome for me to understand the value of my father’s advice. Children change their parents, I know, but I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that Archie’s effect on my life is more profound, more pronounced, than any other influence I’ve ever known. I may have arrived at this place in my own good time, but for sure Archie hastened my pace.

And I guess that’s what bothers me the most about the woman standing next to me in the periodicals section wearing rolled-up Capri jeans, talking to her daughter. I hate knowing that I used to say things like she did, that once I thoughtlessly hurt people with my words as she hurt me the other day in the bookstore. I can’t change the past, I know, but I hope to change the future.

See, there are these three little kids I know and I’m not biased, or anything, but they’re the most receptive learners…

That’s what Coach Dan said to my husband Tuesday night during John’s No Boundaries beginning runners’ clinic. When John shared his and Coach Dan’s exchange with me over his cell phone after the clinic was over, during John’s drive home from Cleveland Park, I was stunned. “How does he know me?” I wanted to know.

John replied that he’d asked Coach Dan that same question, and that Coach Dan had told him that he knew how I finished in my most recent race. “Really?” I asked my husband incredulously because, to be honest, I didn’t know anyone in our running community knew my name, or even really noticed me at all.

“Really,” John answered matter-of-factly.

I suspect Coach Dan may have made the connection between John and myself because I had stopped by the running store where the coach works weekends to pick up my age-group award earlier that day, and in doing so I did have to tell the store’s co-owner my name. That co-owner may have recognized my name as the girl who kinda-sorta accosted the other co-owner Saturday morning before the run when he was walking out of a door I was walking into and I stopped him, stumbling all over myself as I declared, “Hey, you ran Boston!” and then blurted out like some sort of groupie girl, “How’d it go?”

He wanted to know my name, that running store co-owner who ran this year’s Boston Marathon, which I told him before I explained that my husband ran with him up McDaniel Avenue during Coach Dan’s clinic that Thursday before the race. And then, later, I saw that this co-owner drew that connection again, the one between John and me, when I high-fived him after crossing the finishing line, before tearing off the bottom part of my bib to hand to the race officials at the end of the finisher’s shoot.

And maybe that co-owner saw me approach the finish line with D. J., who I heard took a client to the running store later that day to pick out a pair of shoes. Everybody at the running store knows D. J., and maybe Coach Dan was working that afternoon and someone said something to someone else and the connection was drawn again, from John to me, and then between the two of us and back again to D. J.

I don’t know how Coach Dan figured out who I am, or who I was in relation to John, but he did and he mentioned it and when he did he said my name as if I were someone and I’d be omitting an important part of this story if I didn’t admit that Coach Dan’s recognition made me feel at least a little important. Everyone at the Meyer Center, or the doctor’s offices, or the hospital may know me as Archie’s mom, and everyone at St. Mary Magdalene’s, or the park, or the reading group at the bookstore on Tuesday and Thursday mornings may know me as Kit and Jack’s mom, and there’s a whole other group of people who know me as John’s wife, and another group still who recognizes me as my parents’ daughter, but there aren’t many people left who acknowledge me for my own accomplishments anymore. I’m not sure where it’s gone or when exactly I lost sight of it, but sometimes my own identity feels so far off that I have to strain to see it again.

But now I’m going on and on.

So I’ll tell you that I’m thinking about all of this because today at the gym as I was on the parallel bars counting out twenty-one dips and the rest of my class was out the door, running a lap, my trainer Michael laughed and then said to me, “You’ll be a legend by the time I’m finished with you.” He was talking about how my knee bleed when I nicked it with my fingernail Friday while I was doing dead lifts, and how I didn’t notice the blood until he’d said something, and how he’s now exaggerating the whole story by telling everyone, including the rest of my class, that I lost a pint of blood. He was talking about that, but what he said makes me think of something else.

On Thursday I had an appointment at the hospital with a radiologist. The appointment had been scheduled for early in the morning, during my doctor’s rounds, and since it involved the x-ray department I knew I couldn’t bring Kit and Jack along with me. John would take Archie to school, we decided, and I would drop the twins off at my parent’s house where my mother agreed to watch them.

Because my parents live near an elementary school, I wanted to be sure I left our house early enough to avoid the traffic associated with the start of school. I’d have to pass the school on my way to my parent’s house, and then again on the way to the hospital, so I’d do well to err on the side of early, I estimated. This meant that Kit, Jack and I left our home an hour and a half before we usually do. The sun had risen by the time we walked outside, but the day was still brand new. When we left the house to get into my car, parked in our driveway, Jack asked, “What’s that smell?”

“It’s six eh-em,” I answered, just like that. It wasn’t until later, during the drive to my parents’ house, that I realized Kit and Jack had never been outside in this world so early in the morning. Their world during the six o’clock hour involves Mister Roger’s, breakfast bars and peanut butter, getting dressed and waiting for me to walk through the front door, fresh from a run. Until that day they didn’t know about all of this, the cars, the kids waiting at the bus stop, the runners along the side of the road, the scent of the climbing roses over our garage wafting like a perfume’s top note before it evaporates into the warm-weather musty smell of our lawn, the one that rises up from the roots way down deep underneath the thick, top thatch of our Bermuda grass.

Those runners we saw alongside the road, they made me think of this. Even from the front seat of my car I could tell that they were beginner runners, like John and his classmates in Coach Dan’s clinic, and seeing them reminded me that it’d been about a year ago that I started running with commitment. I didn’t run in high school, and I didn’t run in college, so everything I know now I’ve learned since then. I’ve learned so much, and those runners like John along the side of the road need to learn so much like I did, but still I have so much more to learn.

I thought about how much I still need to know, and I remembered how Kit and Jack sauntered to our car that morning, parked in the driveway. They don’t know a thing about being on time or being late, about sitting in traffic or avoiding the hassle altogether. I rush through my days, from task to task, minute to minute, and I forget that the little boy holding my hand and leaning into my legs so much so he slows my progress, thinks we have all the time in the world.

Someday that little boy may let his hair grow long or dye it black, and someday he and his brother and sister will probably wear clothing riddled with intentional holes. They’ll slam doors, all three of them, and each of them will probably tell me that they hate me during some argument we’ll share with such an intensity in their voices that I’ll be tempted to believe them. They’ll do all these things and I’ll wish them young again before they learned so much, before I learned so much, when there was still so much in front of all of us to learn.

That will come to pass, I know, but now Jack asks me to make little houses for him on our couch with throw pillows and baby blankets Kit takes from her dresser drawer while he watches his television shows, and Kit asks me to help her dress in her princess costumes in the afternoon after school and when I do she declares herself beautiful, and Archie runs down the upstairs hall in the morning from his room toward mine too early, before anyone’s bedside alarm has sounded, his arms thrown wide from side to side and he is nearly singing, Good morning, Momma! What are we going to do today?

And that is what I was thinking about when Michael mentioned my legendary status this morning. He was joking, but in a way he was right. I wonder where my identity’s gone, but really it’s right here in front of me. I am all of these things wrapped up together, a series of selves overlapping each other. A part of me can’t exist without the other, and all these parts tossed together make me who I am.

When my children are grown they’ll remember how we are together now, and it’ll shape who they’ll become then. They’ll know what people have said about me, and they’ll know what they’ve said, too. Somewhere in these years ahead of us a switch will flip and they’ll stop leaning on my legs and instead they’ll begin to push me in the right direction. I wonder when that will happen, when the little houses, and princess costumes, and carefree mornings will dissipate like the scent of those roses into the trodden ground, and I wonder what they’ll think of me then, what my legend will be after all?

I took a dinner plate from the cupboard and filled it with fruit. I cut an apple into wedges, peeled an orange, grabbed a handful of blueberries, and pulled the last of the red, seedless grapes, all of them still stuck to a picked-over vine, out of the produce drawer in our refrigerator. When I carried that plate outside and placed it on the table top between Rachel and Jack my three-year-old son breathed, “Ahh, f*uck… I wanted Goldfish.”

I may have asked Rachel if Jack said what I thought I heard him say, or I may have asked Jack what he’d said. I can’t remember. But I do remember feeling embarrassed, and trying to hide my shocked expression from Jack, then resisting the urge to laugh because, really, Jack had uttered the phrase so appropriately and with such perfect diction that there was no denying he’s heard it used before, and often.

Since becoming a mother I have made a concerted effort to clean up my language. I really have. You should have heard the crap that regularly spouted out of my mouth in the dormitories, the cafeteria, the halls of the classroom buildings when I was an undergraduate, and then the colorful phrases I could string together when I was working and doing my best to describe the ridiculousness that occurred in my department to coworkers, or the nonsensicalities that happened everyday in our office to John when I came home from work at night. But I admit that even though my language has been sanitized, it still isn’t squeaky clean. There may be a thesaurus filled with more appropriate word choices, but sometimes the one that feels most satisfying is still a solid “f” bomb.

At least Jack said it in front of Rachel, who didn’t care. At least he didn’t say it in school, like my brother did when he was small and called another kid on the bus a little f*cker for one reason or another. We’d just come home from visiting our grandmother, my brother and I, and that’s where Patrick had learned to deftly employ that phrase. “He has this Aunt Rosie…” my mother tried to explain to the principal who had called her later to discuss the incident our bus driver had reported to him after she’d delivered us to school the next day.

Aunt Rosie wasn’t really my aunt. She was my grandmother’s sister, my father’s aunt, but we cousins called Rosie what our parents did as if she were our aunt, too. Our extended family was large in the way Catholic families were just a generation ago, so it helped to ignore the specifics and instead group people into categories. Not matter who she was in relation to me, Aunt Rosie could pepper a sentence with cuss words like no one’s business. And since she talked a lot, she had occasion to swear often.

I remember that if you had something to say and wanted to interrupt Aunt Rosie’s talking, talking, talking so you could say it, she’d turn a pointed finger on you, pause to take a drag from her cigarette, and then speak from a place way down deep inside her chest as she exhaled, “Okay-you-little-f*cker-you-have-one-minute-starting-right-now.” Because she was intimidating to begin with, and because you knew that Aunt Rosie just called you a bad word, I remember that it was often difficult to instantaneously recall what you’d wanted to say in the first place and that your allotted time would usually expire before you could manage to translate your thoughts into words.

Writing all this makes Aunt Rosie sound like a callous person, but she wasn’t. She was demonstrative and her warmth was infectious. I mean it when I say that Aunt Rosie was as quick to kiss a kid as she was to scold us scamps into silence. I miss her sitting at that cherry-wood dining room table too big for the room, covered in lace tablecloths too formal for my grandmother’s house. I miss them all. They would have loved my three children, even when they swear. Especially when they swear.

It seems as if being off my game at home has thrown me for a loop out on the road, too. Finding my stride while running has been mostly difficult, and sometimes even impossible. I mean it when I say that workouts have felt torturous. So now that a good run has suddenly become an elusive thing, I wasn’t sure what to expect this morning when I showed up for the Greer Earth Day Run 5K.

I was hoping for a PR, but I missed one by two-tenths of a second, finishing in 23:47. I will say, though, that my watch had me in at 23:33, and the race organizers did elect to go green and run a race without timing chips, so who knows. What I do know is this: I was the fifth female finisher in today’s 5K, and I won my age group by three minutes.

The appropriate, self-effacing thing to write here is that obviously the fast girls didn’t show up to run this morning. But I’ll also write that when the race announcer awarded the women’s first place finisher her award he commented that she was smokin’ out there on this hot, South Carolina morning. She only beat me by two minutes.

I’ll tell you, though, all that is well and good, but the best part of the morning had to be when D. J., my trainer who recently resigned his position at the gym to pursue more profitable endeavors, surprised me on the course somewhere along mile three and ran me into the finish. I was grateful for that, and flattered, too. He’s been telling me all along that I’d be a better runner if I had a rabbit to chase, and I know that’s true, especially if that rabbit was as encouraging as D. J. is.

After I crossed that finish line I called John to check on the kids. When I called, John was getting ready to take Archie and Kit to the doctor’s office. Turns out Archie was feverish and complaining that his neck hurt (he meant his throat), and Kit kept insisting that her ear hurt. She was up all night screaming, that Kit, so her complaint wasn’t that much of a shocker.

Two co-payments later and its true: Both Archie and Kit have Strep throat. Awesome.

Which means we missed out on a neighbor’s birthday party later this afternoon. Boo.

But those are the breaks, right? The highs and lows, the good and the bad, all of it mixed together to make up the constitution of our days.

What will come next?

Its odd, really, that I’m admitting that to myself because I usually won’t until my shit has been gotten together, past-tense. It’s weirder still that I’m saying so publicly. Just the same the truth is that everything is humming along around here at its normal quick-clip pace, but I’m just not feeling it. Does that make sense? If it doesn’t then maybe this real-life explanation will.

As I type there’s a load of laundry in the dryer and another load in the washing machine. Both machines’ cycles finished a few minutes ago, their built-in alarms beeping aloud to signal as much. I know I need to fold the laundry in the dryer and I know I need to transfer the second load from the washing machine to the dryer, but I just don’t want to. At all. In fact, the idea that this task remains unfinished at this time irritates me. A lot. But that’s not motivation enough for me to actually finish the chore; in fact, my irritation, any irritation, only seems to mutate into frustration these days until that’s all I’ve got.

For example, Kit is sitting at the kitchen table, painting. She’s a pretty good artist, that Kit, and I’m sure what she’s putting down on paper is all kinds of nice, but all I can see when I look at my daughter sitting there, diligently dipping her brush in the little plastic tumbler filled with murky, gray water then dabbing that brush in the mucked-up tray of watercolors I set in front of her a few minutes ago, is the mess she’s going to leave for me to clean up in about twenty minutes. I know, I should make her clean up her own mess, and for the most part I do, but still. She’s three-years old and her idea of clean does not parallel my own.

Also, in the hour he’s been home from school Jack has peed all over himself and the powder room floor, spilled chocolate milk down the front of his shirt, and antagonized the dog into a frenzied butt-tucking frolic around the first floor of our house. Furthermore, that youngest boy of mine just came in here, placed one hand on the desk for balance and then used the other to pull off his underwear which he left on the floor beside me when he ran out of this room in pursuit of his sister who is headed upstairs, she tells me, to pull two blankets out of the dresser in her room. She and Jack are going to play picnic with her dolls, Kit says, and that’s wonderful and I’m tickled by their creative, imaginative play, but to be honest all I can think as I watch Kit and Jack spread those two blankets out across the floor is, Damn. More laundry.

And then there’s Archie who wants yogi milk, in a cup with a straw. The first time he approached me with this specific request of his I obliged. When I opened the refrigerator door to retrieve the milk with which to mix the packet of Carnation Instant Breakfast, vanilla please, I found a cup already filled with Archie’s favorite drink leftover from breakfast so I took that one out of the refrigerator and gave it to Archie instead of making a new drink. He protested initially, but then agreed to taste it after I convinced him to do so. After he did Archie clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times before be looked at me and declared, “That’s peach. No peach.” Although I’m happy that Archie’s sense of taste is keen enough to ensure he’ll be a shoe-in as a sommelier one day, that observation of his was enough to set me off on one of my internal tirades aimed at John, who insists on mixing these yogurt drinks he got free last week at the grocery store with coupons he clipped from the paper into Archie’s yogi milk even though it’s obvious Archie prefers his drink shaken, not stirred, and just vanilla, please. Suffice it to say I told Archie he was out of luck and so he left that cup with the straw at the table, still full, and he’s already come in here to ask me for another drink about three times since I left the kitchen and each time he does my stress level ratchets itself up another notch and I’m here to tell you that, really, my head may explode by the end of the day. But still I keep telling Archie no, he cannot have a different yogi milk, but with all the whiney please-please-pleasing he’s doing I just may give in if he comes in here again. I’m gonna do a stellar job with the discipline this week, I can tell already.

And that’s the thing, really. If all this irritation, and frustration, and aggravation where limited to just this week I think I could be o. k. with that. But it’s not because I felt like this last week, too, and things felt so bad one night that during bath time I called a staff meeting.

John wasn’t home yet, and I had the three kids lined up in the tub in birth order from left to right when someone did something that made me want to scream. Instead of screaming, though, I sighed REALLY LOUD and said, “O. K., fine. That’s it. We’re having a brainstorming session.”

None of my kids understood what I meant by that of course so I explained, “When Daddy’s at work and things stop going well sometimes he has to go to brainstorm meetings to try to figure out how to make everything good again. So we’re gonna have one right now, a brainstorming session.”

That made Archie, Kit and Jack smile so I continued, encouraged by their enthusiasm. “I’m gonna give you all a chance to tell me how to make things better around here. All ideas are good; none are bad. Jack, you’re first. Go.”

Jack launched into this halfway articulate paragraph out of which I could glean the phrases makes me sad and call an ambulance. For the sake of clarification when he finished talking I asked Jack, “So if we make it through the day and we don’t have to call an ambulance than you’ll be happy, not sad?”

Jack smiled broadly then and enthusiastically nodded his agreement with my assessment. Which is good, I think, because surely I can measure up to this standard of excellence.

Kit, who was seated in the middle of the tub sandwiched between her brothers, was next. “Mommy, don’t be mad,” she implored while shaking a finger in my face.

“I try not to get mad, Kit.”

“And don’t do ’dat ting with your eyebrows,” she continued.

“What thing?”

Kit couldn’t explain with words, but she pushed against my brow with that pointing finger of hers. “’Dat ting,” she tried to demonstrate as she pushed my eyebrow up and then pulled it down.

“O. K., I’ll try,” I promised.

It was Archie’s turn to speak next. I looked at him and repeated my question, “What can I do to make things better around here?”

“Have big ideas,” he answered.

I repeated his sentence as I usually do. I like to think that doing so let’s Archie know I understood him, really heard what he said. And then I asked, “Like what?”

He stared at me for a long time in response and somewhere crickets chirped in the woods.

“Have big ideas like what?” I prompted again.

“Pinky-Dinky-Doo,” Archie answered finally.

“Have big ideas like Pinky-Dinky-Doo,” I repeated, then promised. “I don’t know if I can have big ideas all the time, but I’ll try.”

That tub talk happened last week and I’m still trying not to lose my patience, get mad, and then frown with my eyebrows even though I have since then and I still do. I may have had an idea or two since the kids and I had our conversation that qualifies as big, then again maybe I haven’t. I’ll have to ask Archie. But I’m sure I haven’t called an ambulance, not even once, so at least that means Jack won’t be sad. And that’s something, I guess.

Just the same I’m not feeling it. Kit is rolling around the floor by my desk right now, asking for a snack, and Archie wants me to read a book to him, one I’ve already read ten times today, and Jack is still running around without underwear. I haven’t started dinner, and the laundry remains undone. I’m frustrated, and irritated, and… hell, how do I fix this?

“We won’t be here Wednesday,” I told Kit and Jack’s teachers yesterday morning during the class’s drop-off time.

“We’re going to the Special Oh-impics,” Jack injected, finishing my declaration for me.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing. All six of us will join Archie, his classmates and teachers tomorrow morning at Furman University for the Greenville County Recreation District’s Special Olympics of Greenville. Archie will participate in the games as a member of the Young Athletes Program, a Special Olympics initiative aimed at increasing children’s strength and coordination in preparation for sports participation.

When representatives of the Special Olympics participated in a PTA meeting at Archie’s school last fall, they explained to us that the Young Athlete’s Program is a great way to introduce children to group play, cooperation and awareness to rules, while also focusing on socialization, interaction and fun. I’ll admit now that I have no idea at all in what event Archie is scheduled to participate tomorrow, but I’ll tell you, too, that my ignorance does nothing to douse my enthusiasm for Archie’s involvement in the day’s activities.

That’s why we’re all making such a big deal out of Archie’s small part in this year’s games, I think. Because we enthusiastically support Archie and celebrate his abilities, because we want to share our confidence in Archie’s potential, as well as in the potential of his peers, with other people who believe in each of them, too.

As I was thinking of all this yesterday afternoon I realized that Archie doesn’t have a pair of tennis shoes that fit him. We just bought Archie new boat shoes, but the pair of tennis shoes lying on the floor of his bedroom closet are at least three sizes too small. So this morning Kit, Jack and I stopped by Target after we dropped Archie off at school to buy shoes appropriate for tomorrow’s activities.

I’ve mentioned before that every morning Archie insists I explain to him exactly what we’ll be doing during the day. When I told him this morning that his sister, brother and I would be going to the store while he was at school Archie asked me to extrapolate. “For… ?” he wanted to know.

“For shoes you can wear tomorrow to the Special Olympics.”

“Oh!” Archie declared enthusiastically, his eyes popping open wide as he spoke. “For Oh-limp-ick Shoes!”

Later at the store I asked Kit and Jack to pick out the tennis shoes we’d buy for Archie. “Should we get this pair, or this pair?” I asked them, holding a box in each hand.

“Those should be Archie’s Oh-impics shoes,” Kit answered, pointing to the box in my right hand. And so they are.

That’s the other thing, too. The biggest thing, really, at least this time around. Our whole family will attend the Special Olympics tomorrow morning because we believe in Archie’s efforts, but also because I want Kit and Jack to see us supporting Archie, supporting his peers. I want them to have the exposure necessary to understand. I want them to get it as small children in a way I didn’t even begin to comprehend as a teenaged volunteer at the Special Olympics in our high school’s stadium, in a way so many adults can’t understand even now. Because if our family’s enthusiasm can teach them this one thing… well then, that would be something, right?

I asked Kit about the stickers decorating her doll’s sleeper when they came to me, Kit and her baby, as I was sitting on our powder room toilet. “Why does your baby have all those stickers?” I inquired of my daughter as casually as if we were comparing our days’ activities at the table over dinner. I’ve been a mother too long to feel embarrassed about excrement.

“My bay-bee got the stickers ’cause she was good at ahh grocery store,” Kit answered while she bent down to adjust the blanket she’d tucked into the stroller beside her doll.

When my three children are well-behaved at the grocery store, they’re usually awarded with PAID stickers, pressed against their small chests by baggers and cashiers who have made it their business to always remember Archie, Kit and Jack’s names. To my children those stickers feel like a fine reward, and I’ll tell you, too, that the sight of the word PAID in large print stuck to my children’s shirts like some sort of honor badge always makes me want to laugh a small, private kind of laugh because, yes, I agree. These three babies have been paid for, with sweat and tears and blood.

Today was the first day back to school after spring break. This year Archie, Kit, Jack and I spent our time together drawing and painting, reading books and watching t. v., taking trips to the store, the doctor’s office, to our own backyard. I admit I wished them back to school a few times, but mostly we four coexisted comfortably.

Three years ago on the Friday before Easter I stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, wondering why the lights above me seemed so bright, why all the stimuli surrounding me seemed to be coming in so slow but then stirred around inside my skull so fast, why nothing about this ordinary trip to the store on an ordinary day seemed very ordinary at all.

Archie had been home all week, and the twins were only one. I’d only meant to pick up a few things at the store and I was sure I could manage the trip alone, but the twins were crying and Archie was doing his wha-wha-wha-whining thing with half of his hand shoved into his mouth, and I was tired, and hungry, and oh-good-god-already I’ve had enough.

Later that afternoon John took me to the urgent treatment center because I was sure I was having a stroke and that’s where a patient doctor listened to me as I tried to find the words to describe what was happening inside my head. After I finished my nonsensical description that doctor explained to me that I was experiencing an anxiety attack, then he emptied a syringe of liquid into the fleshy part of my hip and instructed John to take me home and put me to bed. I slept like a woman without worry that night three years ago and I’ll say now that although I may not always manage Archie, Kit and Jack with aplomb, we four do better these days than we used to.

On Saturday afternoon John and I took the kids to the grocery store again. John loaded Kit and Jack into a racecar shopping cart, and I let Archie pick out a metal cart he could ride in while I pushed. A few aisles into our shopping trip Kit and Jack asked John if they could get out of the cart and walk beside it instead. “If you promise to behave and stay close,” John negotiated.

When Archie saw his father lift his brother and sister out of the cart he asked me if he could get down, too. “No,” I answered as I paid more attention to what was on the shelf beside me than to what the little boy in front of me was asking.

“Yes, I can,” Archie growled at me, the timber of his voice rising up inside his throat.

“No, you can’t,” I insisted thinking then of the boy who likes to empty shelves and laugh wholeheartedly at the ensuing mess.

Archie growled again, his tone as insistent as my own this time. “I can.”

That’s when I really heard my son. He can. And that’s when I heard what Archie was hearing in my answer, I say you can’t. The realization humbled me.

As I lifted Archie from the shopping cart I struck the same bargain with him as John had with Kit and Jack. “No funny business, buddy,” I concluded.

And there wasn’t any either. Archie walked beside me up and down the aisles. He held my hand. He could. He was right. Once Archie turned his face into my hand and kissed it. My chest felt full and I smiled at everyone we passed. Our steps were small, Archie-sized, but even tiny treads can complete a course.

Over coffee on Friday afternoon my friend and I talked about the trip we took to the museum with our children earlier that week. Jack was at the doctor’s office with John, Archie was watching Noggin’, and Kit and Sophia were seated at the kitchen table near Rachel and me. They were painting, and we were talking.

Rachel told me that she’d talked to her husband over dinner about the way other people at the museum looked at Archie, about the way they watched all of us. I told her that I’d noticed it as well, but that I usually notice people watching Archie, watching me and Kit and Jack and John with him, too, that I’ve learned to not notice their noticing.

Rachel and I agreed that many people smiled when we acknowledged them acknowledging us, but that some other people looked away, refusing to make eye contact with either she or me. “I always assume those people are thinking unkind things,” I confided to Rachel.

“I noticed people moving away from us, too,” Rachel said.

I hadn’t noticed that at the museum, but it’s happened before, I know. I told Rachel about the Gymboree classes I used to take Archie to when he was small, about how all the other babies progressed through the classes more quickly than Archie did, about how this meant we met a lot of new classmates whose mothers sometimes paused when it was my turn to introduce Archie, say his name and his age, and then stumble all over myself as I tried to explain his diagnosis and make excuses for his obvious delays.

I told Rachel that one day during class a mother pulled her baby away from Archie when he rolled across the mat to smile hugely at that other baby, to laugh and snort excitedly as he lay on his chest and pump his arms and legs in the air as if he were trying to swim or fly. I told Rachel how that woman and her gesture, intentional and unkind, destroyed me that day. I didn’t say anything to that other mother, and I didn’t cry right there on the mat, or leave the class either. Instead I reached out to retrieve my baby and later carried him and that woman’s calloused action home with me way down deep at the bottom of a pit inside my stomach.

“The momma bear in me wanted to come out at the museum,” Rachel confessed as she sat across from me at my kitchen table. She puffed up her chest when she said so, pulling her elbows tight against her sides, making fists with her hands. Her shoulders rose up around her neck. “We all have issues. He just wears his out here,” Rachel said then, waving her hand in front of her face.

I implicitly understood Rachel’s reaction. I’ve felt that way, too, at those Gymboree classes when Archie was small, and then again, and again. There are some days when looks or gestures bother me more than they do other days, but mostly I’ve learned to smile at anyone who may look at us a little too long. And when I smile I hope that my face says, I love him. I wish you would open your heart to him, too.

I’ve learned to wish, but not to force. I’m also learning to listen. To myself, to Archie, to Kit and Jack, too. And I have to say that writing these things right now makes me realize that my children aren’t the only ones who are growing up.

That link above will take you to an article that appeared in today’s New York Times. It was written by a mother whose son is autistic. The following quote from the article struck Maya as significant, and it impacted me in a similar way:

Annie Lubliner Lehmann writes, “[W]hen I look at him I can’t help wondering if the past years weren’t some heaven-directed scheme meant to humble us and teach us the value of acceptance. Understanding that we couldn’t change him had changed us.”

What would my answer be if I turned that musing of Lehmann’s back on myself? I know it, and I bet you readers do, too.

Also, I was the 1,734th person to cross the finish line. That sounds like something to thumb your nose at, I know, but it’s not when you consider that approximately 39,000 people ran or walked the race. That’s a lot of race participants to pack into one place, don’t you think?

There’s a lot I could tell you about the run. I could write about how I blew out the first three miles, including the bridge’s ascent, in just 23 minutes. Or I could tell you about the amazingly quick fourth mile I ran, and then the subsequent fifth mile during which I wished for death so I could at least exit from the course gracefully. That’s when I swore I’d never run again, that I’d give this whole, insane pursuit up entirely if the race could be over-already-right-now, please.

But mentioning those things alone wouldn’t be telling the whole story because, for me, the true grit of a runner’s tale can be found in her final mile. That’s when I dug as deep as I could go, that’s when I turned the corners from Meeting Street to John Street, from John to King Street, from King to Wentworth Street, as fast as I could, and that’s where I let the bottom fall out, on Wentworth, when I sprinted that final length to the finish line.

After I finished, after John found me and I ate an orange and a banana and drank a bottle of water, we visited with John’s younger brother Lewis at the Knight’s of Columbus, then bounced around the streets downtown visiting one shop then another, waiting for the race to end so we could cross the street and get back to our car. Two or three hours would pass from the time I’d crossed the finish line before the race officials and law enforcement officers would open the race course to traffic again.

As soon the barricades were gone and we were able to cross the street, John and I began to pick our way toward our car. As I turned my head to look for oncoming cars down King Street, I saw her. She was holding onto the arm of an old man and she was slowly, carefully walking down the street to make that next-to-last turn toward the finish line.

She limped as she walked, as if she had Cerebral Palsy or had suffered a stroke. Two police officers road their motorcycles in front of her, their headlights on, indicating that she would be the last race participant to cross the finish line. We people strewn across the sides of the street paused as she neared. Everyone stopped talking, stopped hollering, and all you could hear was the hum of the cruisers’ engines, the sound of the street cleaner swooshing water across the pavement a block away.

Someone started to clap. I put down the things I was carrying in my hands so I could clap, too. John did the same. I think I was the first person to yell out to her, the last race participant, and as soon as I did other people began to whistle and cheer, too. We kept it up until she passed us, turning that next-to-last corner toward the finish line.

After she passed I bent over to pick up the things I’d laid down in front of me. People began to walk again, to talk again, and John and I turned away from King Street to make our way home. That’s when I felt like crying and I told John as much.

As soon as I’d found John after I finished running I had to hold onto his arm until my legs steadied themselves again. I’d given my best effort, and this woman on another man’s arm was, too. What I’d accomplished that morning was important to me, but what this woman was doing felt bigger. Her efforts belonged to her, but they seemed universal, too. It’s trite to say so, I know, but I’m thankful her triumph gave me that perspective this past Saturday morning in Charleston. I really am.

“Most people don’t think of this word as hate speech, but that’s exactly what it feels like to millions of people with intellectual disabilities, their families and friends,” writes Sean Carroll of the Special Olympics. “Using ‘retard’ as a term of derision is just as cruel and offensive as any other slur.”

I’m participating in this movement because… well, this is why…

When someone says the words “retard” or “retarded” in front of me I’m instantly transported back in time to that summer afternoon I stood in front of the kitchen sink in my parents house, holding my hands under the water running out of the faucet. I’d just received a call from the doctor who preformed my amniocentesis after he discovered an abnormality in my baby’s heart, one that the doctor explained was largely indicative of a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

He’d lied, that doctor, and told me that the geneticist hadn’t yet shared with him the results from my test, but that he’d like John and me to come see him in his office later that afternoon. John and I knew what the doctor meant to do, and we agreed that we’d feel more capable of handling the news coming our way if my parents accompanied us to that appointment. I’d leave work and John would do the same, we agreed, and we’d meet at my Mom and Dad’s house before driving the distance to the doctor’s office.

So I was standing in front of that kitchen sink when my dad walked in the door. He was grim-faced and his shoulders hung forward, and I remember how wounded his countenance made me feel. “Do you mind if we come along?” my father asked me then.

Why are you asking me this?, I remember thinking, frustrated and angered by my father’s politeness. We already told you we wanted you to be there! That’s what I said inside my own head, but instead I sighed aloud and then spit out, “No, you can come. But I don’t know why we all have to go to find out that our baby is retarded.”

When I said that word then I spoke out of the hurt inside my heart. When I think that word today it also originates from a place of tenderness, a place of vulnerability. When you say that word aloud in my presence it reminds me of the ignorance I once had regarding my son’s diagnosis, of the ignorance I fear will always influence society’s perception of my son.

You see, that day in front of the kitchen sink I didn’t expect Archie to change my view of intellectual disabilities as completely as he has. I didn’t know how bright my baby would be in spite of his diagnosis, in spite of all the medications he’s received that indicated possible cognitive impairment.

I didn’t know that one day my five-year-old son would be able to recite a pile of books, word for word, or count to 67 as I pushed him on the swing at the park one spring afternoon. I didn’t know then that one day he’d have a younger sister of whom he would implore, “Kit, let me see your hand,” when she sat at our family’s kitchen table one evening, frowning hugely and whining about her sore finger. I didn’t know either that this morning, just today, Archie would say to me, his speech still thick with sleep, “Mama, don’t go running. It’s still dark outside.”

All of this is why when you say the words “retard” or “retarded” to describe something stupid, dumb, or annoying your flippancy hurts me. You may not think that my son is retarded, and although I thank you for thinking so, you should know that your words still wound me in a way I struggle to describe aloud.

If what I’ve said effected you, or if you share a similar perspective and you’d like to join me in participating in the Special Olympic’s Spread the Word to End the Word campaign, you can do so in any of the following ways:

Go here and sign the pledge.

Write a post on your blog that describes why you should end the use of the “R” word.

As always, thanks for reading.

My answer this morning sounded a lot like my answer yesterday morning, as well as my answer the morning before that. “First we’re going to eat breakfast. Then Daddy will help you get dressed. After that you can listen to the popcorn song. Then we’ll go to school.”

“Go to school to see Nardia!” Archie concurred excitedly, clapping his hands as he turned his eyes up toward the ceiling and jutted his chin way out. Nardia is Archie’s teacher and he likes her very much.

“Yes, you’ll go to school to see Nardia,” I repeated. Most days our shared language is of the call-and-response variety, Archie’s and mine.

Later in the car, on the way to school, Archie and I shared the exact same conversation except this one didn’t end when Archie became more interested in what I’d set in front of him at the kitchen table than what I had to say. And this second time around Archie told me he was going to school to see Nardia, then asked me, “And then we’ll…”

I was supposed to fill in the blank he left at the end of the sentence. “Don’t know,” I told him. “We’ll have to figure that out this afternoon.”

“Huh,” Archie grunted from the backseat of the car. He doesn’t like blank pages in the storybooks of his days, that boy of mine. I can’t say I blame him either. Routine breeds security, and direction feels purposeful. I know this, and I suppose I’m passing the knowledge along to my children, too.

Earlier this week the company John works for filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition. We’d sensed this was coming for some time, John and I, and as John understands it the filing was a smart, business-savvy move. The good news is that BI-LO’s sales have risen significantly in the past few months and we believe that things will soon turn around in the company’s favor, but still. But still inside our own home it feels like we’re just going through the motions every day, planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and waiting to see what happens.

So I dropped Archie off at school this morning with a promise that we’d just hang out together this afternoon, he, his brother and sister, and I. Then I turned my car around and drove back the way I came, across town, toward Kit and Jack’s school. John had tossed a pile of clothing he wanted me to take to the dry cleaner’s today on the passenger seat in my car, so when I saw that I’d made it to Kit and Jack’s school early I passed it by and drove down the road just a mile more to drop off this load of dress shirts and pants and pick up another.

“It’s Dhanesh’s dad!” Jack proclaimed with enthusiasm when we pulled up to the drive-thru window. We’ve been going to the same dry cleaner’s for years, since before Archie was born. When we started going there we took my work clothing to be cleaned, too. Some days that revelation makes me laugh, especially when my car’s a cacophony filled with cranky kids.

When I was pregnant with Archie, after we’d learned of his diagnosis, John shared our news with the dry cleaner and he in turn shared his home phone number with my husband. The dry cleaner knew that John traveled a lot for work and he wanted to be sure I had someone to call at night if I needed anything. I remember that kind gesture made me cry then, back during those early days when my emotions rode high in my throat and I was learning to accept what I’d been given. Now all these years later, I don’t cry as much as I used to, John doesn’t travel much for work anymore, we have twins in addition to Archie, and one of the dry cleaner’s three sons, a twin himself, is in Kit and Jack’s classroom at school.

As I handed my debit card to the dry cleaner he handed a business card to Jack. I could see that there were numbers written on the back of the card in a child’s hand. “Give that to Dhanesh,” the dry cleaner instructed Jack. Then he handed another card with more numbers to Kit. “Here is one for you to give Dhanesh, too,” he told her.

“What is it?” she wanted to know.

“Dhanesh was practicing his writing. That card will let him know you came here before school and he’ll be excited about it,” the dry cleaner explained.

At school a few minutes later Kit and Jack ran down the hall toward their classroom, those cards tucked into the palms of their hands. As I watched them run ahead of me, looking for their friend, I marveled at the way time works. I used to think I had control over what comes next based on the decisions I make, but every day I believe a little more that time just is and circumstances just are.

After I left Kit and Jack’s school I went to the gym. Before I got on the elliptical to warm up before my workout began, I stooped to tie my shoes. When I get a new pair of trainers for running, I retire my old ones from the road and use them instead at the gym. But my most recent trainers are really, really road-worn so I’m trying to figure out now how to justify purchasing new gym shoes when I just bought new trainers.

Judy, one of the ladies with whom I work out, was watching me so I looked up at her from my place on the floor. “I need new shoes,” I offered.

“So go buy some,” she responded.

“But I feel guilty…” I began to reply, but Judy interrupted me there.

“A mother should never feel guilty,” she intoned. Judy has three adult daughters herself and buckets full of sage parenting advice hewn from her own experience. “I know shoes are expensive, but if John had to hire someone to do what you do every day he’d have to pay them one-hundred-grand.”

Since John and I had already agreed that I should buy another pair of shoes for the gym, and since Judy had encouraged me to do so, too, I sat down at this desk when I got home, in front of this computer, and ordered a new pair of racing flats I’ve coveted for a while now online. I decided to retire my old flats to the gym and instead wear the racing equivalent of my trainers next weekend in Charleston. I’m signed up for the Cooper River Bridge Run again this year except this time around I know what to expect and what to do, and I’ve earned a place in a faster heat.

Maybe I should feel remorseful for buying those shoes, but I don’t. There are things we know, I’ve learned, and things we can only guess at. I believe here in our home we’ll be going through the motions again next week, waiting to see what happens. But I know I’ll be in Charleston next Saturday morning, standing behind a starting gate swathed in dawn’s early light. And that’s something for which I can prepare myself, no matter what.

I usually encourage Jack’s interest in the president, but I didn’t feel like enthusiastically discussing the administration during that drive home so I let Jack’s comment dissipate without debate. Jack, however, wasn’t satisfied by my silence. “Mommy, I saaaaiiiiid it’s Barack Obama!”

“No, Jack,” I sighed. Then I explained tersely, tightly, “It’s an American flag. Barack Obama is our president, not our flag.”

Jack didn’t reply, but Kit did. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” she asked. I looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and saw that Kit was frowning, that she looked concerned.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Mmmmmmooooommmmmyyyyy!” Kit and Jack yelled in unison and you should know that try as I may, I cannot lie to my children.

“I’m upset,” I answered, keeping my explanation straightforward, succinct.

“Why?” Kit pushed.

I weighed my options in the string of seconds that followed. Should I disregard my children’s concern and attempt to change the subject? Or should I turn my disappointment into an opportunity to teach my children about something they’ll surely experience themselves some day soon?

“My feelings are hurt,” I answered.

“Why?” the twins asked together.

“Because Barack Obama hurt my feelings,” I said plainly, making an effort to limit my response to a description Kit and Jack would understand. They believe I know the president personally, I’m sure, so I hoped this explanation would satiate their curiosity.

But still Kit pressed some more, “Why?” The tone in her voice alerted me that she was genuinely concerned.

That’s when I sensed it was time to lay all my cards on the table. “Because he made fun of Archie and his friends who are like him, and that disappointed me a lot and really hurt my feelings because I never expected the president to say something like that.”

“Oh,” Kit and Jack breathed at the same time. Kit stared downward, toward the floor, and Jack raised his hand to his mouth and stuck the tip of one fingernail between his teeth.

“My feelings are hurt, too,” Kit told me after she considered my explanation for a few beats. We three were silent then, our car passing a few more houses before Kit asked, “But why?”

“Why what?” I wondered aloud.

“Why did he say ‘dat?”

John and I have spoken to Kit and Jack before about Down syndrome, about what it means for Archie, what it means to us. When we did they’d asked questions, simple ones, and in turn we always tried to provide Kit and Jack with concise answers that addressed their questions precisely, honestly. It always felt like the fair thing to do, the right thing to do. And this occasion, driving home from school in the car, didn’t feel much different.

Again I looked at Kit’s reflection in the rearview mirror. She looked back and I knew she was hanging on my every word, waiting for an answer to her question.

“You know how Archie’s a little different than you guys?” We’ve covered this material before, Archie, Kit, Jack, John and I.

Both Kit and Jack nodded in response and answered, “Ah-huh.”

“And you know how Dad and I told you that Archie’s differences aren’t bad, that they just explain the way he is? Well, the president was making fun of that difference.”

Kit crinkled her nose as she thought. “Of Archie’s eyes?” she wanted to know and I’ll tell you now that I’ll never profess to understand the way in which a three-year-old’s mind works.

“Kind of,” I answered. “But really he was talking about the way Archie learns.”

“Oh,” said Kit.

That’s when Jack launched into a tirade. “Barack Obama, I say you’re a bad man! I say that you no make a-fun of my Archie! I think-a you need to go to a timeout!”

I didn’t know how to respond to Jack’s outburst other than to validate his feelings. “It’s o.k. to feel angry, Jack.” And then after we passed the gas station on the corner I added, “I’m angry, too.”

This afternoon I filled out a form Archie’s teacher sent home from school, an application for participation in the Special Olympics. In just a few weeks Archie will compete for the first time in these games as a member of the Young Athletes Program. Archie’s teacher reports that he’s been practicing for these Olympic games each week as part of his classroom learning activities. She says, too, that my oldest boy and his classmates will march in the opening ceremonies parade, and together they’ll participate in the traditional lighting of the Olympic torch.

As I worked my way down through the release form the teacher sent home, checking off the appropriate boxes that describe Archie’s complicated health history in short and snappy phrases, I wondered to myself how Special Olympics became associated with inability rather than ability.

I freely admit that Archie is no athlete, that in fact he can barely walk the distance from our parked car to a building’s entrance without succumbing to the urge to sit and rest a bit. I say that in one breathe, but in the next I’ll tell you of the baby who once lay in an isolette attached to a variety of beeping and undulating machines over whom his physicians would shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, then admit aloud, “Mrs. Moore, I just don’t understand what’s happening here.”

I tell you that Archie can barely land on his feet after jumping two inches across the floor, but I’ll tell you, too, of the toddler whose disease was so pronounced at diagnosis that his abdomen was hard and distended in a way that it prohibited me from fastening his pants before we’d left our home, panicked and disbelieving, to meet the cancer specialists waiting for us at the hospital.

I’ll write here that Archie can’t throw a small, big, nor medium-sized ball very far no matter how hard he tries, but that story wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t tell you the rest of it, the part during which Archie runs with all his might, his shoulders shaking with laughter the entire way across our backyard, when I pretend that I can’t field his pitch, when my pantomimed actions imply that maybe he can beat me to the ball lying still in the grass this time if he runs fast enough, if he tries hard enough.

He hopes, this boy of mine. He always has and in doing so he’s taught me how to hope, too, how to learn to believe. He’s changed me in a way that means I’ll never, ever utter a derogatory quip about people who are disabled again, nor laugh along when someone else does. I just can’t tolerate it, no matter who makes the joke.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

It won’t always be this way, I remind myself when I feel like complaining about it all. I’d rather do this than comfort my children when they discover they weren’t invited to this event, or another, I reason some more. Because those days will come, I know. This, too, the preschooler’s popularity fueled by coerced inclusion, shall pass. Until that happens, though, I’ll accompany Archie, Kit and Jack to all these parties even if it isn’t always convenient to do so, and I’ll try not to feel slighted when I spend more on birthday gifts for my children’s friends than I do updating my own wardrobe.

Saturday morning’s party was a pajama party. Our neighbor served donuts and other breakfast treats, and all the children wore pajamas. My mother suggested I wear them, too, and I did but I never would have thought to do so myself if she hadn’t suggested it first. But I’ll tell you that I didn’t look as fashionable as my children, especially Archie in his polyester plaid pajama bottoms and baby-blue bathrobe who John proclaimed looked just like Hugh Hefner (and he did).

Underneath Archie’s bathrobe he wore a Wonder Pets pajama top. When John helped Archie pull the shirt over his head on Saturday morning Archie belted out a line from the cartoon’s theme song, loudly and out-of-tune. “What’s gonna work?” he crooned and then paused to breathe. “Teeeeeeeeaaam work!” John and I laughed out loud when Archie finished drawing that “k” in “work” out to its last syllable, then this morning as I ran alongside the road in the dark I thought of John and my laughter, and of Archie’s singing, and then thought to myself that if our family had its own theme song we’d have to claim that lyrical line as our own.

Yesterday’s party was for one of Kit and Jack’s classmates. While we were eating birthday cake Jack asked the mother sitting beside me about her baby who was sleeping in the stroller parked next to her legs. A few beats later Jack told that other mother a joke pertaining to her baby, and so she responded with a silly question of her own. “Does your mommy have her own baby?” the mother asked even though she knew the answer to that question already.

“Noooooo,” Jack answered, laughing and shaking his head from side to side. “I’m my mommy’s baby.”

Kit was seated across the table from Jack, next to the other mother’s daughter. Both girls had been following along with the conversation, but Kit had nothing to say until then. “We don’t have a baby,” she explained. “We have ah Archie.”

Jack agreed. “Yes, we have ah Archie. He’s our sister.”

“Brother,” I corrected as I thought to myself how exactly right Kit was. Yes. We have an Archie.

Kit was still upstairs sleeping when I got back from my run this morning. Archie and Jack were at the kitchen table, Jack eating a blob of peanut butter with a spoon and Archie sipping his yogi milk from a straw cup. John had already set out Kit’s breakfast, packed the twins’ lunch boxes, and emptied the dishwasher so as the boys finished breakfast and I waited for the coffee to brew I folded the load of clean towels I’d tossed into the dryer before going upstairs to bed last night.

After I put the dishtowels, washrags and bibs away in the kitchen I climbed the steps with our bath towels and floor mats. I carried that armful into my bathroom, put the towels away in the linen closet and laid the mats on the floor in front of the tub, outside the shower door, then I walked down the hall to Kit’s room.

I had to shake Kit, my hand on her shoulder, a few times to wake her and when I finally did she wouldn’t open her eyes. “Mommy, I’m tired,” Kit told me, her eyes still closed. “Me ah no want to get up yet.”

“I know it,” I promised her. “I’m tired, too.”

That’s when Kit sat up in her bed, opened her eyes, and began to untangle herself from her covers. Archie, who had followed me up the stairs and into Kit’s room, hugged his sister. “It’s Kit,” he proclaimed. “Miss Kit!” When they’d finished hugging Archie grabbed onto one of Kit’s hands and I reached for her other hand. Together the three of us walked down the hall toward the top of the staircase. Archie let go of Kit’s hand and sat so he could slide down the steps on his bottom, but I continued to hold onto Kit’s hand until she and I reached the last step, the one at the foot of the stairs.

I ran back upstairs then, back to my bathroom again, to change out of my running clothes and into something dry. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, made the beds and collected a pile of dirty clothes, then went downstairs. Archie was reading a book in the living room, Jack was laying his train tracks across the family room floor, and Kit was at the kitchen table, licking the jelly and butter off her toast and staring out the French doors into our back yard.

It was drizzling outside and the rising sun wasn’t doing much to brighten the morning. “It’s a fuzzy day,” Kit observed.

“You mean foggy,” I corrected her without laughing, thinking then of that line from a John Updike story I read for a class in college in which a father comments that his daughter is “determined not to let language slip on her tongue and tumble her so that we laugh.”

Kit got that adjective wrong this morning, but just yesterday while seated at that same seat at this same table my daughter got something else exactly right.

On Sunday morning I fought Archie through breakfast. He wouldn’t eat, and I wouldn’t back down. He cried. I yelled. And then Archie flung his spoon to the ground in defiance and when he did his hand hit my face. That surprised him and stopped me short. As I got up from the table to get a washrag from the drawer beside the sink, I exhaled deeply and spoke aloud, clear and cold. “When you get like this, Archie, I just want to pick you up and throw you across the kitchen.”

I didn’t, and I wouldn’t, of course. But I was frustrated so I said as much. When I did John shot me a dirty look from his place in front of the toaster. I didn’t care.

But I did care when my daughter called out to me across the silence. “You can’t do dat, Mommy!” Kit chastised. “He’s our family!”

No one said anything more until I spoke again. I told Kit she was right, and I admitted I’d been wrong. I apologized, too, and then the entire incident dissipated into the corners of the room like family arguments often do. Archie decided to eat after all, the twins carried their dirty plates from the kitchen table to the sink, and John buttered his toast. All the while I leaned against the kitchen island, paging through the newspaper and drinking my coffee.

Our family. Yes, this is it.

That’s true, I know.

So I ran the 32nd Annual Reedy River 10K Saturday morning. For the uninitiated that’s 6.2 miles over downtown Greenville’s streets, trails and footbridges. I finished in 48:25 minutes, averaging a 7:50 mile. I bettered my previous 10K time by eight minutes, placed ninth in my age group, and finished 50th out of 645 female runners (official race results can be found here).

I set out to finish the race under 49 minutes, so I was pleased with how I performed. When I crossed the finish line I looked at John who was standing directly in front of me on the other side of the barricades separating the runners from the spectators and breathed, “I did it!” Because I had. And that felt awesome.

There’s a song on my iPod I listen to most mornings when I’m out on the road, running along the shoulder. It begins with a short, synthesized guitar riff and then Brandon Flowers intones, “I did my best to notice, when the call came down the line. Up to the platform of surrender, I was brought but I was kind.”

“And sometimes I get nervous when I see an open door,” he continues. “Close your eyes, clear your heart… Cut the cord.”

I’ve written before about the start of a race, and hearing this song again today made me think of Saturday morning on Main Street. It made me think about waking up Saturday, too, about when the alarm went off and I actually smiled before I slipped out of bed. I wanted to run the race; I was ready.

Not too long ago I used to approach the starting line with a rolling stomach, but now I stand there as if I’m utterly confident in myself, in what I’m doing. I’m not sure how that happened, but I’m glad it did. It’s as if I’ve given in to myself and this is the reward. To be honest, it feels like a kind of redemption, really, but I don’t know from what I thought I needed to be redeemed. I guess I’m still figuring that part out.

“Go for it,” I replied turning away from the computer screen to look at my daughter.

Kit put her hands behind her back and leaned against the wall beside the window before she started to talk. “Um, um, um, umm…,” Kit began and you should know in case you couldn’t figure it out by the way I wrote it that Kit sometimes stutters when she talks. “Ummm… Jackie Moore tried to go ah potty like, um, Daddy, but… um, um, um… he missed ah potty and, ahhhh… um, he make a big mess.”

“He did?” I asked with mock incredulity and Kit nodded in response. We’ve taught Jack to sit on a toilet to pee, to use his pointer finger to tuck himself down into the toilet bowel so he won’t pee on the seat. I know he uses the urinals in the lavatory at school like the other boys in his class, but until yesterday I had no idea Jack wanted to try standing in front of a toilet to pee at home.

“He’s in my bathroom,” she snitched.

Upstairs I found Jack standing against the wall in that small space between the toilet and the sink. His jeans and underwear were down around his ankles and he was holding his hands in fists against his lips. I could tell he was anxious about what my reaction to his attempt at peeing while standing may be.

“Kit said you tried to pee like Daddy,” I offered.

Jack launched into this rambling explanation about where he’d stood to pee, the trajectory his urine took, how he’d wanted it to go into the potty instead. I smiled as Jack talked and assured him he wasn’t in trouble when he finished speaking. “Hey, you tried,” I told him. “That’s what counts. Pull up your pants and I’ll go get a towel so we can clean this up.”

In truth, Jack didn’t make that much of a mess. There weren’t any puddles on the floor, and there were only a few drops of urine sprayed against the raised toilet lid. Honestly, I have to say that I was impressed.

In other liquid-related news, Kit and Jack recently developed an affinity for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I used to feed them grilled cheese sandwiches when they were younger, the kind I grew up eating in Pennsylvania with butter slathered on the outside of each piece of bread, both sides of the sandwich grilled brown in a hot skillet on the stovetop, with two pieces of processed cheese melted in the middle, but I stopped for a while for whatever reason.

Sunday’s snow and Monday’s school cancellation reminded me of similar days from my own childhood when my mother would usher my brother and I inside from the cold and place this menu, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, on the kitchen table in front of us. So I made it, too, for my own children and ever since Kit’s asked for tomato soup and that bread with cheese sandwich for each meal.

Mostly I’ve indulged her request and each time I have she eats what I place in front of her with relish. Jack does, too, which is both refreshing and satisfying because that boy, he rarely eats. I was even able to talk Archie into tasting a few spoonfuls of soup the other day, into touching his tongue to the spoon, please, Archie, I’d appreciate it so very much. He did, and I did, and that was a new kind of something to celebrate as we four sat around the kitchen table, Archie and me smiling hugely and Kit and Jack clapping for their big brother.

So Kit was eating her sandwich and soup yesterday afternoon, polishing off her sixth request for this menu, when she paused, spoon in air, and then looked at me. “I’m fat,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?,” I wanted to holler in response. “This? Already? But you’re only freakin’ three years old and you’re small and willow-y and I think you’re built like me, like my grandfather all sinewy and solid, or your father’s grandmother who was all kinds of tiny, and that you probably won’t ever be fat even when you first go to college and gain the freshman fifteen!”

That is what I thought, sitting there at the kitchen table across from Kit, but instead I replied, “Do you mean you feel full?”

“No, um, I mean I’m um, um, um… fat,” Kit clarified.

My mind clicked and whirred, faster than fast. I was searching for the appropriate response, but I wasn’t sure what that was. I can’t remember the last time I commented aloud on my own weight. To be honest, I don’t think about my weight very much at all. I eat well; I exercise. I’m fortunate that the rest of the equation falls into place based on those two variables.

John doesn’t talk about his weight, or his diet, or even his appearance for that matter. He works out, too, and when we talk together about our time at the gym John and I don’t compare how many calories we burned, rather we talk about how difficult it was to finish today’s set of crazy eights, or step-up’s, or all those pull-up’s the trainer at the gym fit into the middle of today’s workout. But I don’t think we ever utter the word fat, neither to describe ourselves, or others.

I wanted to ask Kit so many things, but instead I just said, “You’re not fat, Kit,” then let it go at that.

Maybe this fat bit is just another little girl thing? Kit is more insightful than her brothers, and more concerned, too. There isn’t much she misses, and she’ll always ask John or I to explain or clarify those things that she doesn’t understand.

Just yesterday I sent Kit to our time-out spot on the bottom step of the staircase because she knocked Jack’s blocks down in frustration when he told her he’d rather she not help him build the road and bridges he was setting up across the family room floor. She kicked the blocks and sent them flying, then yelled out, and I swooped in and marched her off to serve her time on the stairs. “We don’t do mean things like that to our brothers,” I reprimanded. And then to Jack I suggested, “You should share your blocks with your sister. You’d have more fun building that road if she played with you, too.”

After Kit was released from time-out, after she’d apologized to Jack, after they played together with the blocks for a while, my girl came to me and wanted to know, “Mommy, do you still love me?”

“Of course I love you,” I confirmed. “What makes you think I wouldn’t?”

“Um, um… because I was bad and had to um, um, um go to ah time-out,” she explained.

My goodness.

This morning Archie awoke early again. He’s been doing this for days now, and when he does he wants me to get up with him, too. John’s gone to the gym that time of the morning and I’m usually preparing to leave the house to run as soon as John walks through the door, home again, so it isn’t such a big thing to get up with Archie, to bring him downstairs with me. So I do and together we cut into the darkness of the family room, me carrying my oldest boy down the stairs on my hip. These past few mornings we’ve sat together in darkness, Archie and I. He is tucked into my lap and I’m flipping through the channels on the television set.

When it snowed we lost our cable connection. John pulled an antenna out of the hall closet, hooked it up to the television set, and for a couple days we watched only the stations we could find in standard-definition. One morning while flipping through the channels I came upon an episode of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. We’d watched the series last summer, Archie, Kit, Jack and I, but then the station that aired it altered it’s programming and Mister Roger’s was lost to us. We’re happy to have found it again, and on these early mornings when Archie joins me downstairs I use the television clicker to turn off our cable connection and together Archie and I sit in the dark, watching Mister Roger’s together.

I am racing tomorrow morning, so I’ve been tapering this week. That means I’ve skipped my morning runs since Wednesday and have been home for the end of the show when Mister Roger’s sings, “It’s a good feeling to know you’re alive…” Archie sings that song with Mister Roger’s, too, every word of it, and my god I can’t tell you how it makes me smile every time he does.

Do you know what else made me smile today? After I took Archie, Kit and Jack to school this morning I went downtown to pick up my race packet for tomorrow’s Reedy River 10K Run. It’s usually difficult to find a parking space along Main Street, but somehow, someway I was able to park in the first spot right outside the Poinsett Hotel where the run expo was located. There was a time when I would have acknowledged this as a sign of my impending greatness, but since I’ve become a mother and wised up about some very important things I’ve realized that I make my own luck, that I’m forging my own fate.

Before the half-marathon in Myrtle Beach I didn’t tell you that I’d been sick with some sort of upper-respiratory infection and that my right foot was giving me all sorts of problems. I imaged such an admission would only elicit an e-mail from my brother that read simply enough, “Making excuses already?” So I kept it to myself and pushed on.

After the run, after I was home again and still feeling washed out, I went to the doctor who diagnosed me with bronchitis and Achilles tendonitis. So I’ve been taking prescription medications for my cough, and I’ve been doing stretches for my foot, and things are better nearly all the way around. Which is good and makes me feel ready for tomorrow’s run. Which makes me smile, too, when I think of that parking space right in front of the hotel and the runner’s expo that made me feel for a moment that all these things that matter to me today are falling into place.

When I left the expo I dropped by the running shoe store where I like to shop. Clive was working again this morning, and he agreed to accept the trainers I wanted to return, the ones I wore that I suspect contributed to my Achilles tendonitis, in exchange for a new pair of my old favorite trainers, thank goodness.

In reality Clive and I talked shoes. I showed him the ones I’d brought back packed inside their box, and he took my name, my phone number and my shoe size so he could order the shoes I wanted.

But inside my head I was a better customer, one who reached to touch Clive’s elbow as he wrote my information on the store’s order form, one who explained that he fitted me for the shoes in which I ran my first half-marathon, the same ones I used again a few weekends ago to run my second. Inside my head I thanked Clive for helping me along the way to that place out on the race route where I found my confidence, to that instant in time that I made my mind my friend again.

So there’s all this, a whole, big mixed bag, but I just saw Kit and Jack walk past the office door on their way to the bathroom. I guess I better see what they’re doing, and clean up pee again if Jack wants to try to go like his Daddy, standing up in front of the toliet.

We share conversations, real ones with actual subjects, beginnings, middles and ends. And we play games, made-up amusements that end in fits of laughter as well as structured exercises designed to teach preschool stuff like letters, and numbers, and colors, and shapes. Sure, Archie, Kit and Jack have nearly memorized all those things already, but the fun of it is watching them reveal in the realization of how much they already know.

You’re so smart, I tell each of them one hundred times a day. And I’m so proud of you. When they three are older and find themselves sitting in a desk in math class, not knowing how in the world their teacher is figuring the problem inked out on the transparency film set upon the overhead projector at the front of the class, I hope they remember how adamantly I believe in their ability to succeed.

While getting to share all these new intimacies with my children is reward enough for giving up naptime, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the beneficial effects our new schedule has had on bedtime. It’s earlier, for one thing. Archie, Kit and Jack actually ask to take a warm bath and then to go to bed now, please. And they mean that, too, the part about rushing off to bed with immediacy because once their father and I have tucked each of them into bed all three children are blissfully asleep in no time at all. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that alone is award enough for our long afternoons, one that’s all wrapped up in wonderment.

All the snow lying on the ground the past two evenings has reflected the day’s last light through our windows, brightening both bedtimes. Even still Kit and Jack insisted on keeping their bedside lamps lit as they are both determined never to sleep in a darkened room. Their older brother’s preference for nighttime ambiance is different, though. Archie likes the room dark, almost black. “Turn off the light, Momma,” he reminds me every night as if I’d somehow forgotten since I’d last tucked him into bed.

Last night I lay awake wondering if it meant something that the twins like to sleep swathed in light, that Archie likes to sleep steeped in shadows. I do this a lot, this seeking to assign meaning to hollow things. After all, how can all these things we do and don’t do not be related in some significant way? Shouldn’t it all be tied together, all these decisions we make, across the days and weeks and months?

So last night while I lay in bed I thought of Archie’s goodnights. That made me think of his goodbyes and then his hellos, and the way Archie introduces himself to everyone he meets and how he never forgets a name. When I pick Archie up at school he stops off in his therapists’ offices or their treatment rooms on our way down the hall, toward the door. He’ll wait in the doorways until those therapists turn to look at him, acknowledging his presence, and then Archie will stick his right arm way up high over his head and touch his thumb to his pointer finger, both digits stiffly fixed in space.

Bye, Chery, or Ashley, or Courtney, or Wendy, he’ll say, and then Archie will wait until they answer in turn. He says goodbye to all the students we encounter, too, Burke, and Mary Sullivan, and Melissa, and Nicholas. Sometimes Archie will stop to hug another child, and other times he’ll just walk passed them as if this hallway was in a high school somewhere and he, late for another class, only had time for a hurried hello, a smile and a nod. Always I follow behind Archie, allowing him to lead the way.

Outside the school’s administration offices Archie bids farewell to the executive director, development associate, assistant director and secretary. He doesn’t know what they do, but he knows their names. They know his, too, so they always stop what they’re doing to take the time to answer in turn, Goodbye, Archie. See you tomorrow, and their saying his name out loud makes me think of my grandfather, my father’s father, after whom Archie was named and how he once won a prize in a good citizenship class, a copy of Dale’s Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, and how my father and aunts and uncle always laugh when they tell that story because if there was one thing their father knew how to do instinctively without any book’s help it was win friends and influence people. Last night as I lay thinking in bed I wondered if this was one of the ways in which Archie’s birthright transcends his birth defect.

Last week in the car on our way to school Jack was telling stories. “I saw the big, bad wolf,” he said, looking out the window at a bank of trees alongside the road.

“You did?” I asked Jack as I looked at him in the rearview mirror, sensing that he wanted me to say something.

My question gave Jack pause. “He’s a little, bitty dog. He’s not a very bad wolf.”

Everyone always says that Jack looks like John, but he doesn’t. He looks just like my own father did when he was Jack’s age, and in a way Jack is more my son than John’s. Sometimes I watch Jack assess a situation, picking at his cuticles as he takes it all in. When I go to him afterwards and he folds himself into my arms, jumping up and clinging to me with his legs squeezed tight, I know it’s true: Like me, Jack’s a fanatic, too.

I thought of Jack and his wolf last night, and I also thought of something Kit and I have been talking about. She says there are girls at school who don’t want to be her friend, and when she first mentioned it two weeks ago in the car on our way home from school her words made my breathe catch in my throat.

“I asked them if I could play with them and they said ‘no-sorry-bye,” Kit explained that afternoon in the car. Another day she said one girl wouldn’t eat the sugar cookies I sent in for an “S” week snack, but then last week Kit shared with me that the same girl told her she’d like to be friends after all. I’ve talked to Kit, and I’ve talked to her teachers. We four agree that all is satisfactory now, but still I can see Kit’s adolescent years lined up before me and I wish I didn’t know them so well.

Two weekends ago we had friends over for dinner. We served cake for dessert. Archie thought that meant it was someone’s birthday so he sat alone at the kids’ table long after the other children had finished eating, working on his own plateful and singing the birthday song again and again. After he finished his dessert, Archie made his way around the dinner table where we adults still lingered, our words falling in pieces around us, our sentences scattered about the floor. He touched each person’s back, naming them as he did. I sat at the head of the table and watched Archie do this and all the while I was grateful for him and for friends who choose to ignore the dessert plate Archie flung upon the floor just because he could, for friends who strive to see my oldest son as I do.

Last week John brought home a copy of the BI-LO Charity Classic golf tournament invitation. A photo of Archie on a swing in the park swallows up the booklet’s third page. Next to it is a quote from the Meyer Center’s executive director, the same one Archie bids farewell each day on his way out of school. In the quote she is talking about BI-LO Charities and what they’ve done for the Center, about what it feels like to see a child progress.

I’ve written before about the day that photo was taken, but what I didn’t tell you then was how the photographer commented at the end of our time together that he’d collected enough shots of Archie’s tongue. Half of me wanted to strike at the photographer for saying so, but the half of me who agreed with his comment wholeheartedly kept me from doing anything at all.

The advertising agency was taking another boy’s photo that day, too, for the same publication. He was a hired model, and Archie was a suggestion made by the charity director, the agency’s customer. That charity director is a fan of both Archie and his father, and she was excited to have the opportunity to showcase someone who has benefited from her work, someone whose life overlaps with her own.

The other boy at the park that day, the one who is a model, was dressed a little shabbily I’d thought then and again now after I’ve looked through the invitation in its entirety. In addition to outlining the weekend’s activities, the booklet also names the charities supported by the event’s proceeds. So there are other photos in it, too, of people representing different organizations, people from various walks of life. I looked through the booklet and thought of the photographer and how I suspected he preferred the model, the other boy who was neither disabled, nor underprivileged, nor a survivor of some acute illness, and I thought how that boy was dressed then I wondered last night as I lay in bed thinking what it all meant after all.

I remembered picking out clothing for Kit and Jack to wear to school last week. It was Tuesday night, and I knew they’d go to church the next day in celebration of Ash Wednesday. Their teachers and the parish priest would introduce them to the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful. I haven’t been to church in one hundred years, but still I made sure to lie out dress outfits for my children to wear. I may have questioned my commitment to the religion I was taught long ago, but I know that once my children’s father, and their grandfather, uncles and cousins, too, were altar boys all, each of them serving mass every Sunday morning. And that felt like something significant last week when I picked the clothes Kit and Jack would wear to school.

When I got to Archie’s dresser drawers that evening I passed over a long-sleeved t-shirt with a robot printed on front. I knew Archie would not go to mass that next day so I didn’t need to choose dress clothing for him, and I was sure the shirt would match the sweatshirt I’d already laid atop the dresser, but still I didn’t fold back the corners of all the shirts stacked on top of it so that I could pull it free from the pile without rumpling what I left behind. The school district was testing Archie’s cognitive ability that week, an assessment devised to fulfill a state requirement, and that night in front of Archie’s dresser I was afraid the social worker would begin their time together by asking Archie what was on his shirt and that he wouldn’t know. I didn’t want to play into her preconceptions, I decided. I’d pick another shirt.

School was cancelled again today as a result of Sunday’s snow and the precipitous driving conditions it left behind. Archie wanted to take a shower with John before he left for work. There were no schedules to keep so John invited Archie in. Kit and Jack watched a children’s program on PBS as I went into their rooms, made their beds, turned out their table lamps and picked out their clothing for the day. Today I pulled the long-sleeved robot t-shirt from Archie’s dresser drawer and brought it with me back to my room.

When he finished showering with his father I rubbed Archie’s skin with handfuls of thick lotion, then helped him lie back so I could affix his diaper into place. After I pulled his sweatpants up around his waist, I slipped the shirt over Archie’s head. He looked at it and then exclaimed, “Oh! There’s a robot on my shirt!”

This evening I’ll write here that Archie sleeps in the dark comfortably because he knows his own heart, because he has what it takes to confidently pick his own way through it all. It turns out that Archie is everything I always hoped he would be both because of me and in spite of me. What luck. He’s raising me right, that boy of mine.

All afternoon these kids of mine want me to read to them, too, book after book, and help them with puzzles and put-together toys and putty and paint. Then they want cookies, or a boost onto the potty, or help wiping up a spill by the sink leftover from a mediocre, although independent, attempt at washing hands.

It’s as if we’ve just rounded a corner onto a road we’ve never walked before and the three children keeping time beside me are suddenly taller, more aware, and they’re stepping out in front of me calling back over their shoulders, wondering, “Can you keep up, Mom? How did you get so slow?”

So that’s what I’ve been doing this past little while, keeping up with my kids. I just wanted to say so here, to let you know if you’d been wondering.

I write this now, but last night as I lay in bed I thought of Archie, Kit and Jack sleeping in their own rooms. I recalled what we did over the weekend and looked forward to what we’d do today, and then I remembered the lyrics to a song I’d listened to on my iPod while I was running down the road that morning, my footsteps falling on pavement made brighter by the advent of an earlier dawn. That’s when it coalesced for me, all those moments, and I knew what I’d write about here today if I could just find the time.

I still haven’t found the time.

But I hope to soon. I’m hanging in there.

That’s a photograph of me after I finished my second half-marathon in Myrtle Beach. If we’re facebook friends then you probably saw the photos John took early Saturday morning as he posted them to the site. John, my tech geek of a husband, got a kick out of doing that, let me tell you. But it was fun, and he was excited for me so it was all done with the best intentions.

I completed the run in 1:49:39, averaging 8:27 minute miles. I’ll tell you that I have all my mile splits written down on a scrap of paper that’s lying on the desk right here in front of me, but please know, too, that I’ll spare you those details. You’re thanking me right now, I know.

The marathon’s web site says that I placed 470th out of 2,829 half-marathon runners, women and men combined, but I don’t know how accurate that number is. What I mean by that is the timing system determined those places based on each runner’s gun time, not his or her chip time, and I know it took me at least a minute to cross the start line after the gun fired.

That’s how it is in popular races, though. And while it can be frustrating to be caught up in the crowd there’s something incredible about it, too, so much so that it gives me goose bumps to think about it. And that’s what I want to write about here today, the way I was overcome by the amazing oneness of the start this past Saturday morning.

If you’ve ever run a race you know how it is. You roll out of bed really early, wash your face and brush your teeth, and then you put on your running clothes, dressing as lightly as you’re able based on the weather forecast. Maybe you eat something before you leave the house, maybe you grab a protein bar to take along with you and eat in the car. No matter where you eat, sometime during your drive to the race venue you chug a bottle of water. Before you know it you’ve parked your car and you’re milling around the starting line, outside in the dark.

There are other people there, too, who can be a lot of fun to watch. You can usually tell who’s a better runner than you are just by looking (although there are always exceptions to the Rule of First Impressions when you’re talking about runners), but you’ll always know based on appearance alone who’s filled with nervous energy and who’s fueled by quiet confidence. I like the confidently quiet people, and always try to position myself beside them for the start.

Time passes and you shed your extra clothing, stuffing it in your race bag or passing it off to the friend or family member who agreed to get you to the starting line that morning. You’ll have to pass your race bag off to a volunteer before it gets much closer to the run’s start time, and if you’re lucky your friend or family member will just know when it’s time for him to quietly fade away into the crowd of spectators.

And then someone will read a long list of announcements over the PA system, and then someone else will sing the National Anthem. There’s a lot of movement then, among the runners. We squeeze together as closely as we can, pushing against the starting line. It’ll get awfully quiet all of sudden, too, after the singing and the enormity of that has this way of hitting you hard especially when you realize that a lot of people packed together without regard for one another’s personal space requirements aren’t making any sound at all except when they breathe, inhaling and exhaling, in and out.

And then someone fires a gun and the pack of runners begins to move. People are walking behind you, trying not to step on your heels, and you’re pushing against the people in front of you, trying yourself not to bump into them. You’re all moving together, walking but moving more quickly than if you were just walking, each of you waiting for that moment you can finally begin to do what you can came here for… run.

Just like that you realize that the silence preceding the starting gun’s shot has dissipated. There are people cheering, spectators are clanging cow bells, and the timing pad covering the starting line beeps every time a runner with a chip fixed to her shoe crosses over it, officially beginning her own race right at that very moment. When you cross the timing pad and your chip beeeeeeps into life you hit the button on your wristwatch starting your own timer, the one you’ll carry with you throughout the race route, and you’re gone, caught up in the crowd of runners surrounding you.

And that’s the part that got me this past Saturday morning. It was quiet, and then it was loud, and then it was quiet again much quicker than I anticipated after I’d passed the start. It was dark and I was running outside like I do nearly every morning only this time I wasn’t alone. Other runners, all of us shoulder to shoulder, surrounded me those first few miles, and we were moving together, stride by stride. Every now and then someone would say something, but mostly it was quiet except for the slapping of our shoes against the pavement. We were a wave of bodies, caught up in motion, moving inland toward the breadth of sand between the water and pavement a few miles down the road. Together we were a breaker, waiting for our instance to crash against the shore, to turn back toward the finish line and pick our way home again. We runners were singular in purpose; determined to finish what we’d started.

It was amazing.

I’ve written before about how I run, and I’ve mentioned a few times how John cares for Archie, Kit and Jack in the mornings before school, feeding them breakfast and getting them dressed, while I’m outside on the side of the road, logging mileage up one direction away from home and then back again another. We are early risers here and I’m always home from my run by 7 o’clock, but still John covers the time I’m gone so seamlessly that the kids prefer him to feed them, to dress them, even on the mornings I don’t run and am instead home when Archie, Kit and Jack awake, eager to greet the day.

Although the mornings I run may vary from one week to another, I always run on Saturday mornings. In the summer when it’s hot and humid I leave before dawn and do my best to make it home before the sun rises too high in the sky. In the winter when it’s cold and damp I drag my feet as long as I can, hoping my delay will make for a warmer run. But no matter the season John is always left alone with Archie, Kit and Jack while I’m out completing my long run, knocking off mile after mile as the morning burns away.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to say that John watches the kids without complaint because he does sigh and roll his eyes occasionally when I talk about fitting in another run, just a quick one this time. But I do mean it when I tell you that my husband never, ever protests when I leave the house for any of the runs printed on my training schedule, the one that is lying in front of me right now, its corner tucked underneath this computer’s keyboard. I’m grateful for that, and I know I’m lucky to be able to say it’s so, too.

Sometimes John and the kids will surprise me on Saturday morning when I’m out on a long run. They pile into my station wagon, all four of them, and John will follow my route until he finds me. He’ll slow the car down then and roll down all the windows, then John, Archie, Kit and Jack will all holler my name and shout hip-hip-hooray as they wave their arms at me way up high over their heads. Their encouragement always propels me forward, bolstered by their affection and support.

Occasionally John and the kids will park the station wagon somewhere along my route and wait for me. When they see me coming they’ll honk the car’s horn and stick their hands out the windows. John and the kids always smile hugely when they do this, and when I see their faces I can’t help but smile myself.

Telling you all this is my way of saying that this Saturday morning I’ll compete in the Myrtle Beach Half-Marathon, my second race ever of this distance. The race begins at half-past six o’clock on Valentine’s Day morning. That feels significant to me because I know John, my partner, has played an integral part in getting me to Saturday’s starting line.

John doesn’t run himself; it’s not for him. But he understands that keeping a training schedule and running races helps me feel as if I’ve accomplished something, so he goes through the motions, delivers me to the events, cheers for me along the race route and then waits for me at the finish.

I told John the other day that I ought to take a photo of him this weekend after the run, all laden down with my race bag and discarded gear. That made John smirk because he likes to joke that he’s nothing more than a pack mule to me on racing days. That description disgruntles John, but it says something meaningful to me.

“Do you know how I’d caption that photo?” I asked John. “I’d call it ‘True Love.’”

Both John and I rolled our eyes and laughed when I said that because neither he nor I are the types of people who talk openly about the affection we have for each other. We may have both laughed out loud, but I’m sure John knows I meant it.

So Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you blog readers, and especially to you, John. Who would have ever guessed at all of this, you know?

I’m not only feeling the love from John this weekend, but from my parents, too. My mom and dad are keeping Archie, Kit and Jack so John and I can spend the weekend at the beach. The race is Saturday morning; I’ll get to watch the sun rise over the ocean as I’m running. But because of my parents’ generosity of spirit John and I will be able to hang around and enjoy dinner out Valentine’s night, then we’ll actually be able to sleep as only parents away from their small children can, like the dead. I can’t wait.

My dad isn’t the sort of father I’d describe as a domineering. He didn’t demand respect through rules or mandates; mostly he did his best to teach us right from wrong with a gentle hand, to demonstrate through example how to work hard and honor our friends and neighbors. He’s always lived for my brother and me and my mother, too, that father of mine, and now he idolizes his grandchildren in the same way. In my father’s eyes, we all walk on water.

Mostly I’d say that Dad has always earned his family’s deference in return by way of his generous spirit so it feels funny to write here that he had a favorite spot on a favorite chair that we understood to be his, no matter what.

I remember complaining one evening after dinner that I had to relinquish my claim on Dad’s chair. I sighed, and moaned, and carried on so much that my mother chided, “If you don’t like the way we do things here then you can do them differently when you grow up and have your own family.”

The funny thing is that now, as a mother myself, I often find myself imitating the manner in which my parents taught and treated my brother and me. And, really, that sentence right there is essentially the point I’d intended to make here when I sat down in front of the computer this afternoon to write. But I want to tell you, too, that the sequence of thoughts that brought me here began this morning as I drove my car out of the neighborhood, when Jack wondered aloud if his friend next door would come to our house to play again this afternoon.

“If she does, will her mommy come with her, or will her daddy come over later to pick her up?” Jack wanted to know.

Yesterday I watched my friend’s daughter because my friend is sick and needed to go to the doctor’s office. My friend usually accompanies her daughter when she comes to play, and she and I enjoy that time together then, too. Those mornings or afternoons are play dates for us as well, we big girls accompanied by our small children. But yesterday there was no friend, only her daughter, and then a father knocking on the door later in the afternoon.

The afternoon didn’t feel extraordinary to me; I was just helping a friend. But when I looked at yesterday afternoon through the framing of Jack’s question this morning, his words all lined up inside my head, I realized that my friend, her husband, myself and John, too, must look to Jack like I remember my parents and their friends looking to me when I was small. We are grown-ups, adults, women and men. I’m surprised to find that to my son I’m not simply the older version of my younger self I imagine I am.

Inside my head this morning in the car I heard my father speak in his jovial voice, the tone of his I hear most often in my memories. He was responding to the line I used a lot when I was young and trying to make a point: “But you’re a grown-up.”

“No, I’m not,” Dad would always counter, laughing. “I’m just a big kid.”

Tonight I’ll fix dinner for my family. One child will complain about what’s on her plate, and I’ll bargain with another to coax him into take another bite. John will compliment the meal even if it’s not very good, and then he’ll help me clean up the kitchen after everyone’s finished eating and left the table. He and I will talk about work, and we’ll talk to Archie, Kit and Jack about what they did at school today.

Later we’ll watch the news in the family room. The kids will complain because they’d rather watch Max and Ruby, and John and I will strain to hear the news anchor speak over their cacophony. He and I will dwell on the economic segments of the newscast, then we’ll talk again about revising our household budget and I’ll wish out loud for the fifteenth time this week that I’d taken an economics course in college. While John and I are talking, Archie, Kit and Jack will fight over a particular toy that lay discarded in a corner of the room just an hour before.

I’ll tell John that I volunteered at the twins’ school today, and I’ll speak of the errands I left undone, the ones that need to be finished tomorrow. No one will really listen to me as I talk, but I’ll be glad to have named the tasks aloud. The phone may ring, and a load of towels may need folded. Someone may finally decide to fetch the mail from the box alongside the street.

Then we’ll usher the kids upstairs, to our bathroom with the big tub. John will bathe Archie, Kit and Jack, and then he’ll dress them in the pajamas I laid out on the floor of our bedroom. All the while I’ll be putting laundry away in their rooms, picking out clothing for them to wear tomorrow. I’ll disassemble the humidifiers in each child’s bedroom, then carry the water reservoirs into their bathrooms where I’ll fill the containers with new water.

As I fill those containers with water I’ll catch my reflection in a mirror or two. In them I’ll see the face of a woman that looks a lot like a girl I used to know. The person in the mirror does a good enough job at acting grown-up that she’s able to fool her children; maybe she even fools most everyone she knows into seeing her that way, too. But the thing is that girl, the one who still feels familiar enough for me to call her myself, is just making it all up as she goes along. I’m just emulating expectations. I hope that’s enough, and I hope someday it earns me something akin to my own chair.

Jack’s teacher told me that the church organist was playing as the students took their seats. “He said the music was ‘yuck’ so I asked him what kind of music he likes,” the teacher shared with me when I picked up the twins outside their classroom at the end of the day. “Jack shook his hips, pumped his fists in the air and yelled, ‘only rock ‘n roll!’”

Coughing myself awake isn’t the worst part of the night. The worst part is afterward when I lay awake in a quiet house where everyone else is sleeping. I flip around the bed, back to side, one side to another side, then over on my back again. I toss around and will sleep to envelop me, but she plays coy and I’m left lying alone in the dark waiting for something to come that I’m just not going to get. Not now at least.

So I’ll lay there and I’ll think about how tired I’m going to be in the morning, and how feeling tired is going to make the day seem long, and then I’ll remember that long days leave me little patience and I’ll will myself, awake and alert, to do my best to tread lightly with Archie, Kit and Jack, no matter what. The words inside my brain prattle on and on.

Last night I turned on the television in our bedroom and watched a PBS documentary about polio that I’d already seen once before except this time while I watched the program, wrapped safely in the cocoon of my bed, I cried.

“It was a really great documentary,” I told my mom this afternoon when she came over to play with Kit and Jack while I left the house to pick up Archie at school. “It was all so moving, and really I didn’t know how it was then until I watched that program.”

“My dad kept Jonas Salk’s dog at our kennel,” my mom told me. My grandfather, Jack, was a police officer but he trained dogs, too, and kept a menagerie of animals on the plot of land he’d amassed outside of Pittsburgh. There was a big barn on the land and when my mother was small that barn served as a kennel. I knew that part, but not the piece about the doctor.

“Oh,” I replied stunned that this family fact had escaped me until now.

The part of the documentary that really got me, the part I didn’t talk about with my mom this afternoon, was when the historian explained that Dr. Salk tested the vaccine on children from a state hospital after he’d tested it on monkeys, but before he introduced it to a typical human audience. The historian in the documentary named the state hospital where the children were kept and the adjectives retarded and feeble-minded were in its title. That part of the program bothered me more than the photographs of the children in leg braces, or the films of the adults entrapped in iron lungs because I saw Archie’s face in the smiles of the children from the state hospital and it made my heart hurt for one hundred different reasons.

This afternoon Archie was full of questions on the way home from school. He didn’t care that I was unable to sleep last night, Archie just wanted me to answer him every time he pointed to a building or business, a tree or traffic sign, a car or empty space and asked over and over again, “Mama, what’s that?” If I didn’t fittingly name the object at which Archie was pointing he’d patiently correct me by pointing again and saying, “No, Mama… What’s that?”

We have played this game before, Archie and I, and when I failed to call an object today the same thing I called it the last time Archie quizzed me all the way home he’d let me know it. “That’s a building,” I answered as we passed a piano dealership and music workshop on the right side of the road.

“No, Mama. That’s a plan-o studio.”

There’s a traffic light near that studio and today I stopped our car there, right behind an SUV with all sorts of bumper stickers covering its rear window. One sticker read, “Honk if you don’t exist.”

“Mama, what’s that?” Archie wanted to know.

“A car with bumper stickers,” I told him. “One of them says ‘Honk if you don’t exist.’”

Archie parroted my answer when I stopped talking and was off again, trailing other thoughts before the traffic light changed. If you go that way you’ll get to the zoo and park, Archie told me. Turn here and you’ll be headed home, or to the ice cream shop, whichever place works better for you right now, he let me know when we reached another intersection. I drove as Archie was asking questions and naming roads, recalling our shared adventures and categorizing memories. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me that Archie was doing all those things while my mind was still caught in the loop of the bumper sticker’s imperfect logic.

I don’t think Archie will ever understand one-liners such as the one on the bumper sticker, but I do think sometimes that makes him the lucky one. Maybe that’s why he’s mine, you know? To teach me a new way to think. To teach me to sleep with abandon at night, folded in half across a pillow, tangled up in a blanket, mouth wide open and breathing deeply.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Relax.

I exist. He exists. Who is lost inside whose head? Who knows the way out?

I joked with a friend a few weeks ago that my one-word resolution for the New Year is apathetic. When I look back on that lighthearted conversation now, I wonder if I meant what I said more than I realized at the time?

But still I don’t feel apathetic. I’m doing things, going places. I have goals, and priorities, and commitments. John, Archie, Kit, Jack and I are clicking, too, the whole houseful of us getting along and understanding each other better than we have for a while now. Things are good and I have so much to say about it all, but I can’t find a starting point or an ending point. It’s as if we five are falling forward through time and I can’t grab onto one thing long enough to share it here.

There’s this, though. Last night after dinner I que’ed up iTunes and clicked on ”Womanizer” and ”Single Ladies”. Archie, Kit and Jack always enjoy these songs when they’re played over the radio stations in the car so I thought I’d download them so we could listen to the songs here, too. So I washed a Pyrex dish in the sink while the music played over our stereo speakers, and all three kids bounced around the kitchen singing along with Britney and Beyoncé.

I’m sure I won’t win any parenting awards based on my wholesome song selections, but the kids relished in all the dancing and singing, and I enjoyed watching Archie, Kit and Jack try to mimic any move I made when I’d stop long enough to pull my soapy hands out of the sink, hold my arms high over my head, then crank my hips in one direction and back again in the other.

That dancing and singing was a small thing, a string of inconsequential moments ticked off one after the other by the digital clock keeping time over the stovetop, but years from now I know the memory of it all will feel bigger to my three children. I know so because I can recall similar instances from my own childhood that began the same way, but in time grew into something much different. And that is what’s important, right?

Maybe that’s the pivotal piece I’ve been looking for all along.

So… get this.

After I’d picked my kids up from school, before we made it into the house, Archie, Kit, Jack and I milled around outside a bit, enjoying today’s warmish temperatures. I decided to collect our mail, and somehow during the time it took me to walk from our car to the mailbox all three children had decided to lay down on the wet ground and roll around in the yellow, dead winter grass.

We weren’t outside very long at all, just the time it took me to collect the mail, because I was sure Archie, Kit and Jack would benefit from a nap, whiny and wretched as they were, if I were able to convince them to take one. But I’d just washed the bed sheets this morning, and I didn’t want the dirt from the wet ground, or all the yellow grass that had adhered to Archie’s clothing, or the sand from the school playground in Kit and Jack’s hair, close against their scalps, in those clean beds. So I stopped the kids as they barreled into the house then took each of their outfits off while they stood together in the kitchen, near our backdoor, before I told Archie, Kit and Jack that we were going to take a bath before naptime today.

Well, the phone rang then, and the washing machine’s beeper ding-ding-dinged so I picked up the receiver and headed into the laundry room as my three children scattered around the room, naked. I was talking on the phone, and I was switching loads of laundry between the washer and the dryer, and then I was folding a hot, clean load of white clothing on the island’s counter in our kitchen.

All the while I could see that Jack was playing with his trains, and that Kit was pretending to talk on her toy phone, just like me. He was playing and she was talking, but Archie was dancing around the floor, stopping intermittently to declare enthusiastically, “I’m gonna PEE ON THE FLOOR!” I was amazed to see him do it, too, right after he’d made his pronouncement each and every time.

I stood flabbergasted by the kitchen table as I observed that Archie was able to both pee on command, his command, as well as control his urine stream, stopping then starting again as he deemed appropriate. “What the hell?,” I wondered to myself. Still I stood and watched, not at all believing what I was seeing.

Archie continued to dance around the floor, shouting, “I’m gonna PEE ON THE FLOOR!” He’d leave one puddle before moving onto another spot where he’d repeat the process, his process, all over again. I watched Archie, allowing him to continue as I studied his actions, filing away in my brain every little thing I saw. My incredulity faded away and before I knew it my bewildered what-the-hell was replaced with a resounding gotcha.

I did step in to stop Archie’s antics as soon as he declared, “I’m gonna POOP ON THE FLOOR!” I’d seen enough to believe in the sincerity of that statement by then, and I knew it was time to grab a handful of paper towels and make Archie clean up his mess all by himself.

It seems to me as if the little boy, my little boy, who pretends to be unable to make himself pee or poop when he’s actually sitting on the potty, or pretends to be unable to control his urine stream on his way to the potty, or whatever else Archie is pretending to be unable to do… Yeah, he’s just pretending and manipulating me (And you, and you, and you, and you, too…)

So… now what?

I chose the word they rather than we because I wasn’t there in Pennsylvania with them, my mother and father, my aunts and my uncles, to take part in the ceremony, the marking of the end of a life on Earth and, depending on what you believe, perhaps the beginning of a better one someplace else.

Uncle Tom was not the first of my mother’s generation to go. My Aunt Pat, my godmother, died during those first years I was out of college, that slender bit of time between childhood and growing up when everything you’ve been trying to figure out, all the things you seek to know, begin to make some semblance of sense and you are relieved, more or less one way or another, to see that maybe you’re on the right path after all.

Just two sentence’s back when I began that last paragraph I was going to write that my aunt’s death wasn’t very long ago, but I see now after writing that second sentence that it was. Realizing this inside of these two paragraphs, within the parameters of these four sentences, makes me feel older now than I did only a few minutes ago.

So Aunt Pat’s husband was there at the funeral today standing alongside my Aunt Peggy, Uncle Tom’s wife. They were flanked by my mother and my father, who endured heart surgery not very long ago, and my Uncle Brian whose own heart surgery preceded my father’s by just a month’s time.

Aunt Penny was also there today at the funeral. She is Uncle Brian’s wife and she slogged through a battle with breast cancer herself. I remember that her hair was just growing back again when she and Uncle Brian and my cousin, Rob, too, traveled to Greenville to meet Archie when he was new, and sick, and hooked up to a ventilator in the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital.

I’m sitting here tonight taking stock of all these illnesses because it reminds me of how far we’ve come, this family of mine. It makes me feel as if we’re all so fragile, but durable, too, at exactly the same time.

This recounting makes me think of how time ticks forward and drags us with it, in and out of the muck and through the smooth times, too. We move through our days both asleep and awake, numbed and aware, and then one day comes, a Thursday morning, when we find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder at a funeral, taking stock of who is beside us and who’s already gone.

I remember once when I was small, playing with my cousins at my grandmother’s house. I fell on the concrete in her garage, or the gravel that paved her driveway. I can’t remember where I fell, but I know that I did and I know that as I ran toward my grandmother’s house sobbing Uncle Tom intercepted me, picking me up with one arm and tossing me across his chest into his other.

Uncle Tom had been a Marine once, trained on Paris Island, and he was strong, his voice gruff. But that day he cradled me against his chest and carried me into Grandma’s house, and the timbre of his voice sounded softer then, sweeter, as he told me to shush, assuring me that I was alright. I remember being taken aback by the way Uncle Tom handled me, gentle and soft. He felt like I remember my own father feeling when I was small, and I know that surprised me then on that day because Uncle Tom and my father had never before seemed the same way to me.

Uncle Tom and Aunt Peggy lived in that house with my grandmother for years. At first they lived next door in another house, but after my cousin died and my grandmother got older my aunt and uncle moved from their red house into Grandma’s white house.

My grandmother and Aunt Peggy are still living there now, in that house where I played and fell in the driveway, although Grandma is very old now. She doesn’t leave the house often, only for necessary doctor’s appointments, and my grandmother hadn’t seen Uncle Tom since he left that day in July when UNOS called. She’d wanted to go to the funeral home the other night, but changed her mind at the last minute. Instead my grandmother wrote Uncle Tom a letter that was placed with him inside his coffin. No one knows but she what it said.

Today I took my three children to the playground after Kit, Jack and I picked Archie up at school. I’d agreed to allow an advertising agency to photograph Archie for a publication benefiting local charity organizations so I spent most of my time at the playground up close with Archie and the photographer while I watched Kit and Jack amuse themselves on the playground’s equipment several yards away.

Kit ran from that equipment to Archie and me several times, back and forth, perpetually checking in as she often does. But Jack remained over there, by the slides and the metal climbers, interacting with a man and a little boy. I watched the three of them, Jack, the boy and the man, and never looked away for more than a few seconds. If my kids and I had been there under different circumstances I would have taken Archie by the hand, closed the distance between us and introduced myself to the man before I thanked him for smiling so wide at my little boy. But today I just waved at that man across the macadam, over the playground equipment, coupling a sincere smile with a mouthed thank you.

That man and his boy left before we were finished with the photographers. Jack was standing nearer me then and I watched as the little boy ran over and hugged Jack, calling him a friend. When the little boy swiveled around and ran away toward his retreating father I listened as Jack called out, “Bye, Matthew!”

I thought nothing of that then at the playground, but tonight as I recounted the story to John at the kitchen table during dinner the significance of the little boy’s name washed over me and warmed me from the inside out. “Oh,” I spoke and then fell silent for a beat or two while everything I’d seen at the playground clicked into place somewhere inside my head.

“That little boy had blonde hair and blue eyes,” I told John. “And the man was wearing a camouflage coat.”

I was nine years old when my cousin, Uncle Tom and Aunt Peggy’s only child, fell of his bicycle riding in a grassy field behind his school, hit his head, and died. His name was Matthew and he had blonde hair and blue eyes.

I’ve written before how I believe we all move through life in concentric circles that expand and contract, then overlap through the years here, there, and then again. Tonight I’m wondering if that doesn’t continue to happen, too, after we’re gone. Is that what the prophets mean when they talk about life after death? Does our spirit, do our souls, pass between us, from one to the other and then somehow back again?

Is it so much simpler than we ever imagined after all?

I have an explanation, but I should warn you that you may think less of me after you read it. I know this, but I’m going to tell you anyway so you can either confirm that you’re right there with more, or so you can enjoy a good laugh at my expense. Either way at least then I won’t feel as if I’ve been neglecting you, nor will I feel as if I’m withholding the sort of information that’s vital to the growth of our friendship.

So, are you ready?

I’ve fallen in love with Edward Cullen.

Seriously.

Pathetic, right? I know.

I bought the first book in the Twilight series right before Christmas, that time John and I went to the bookstore to fulfill Archie’s holiday wish list. For one thing, I was curious to see what’s behind the big fuss about the book after all. For another, I’ve never met a vampire I didn’t like so I wanted to be sure I gave this new coven of creatures a fair shake, too.

I bought that book, but it sat unopened on the pass-through between our kitchen and family room for a long time before I finally had the opportunity to surrender myself to it. Then I did and I’m here to tell you that I read that book in a day, maybe two days, tops.

After I finished that first book I honestly forgot about everything else I needed to do, rounded up my children and helped them put their warm jackets on, one by one, then loaded Archie, Kit and Jack into the backseat of our car so we four could drive the distance to the bookstore where I’d be able to buy a copy of the second book, the sequel to Twilight. I was like an addict jonesing for a fix as I moved while holding onto small, cold hands, dragging my children through the parking lot outside the store, all of us doing our best to tuck our chins into our chest, hunkering down against the rain. Archie, Kit and Jack were crying because I was walking too fast, but I didn’t care. “Come on, guys,” I coaxed anxiously. “Can’t you just cooperate with me right now?”

A few days later I took a day off from reading that second book to go see the movie with Rachel, and together she and I snickered at how bad it was, at how very Dawson’s Creek it seemed. “Oh, it’s just not good,” I sighed once or twice while laughing so hard I was nearly crying.

Just the same, I finished the second book then went back to the bookstore last week while the kids were in school, after I’d finished working out at the gym. I tucked a copy of the third and fourth books under my arm then laughed at myself as I walked toward the counter near the exit.

A twenty-something guy was working the registers that morning. When he looked at the books I was carrying, the ones I’d tucked under my arms, I rolled my eyes and smiled at the same time. “You’re not aloud to buy those,” he deadpanned.

I didn’t miss a beat. “They’re for a friend.”

He chuckled then and I did, too. “Hey, everyone and their grandmother is reading those books now. Why not you, too?”

I told that store employee that I’d been sucked in, that I couldn’t help myself anymore.

“I know. They are good books,” he allowed. We joked some more and then I left the store smiling to myself, feeling silly but pleased as well to have another few days to spend with these friends of mine right here inside these books.

That’s when my memory of Jack declaring himself beautiful as he sits in the barber’s chair, or of Kit twirling ’round and ’round across our foyer’s floor, or of Archie standing at the bottom of the steps as he yells to John perched at the top of the steps, “Daddy, I have to tell you something right now!” fade to black and are replaced by the slap, slapping sound of my running shoes against the pavement, the sensation of my chest rising and falling, rising and falling fast, and then faster still as my feet are slap, slapping more quickly and those competitive thoughts are replaced by ones that are barely coherent, thoughts summed up best in curt phrases like bang it out, or tear it up.

And then before I know it I’m home again, standing in the foyer where Kit is dancing and I’m pulling wet clothing off my back, a jacket and a shirt, another shirt and a sports bra, discarding each one on a pile in the middle of the floor. From where I stand I can see that John’s already dressed Archie, and that now he’s helping Jack take off his pajamas.

Because I’ve lived another version of this morning earlier this week, and last week, too, I know that there are breakfast dishes on the table for me to pick up after I’ve climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to my room to pull another bra and shirt out of my closet, to trade out my running shoes for another pair of trainers, to wash my face in my bathroom sink for the second time this morning.

Minutes pass, and then more minutes still, and soon we’ve pushed our way through our family’s morning routine, all five of us, and soon I’ve dropped Archie off at school, and then Kit and Jack, too. Soon I’ve run my errands, or gone to the gym, or finished whatever it was I needed to do that morning with the twins on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or without them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Then we’re home again, just like that, my three children and I. If I’m lucky they’ll take a nap, and if I’m lucky they’ll stay awake and play happily together, or watch a favorite television show while I watch them as I fold our clean laundry on the island in the kitchen. It depends on how you want to look at it after all.

I guess that’s how it is that I’m sitting here now in front of this computer screen, still unshowered, still wearing the white cap I do when I run, wondering what I should write. My day is halfway done. Kit, Jack and I went to a doctor’s appointment earlier today, and then to the grocery store. I picked Archie up from school, and when I brought him home my mother and I were able to convince all three kids that they were tired enough to take a nice nap this afternoon. As far as I know that’s exactly what they’re doing right now.

I could tell you that I’ve been writing a lot lately, but that I can’t share it here. What I’ve written is for other people: one piece for a friend, my side of an agreement we brokered; and copy for John to use on his company’s web site. I’ve enjoyed working on those projects, banging them out and tearing them up, but doing so has meant my computer time over the past few days was spent writing those pieces and not writing anything here, on this page for you to read.

Just the same, our days move forward one by one. There have been school days and naptimes, television shows and favorite books. We’ve had our fair share of time-out’s, too, and yelling and crying, all three kids and I. Tomorrow morning I’ll take Archie to school early so I can leave him in the morning room then duck down the hall for a PTA officers meeting, and then I’ll be off to the gym again. Later I’ll go to Kit and Jack’s classroom where I’ll be the day’s mystery reader. I don’t yet know which book I’ll bring with me.

Tonight, after dinner and when the kids have been tucked into bed, I’ll retire to that comfortable place on our couch and visit with my imaginary friends, the ones who exist inside the book series in which I’m completely engrossed now. I’ll read as long as I’m able, until my eyes are too heavy to keep open anymore. Then I’ll climb the stairs, check on my children, one after another, brush my teeth and wash my face then go to bed. If I’m lucky John will be ready for bed, too. If I’m lucky John will need to finish another report for work before he can go to sleep, and I’ll be able to sink soundlessly into my pillow, into sleep, while watching whatever it is I want to on television. It depends on how you want to look at it after all.

“Anne, I love it! Archie’s boy skills are completely on age level!. He’s learned to fart on purpose to distract. He loves it, too! It is really hard to give him ‘angry eyes’ and not smile. Actually he got an extra hug from me and then was told it was not pretty, which he knew already by saying, ‘Not nice!’ Made me feel like my boy was still home… Hate to tell you this skill never gets better, or goes away…”

I ought to be embarrassed by my child’s behavior, but I’m not. I wrote about that already, though. Remember when I told you so?

When John got home from work Archie, Kit and Jack were already sitting at the table, eating their dinner. I heated frozen chicken nuggets in the microwave for Kit and Jack, and opened a plastic cup of yogurt for Archie, too, in case they objected to my main course offering. I also tossed a handful of the pecans John roasted on Christmas Eve, the ones remaining in the storage container on our kitchen counter, onto Kit and Jack’s plates. Kit pushed her pecans aside with a disgusted harrumph, but Jack had already finished his first helping of nuts and was working his way through a second handful by the time John walked in the door.

I remember that my father always greeted us enthusiastically when he came home from work when I was small. “Daddy’s home,” he’d sing as he opened the door. Now John usually swings our door wide open with great aplomb, waits a beat or two, and then hollers a hearty hello as loudly as he can bellow. Sometimes Archie, Kit and Jack run to greet him, but they always holler back, answering John’s greeting with an articulated affirmation of his worth, Daddy! You’re home!

My homecomings rarely elicit that sort of heartfelt greeting.

As he walked in the door tonight John saw that Jack was eating the pecans he’d made. He commented on it, and Jack concurred. “I love my Daddy’s pecans,” he said.

I can’t say for sure, but it may have been all the daddy, daddy, daddies Archie was jabbering excitedly that inspired Jack to ask John next, “What about your daddy?”

John’s father Bill passed away before the twins celebrated their first birthday. I know Jack doesn’t remember him, and he has only recently realized that we parents have parents, too. The way John’s name, Daddy, was tripping off Archie’s tongue may have stirred Jack’s specific question, but I wonder if it wasn’t spurred on instead by something more magical, something ethereal conjured up by my burning oven and the snacks stashed away in a corner of our kitchen counter.

“I have a daddy, but you probably don’t remember meeting him,” John explained as I placed his dinner plate in front of him. I’d poured honey and hot sauce over his sweet potato, and I’d piled sliced onion and peppers, green, red and orange ones, on the other side of his plate. The balsamic vinegar and olive oil I’d drizzled over the onions and peppers was fusing with the honey and the hot sauce in the middle of his plate, and John winked at me before he swiped his finger through the combination of condiments then stuck it in his mouth.

John told Jack how much his father loved roasted pecans, and how his grandfather, his father’s father, had a few pecan trees in his front yard in Charleston. “My Pop, your great-grandfather, used to make us kids pick those pecans every time we were over at his house,” John continued. “He’d be thrilled to see you eat those pecans tonight.”

A few minutes further into the meal, as we five were all eating together, John talked some more about Bill and Pop, and about how much both men liked to eat sweet potatoes. “When I was a little boy, older than you but younger than I am now, my grandfather used to make me drive him to Yates’ so he could buy the best sweet potatoes on the peninsula,” John explained to Jack. “He ate one every day with his dinner, no matter what.”

Jack giggled as John spoke directly to him, relishing out loud the extra attention John paid him tonight, all because Jack knew the right question to ask. Roasted pecans and sweet potatoes, Jack and John, and Archie, too. A mealtime conversation generated by the memories of favorite foods and fathers now gone, a complex compound served up hot to warm this dark and wet January night.

“Her nose smells like poop,” Jack told me more than once.

“And her hair looks ugly,” Kit added, too.

Of course I knew the dog smelled bad, and since I couldn’t remember when Jinx had last been trimmed I picked up the phone and made an appointment to drop her off at the dog-grooming salon this morning. When I returned home after dropping Jinx off at the salon, I found John cleaning out the kitchen cabinets. He reported to me more than once that he’d found items with years’ old expiration dates, and he expressed amazement again and again that we’d had these things in the house this long.

While John was cleaning out the cabinets, while Archie, Kit and Jack were content playing some nameless game in the corner of one room of the house, I made myself busy vacuuming the rugs, mopping the floor, washing the baseboards. I clean our floors often, usually several times a week, but still I was surprised today by how much dust had collected in the corners, how much stuff had tucked itself up against the sides of our rugs.

In truth today’s cleaning effort began last weekend when John and I combed through the pantry, and then emptied the cabinets in the laundry room. From there John moved onto the cabinets and drawers here in our office, and I went upstairs to tackle the bathroom drawers, the medicine cabinet, the linen closets. I even cleaned out my half of the master closet, filling several black, plastic trash bags with clothing I don’t wear anymore, or can’t wear anymore, or won’t wear anymore.

On New Year’s Eve, while John was still at work, I loaded those plastic trash bags into the rear of the car, and Archie, Kit and Jack into their car seats in the backseat of the car, then we four set out to run errands. We went to the store first to return something I’d bought but didn’t need after all, and then we went to the bank. After we were finished there I took the kids to the grocery store for fresh fruit, milk, diapers. When we’d filled our cart, after Jack hugged his favorite bagger, David, a retiree who is now working at the grocery store, I loaded our bags and my children into the car and then made the trip from the supermarket parking lot over to Goodwill.

At Goodwill I maneuvered our car into the long line of vehicles cueing up to pull through the drop-off line. I was driving my mother’s car because John wrecked my station wagon the week before Christmas on Woodruff Road somewhere between the movie theater and Greenridge when he looked left and said, “Hey, look… that Waffle House went out of business, too,” before he plowed into the car in front of us, idling in an intersection rendered useless by the stop-and go-traffic. My mother’s car is a particularly nice one so when it was my turn to unload the stuff I’d brought into the Goodwill bins several employees came outside to help me. I assume those employees supposed that a nice car equated nice stuff.

With the employees’ assistance I emptied my plastic trash bags into the donation bins. After I’d finished one employee asked me if I’d like a receipt. I told her I would so she went inside to get me one. When the employee returned and handed me my receipt she thanked me. “We appreciate you supporting us,” she said.

In return I offered her the biggest smile I could manage then replied, “I’ll always support you.”

As I drove away I thought of my response. I’m certain that employee was disabled. I have no idea how or why, but I know she was. When I’m out in the world and interact with a person who is disabled I always try very hard to convey that I kinda sorta get how things must be for them. That’s probably presumptuous of me to say so, but suffice it to say that in these instances I always want to speak the correct thing, or speak a compassionate thing, but usually I only manage to stumble all over myself trying to line my words up just right.

To be honest, what I want to do most of all is tell this person I don’t know, this person whom I’ve just met, all about Archie, all about how awesome I think he is, all about how what I’d like to do most of all is give he or she, the person here who is working, a huge hug because their success in life can only enhance my child’s chance for success in life… Anyway, you get the idea, I’m sure.

So I was still thinking of all this when I got home, checked my e-mailed and discovered that beginning in February Medicaid in our state will cap all therapies, speech, occupational and physical, offered to children and adults who need them. I know the specific numbers of hours and visits, too, but for the purpose of this post all you need to know is that the allowed appointments aren’t many, and that I’m sure Archie and many other children like him will reach their allotted visits by, like, April if we were to move forward maintaining the therapy schedule we do now.

I walked away from my computer then to fold some laundry, to empty the dishwasher that hadn’t been emptied yet that morning, to call a friend. Then I made my way into this office again to write another friend. “It’s frustrating that the state, or even private insurance for that matter, won’t pay for necessary services for kids with disabilities that can ultimately only help those kids to become responsible adults who are able to hold down a job and contribute to their community,” I wrote without pause. “I hate this.”

I do hate it, but because it’s one of those “great big world” things that is what it is there isn’t much I can do to change it. What I can do, I guess, is make things nice here at home. Keep a clean pet who adores my children, all three of them; keep a clean house, one in which Archie, Kit and Jack feel at home and our friends and family feel welcomed. I can take my children to the supermarket where everyone knows our names, and I can continue supporting the organizations that benefit families like our own. And I can resolve to always, without fail, offer the biggest smile I’m able to manage to people whose lives overlap my own, no matter who they are. After all goodwill and grace are contagious, I believe.

So we’d eaten too much pizza, and we’d stayed up late with our kids, and we were propped up on our bed pillows watching television, when I turned to John and asked him, “What did we do last New Year’s Eve?”

John just looked at me, and I looked at him, and as we were looking at each other I suddenly remembered what we’d done last year. “Oh, yeah…” I mumbled and then turned my face toward the television again.

Last year we’d spent the holiday with John’s family in Charleston. I could write an entire book about why that is both a good and a bad thing, and I’m sure that no family member who would read that book would disagree with anything I could write, but still. I don’t want to write it here, and you probably wouldn’t want to read it, and even if you did you may not truly understand all of the ins and outs of our story, as complicated and commonplace as they are.

What you need to know for the purpose of this post is that John and I were in Charleston last year, and that our three children had been tucked into bed long before midnight rolled around. It had been a long day. I was tired, and annoyed, and I admit that I’d drunk a lot of wine by then, too.

One of John’s siblings had finally decided to change the television station, so at least I didn’t have to listen to that irritating humming noise the crowd makes in the background during televised football games anymore, the one that rises and falls intermittently in direct reflection of the activity on the field. So someone had changed the station and now we were all crowded around the television, waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square, and just a half hour or so before it was time to ring in the New Year Barack Obama was on television in a campaign ad, wishing us happiness and prosperity.

One of my brother-in-laws began calling the Senator “Osama,” and that made half of the room laugh while the other half bristled. My brother-in-law continued joking, and when I couldn’t listen any more I piped in with something like, I’m sure that will seem funny when Senator Obama wins the whole damn thing.

My brother-in-law and I went back and forth then, trying to better the other with his knowledge of the political process and my intuition, until John gave me that look he does when he hopes I’ll just-let-it-go-right-now, please, can’t-you-just-let-it-go. I recognized the desperation in John’s eyes so I backed down and retreated to the kitchen until it was time for Dick Clark to ring in the New Year.

Then I joined everyone in front of the television set again, and I remember that I felt emotional enough when I saw Dick Clark on television that I kind of cried a little. I remember standing next to John thinking about how awesome Dick Clark was to be there, counting down the final few seconds of the year, and then I remember hearing my brother-in-law snickering at the way Dick Clark talked.

I vividly remember this next part of the story.

“Really?” I asked my brother-in-law.

He just looked at me blankly as if he had no idea what I was talking about.

“You’re going to laugh at him for the way he’s talking?”

The room was quiet then. John was looking at me again, his eyes opened wide and flashing just-let-it-go-right-now, please, can’t-you-just-let-it-go. But it had been a long day, and I was tired, and incensed, and I’d drunk a lot of wine by then, too.

“Do you know how hard he had to work to be able to do that?” I remember yelling. “Do you know how much therapy it took him to get there?” I asked while I pointed my finger at the television screen.

I remember being angry, and I remember that the room was quiet, and I remember that John asked me then, out loud, to please let it go. I did and I walked away, out of the room. I don’t remember anything at all after that.

No one’s since talked to me about that night, and I wonder sometimes if everyone’s forgotten. But I know they haven’t; I’m sure they haven’t. My husband’s family is like that after all. Everybody always knows the whole story, but no one ever talks about it. They may give you a hard time about it, but that’s all you’re going to get. That’s just the way it is.

I wanted to tell you this story so you know that although I am very Zen about Archie’s diagnosis most of the time, sometimes, every now and then, I do struggle with the general worldview of my son’s abilities. I do genuinely like my brother-in-law, but I discovered that even family members can feel like part of the collective consciousness sometimes, part of the world and what it sees, what it can’t see. What it knows, what it doesn’t know. What it can never understand until it opens its mind wide enough to take it all in.

So I do struggle, but I didn’t the other night. Instead John, Kit, Jack and I fought over who would be lucky enough to sit next to Archie while we watched the movie. Then when it was over, as John and I were helping the kids climb the stairs, I hugged Archie, and I hugged Kit and Jack, too, and I thanked each of them for making me the woman I am this year, the woman I am right now. And I meant what I said, every word of it.

I had to change Archie’s diaper before we went upstairs. He had pooped, again, so I cleaned Archie, put a new diaper on him and then pulled his overalls up, bringing the pant’s straps over his shoulders one after another so that Archie could help me to fasten the buckles against his chest. We walked over to the sink then, Archie and I, and we both washed our hands then dried them with paper towels and I have to say that Archie was as proud of himself for completing this process with me as Kit and Jack were when they successfully maneuvered through their most recent trip to the bathroom, start to finish.

To be honest, neither John nor I have done much to teach Archie to use the bathroom. We sit him on the toilet every so often, and we talk to Archie about how he should go to the bathroom in the bathroom rather than in his diaper. The good news is that Archie has experienced success on the toilet, and all five of us have praised him for a job well done on those occasions. The even better news is that Archie’s also told both John and I many times that he needed to use the toilet, and both John and I have helped Archie into the bathroom when that’s happened, but more times than not we’ve both discovered that Archie’s already gone in his diaper by the time we maneuver him into the bathroom.

I am telling you this so you understand that I’m not embarrassed at all to admit here that today I had to change my five-year-old son’s diaper before I took him upstairs and laid him on his bed, rubbed lotion on his chapped cheeks and then kissed him on the mouth before I walked out of the room, shutting the door behind me. I’m not embarrassed because Archie is doing the best he can, and John and I are doing the best we can, and with all of us pitching in our best effort I’m sure that Archie will someday learn to use the bathroom effectively.

But I am embarrassed to tell you this: While I was changing Archie’s diaper this afternoon, as I was wiping the poop from the creases in his skin with the fistful of wet wipes I held in my hand, my daughter kneeled beside me and said in a singsong voice, “Archie’s a baby because he poopy-ed in his diaper.”

At first I wanted to holler at Kit, to chastise her for teasing her brother. But before any admonition could leave my mouth, I realized those words coming out of Kit’s mouth were mine and not her own.

The truth is that over Thanksgiving weekend, while he was playing at his grandparents’ house, Jack pooped his pants. After we’d taken him to the bathroom, after we’d cleaned him up, both John and I gave Jack a hard time about what he’d done. “Babies poop in their pants, Jack,” I remember saying to my son. My brother and his family were at my parent’s house, too, so I decided then to use their youngest son as a teaching tool.

“Does Rhys poop in his diaper?” I asked Jack.

“Yyyeeeesssss…” Jack replied, whining. I remember that he was staring at his feet and holding his fists against his mouth, and I remember how I knew Jack was implicating himself right then through body language alone.

“Is Rhys a baby, Jack?”

“Yyyyyeeeessss…” Jack replied again, and by now he was squirming, trying his best to move away from me.

“Well, since you’re a big boy then you shouldn’t poop in your diaper anymore, right?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Jack agreed.

That was that and I didn’t think anything more about it until today as I changed Archie’s diaper on the rug in front of the door to the garage and Kit made the observation she did. Before we went upstairs I talked to Kit about what she said rather than reprimand her, and to myself I vowed to try very hard not to use a comparison again that may incriminate Archie through no fault of his own.

I did those two things and then after I put Archie, Kit and Jack down for their naps I ate a bowlful of macaroni and cheese and wondered to myself if most forms of mockery and meanness are manufactured by mothers teaching their children. When our children implement what they’ve been taught, when the differences in what we teach our children and what they see become incongruous, and when that lack of continuity causes our children to feel uncomfortable, is that when and how an innocent statement like Kit’s manifests into something more malevolent?

So I’m thinking about this right now, and I’m thinking, too, of a family gathering we attended the Sunday before Christmas. One of my nephews is getting married this summer and everyone was standing around the kitchen island asking him about his big wedding plans, and his grand honeymoon plans, and about this house he and his fiancé are planning to purchase. I was listening to this conversation and in the middle of my nephew’s answer to no question in particular my face flushed with anger, just like that, and I looked around the room and wondered why none of the other adults there looked as upset as me.

I wasn’t jealous, I was sure. I was just really mad and I had to try very hard to keep from spitting out accusingly, “Yeah, you think you’re big stuff now but just wait until life kicks your ass, too…” So I bit my bottom lip and I looked around the room and into the faces of all the other adults there. I know some of their hurts, and I’ve watched some of them wounded, and I sat there and wondered why they weren’t fidgeting in their seats like me, why their chins weren’t popping in the air with repugnance every so often like mine was.

It took me until the drive home to realize I was so incensed by that conversation because those words my nephew spoke sounded a lot like ones I once said standing in that same kitchen, around that same island. I’d said similar things, and no one told me then how foolhardy I sounded either. They didn’t tell me because I never would have believed them, because I wasn’t yet ready to hear what they had to say. I felt a little less angry then during that drive home, but still I shook my head, hoping my nephew will soon learn the lessons I’ve learned one way or another.

I was still shaking my head when John interrupted me. He wanted to talk about the charity housing program my brother-in-law is championing, the one John’s brother wants the whole family to sponsor together. “I told him that was a lot of money for us right now,” John confided.

John is one of six children. He is younger than his next oldest sibling by five years. Because of the age difference between John and his siblings, and because John didn’t start his family, our family, until he was in his thirties, Archie, Kit and Jack are significantly younger than most of their cousins. In other words, here in our house we are still buying diapers while many of John’s siblings are nearly finished paying for college.

I agreed with John aloud, with his confession, and then he told me, “While they were trying to talk me into it someone said they wanted to do the housing project so they could show their kids how the other half lives.”

I was silent for a few beats before I replied, “Our kids already know about that.”

Please know that I am conscious of what my family doesn’t have, and self-conscious of what we do have. And I know, too, that we five enjoy a comfortable life, but I also am convinced that both John and I are ensuring our children learn selflessness through the little lessons we teach here at home every day.

So that is one thing for sure, but I think what bothered John the most about the comment he shared with me is how completely it missed the obvious mark, the one playing on the floor in the middle of the room who goes to school with peers of all disability and socioeconomic levels. I’ve said it before, I know, but it occurs to me in moments like this one so often that I’m sure I need to repeat it again: John and I expend so much energy trying to show our family how alike Archie is, that we sometimes forget to admit how different he makes our life, too.

All lessons about misfortune aren’t economic in nature, John and I agreed there in the car. And all lessons about misfortune are better told when we talk instead of how we smile in its unsightly face each day, how we teach others to smile at it, too. John and I agreed then to conclude that is how he and strive to be our best selves, how we move forward without embarrassment over what we do, or what we have.

This is all to say that today I changed my five-year-old son’s diaper and my three-year-old daughter commented on it. If I make sure that comment of hers doesn’t become a criticism then maybe someday she won’t say the things I once did, standing around that kitchen island, and then another day still maybe she won’t have to shake her head, side to side and side to side, all the way home in the car.

An hour earlier I’d called him to ask that he pick up one last Christmas gift for me. “It’s paid for,” I’d told him. “I have to pick it up this morning, between nine and twelve, and I don’t know how I can make that work.”

“You were worried about it so I just wanted to give you some peace of mind,” Dad offered during our second phone call of the morning, after he reported that he had the gift in hand.

The gift my father had stopped to pick up on his way into work today fulfills Archie’s wish list. Since Thanksgiving time Archie and my mother have been singing Jolly Old Saint Nicholas together, only instead of naming what Johnny and Susy and Nellie want from Santa, Archie and my mother invented new lyrics to describe our family’s Christmas wishes. According to the song lyrics Archie has learned to sing, Jack wants a train, Kit wants princess and art stuff, and Archie wants a bag of books.

So that’s what my three children will find underneath the tree tomorrow morning, more or less. And that’s what my dad had to pick up on his way into work today, the bag I found last weekend made from fabric decorated with Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Little Boy Blue and the Itsy Bitsy Spider, the one I had embroidered with the phrase Archie’s Bag of Books.

The weekend before John and I had run around town together to work on completing our holiday shopping list. We saved the stop we’d planned to make at the bookstore for last. When we got there John and I walked directly to the children’s book section of the store and essentially dissembled the display racks exclaiming, “Get this one,” or insisting, “He’ll love this one,” and every so often interjecting with an “I loved this book when I was small so we have to get it, too.”

If you’ve visited our home you know how many children’s books we already have. And if you know me in real life you also know how I don’t like to buy toys, but that I’ll always agree to indulge my children with books, books, books. So when Archie told John and I that he wanted Santa to bring him a bag of books that felt like permission to go out and cosset my own dreams for my biggest boy, too.

You may have seen me standing in that line at the bookstore two Saturdays ago. I was standing next to my husband who held a pile of children’s books in his arms that was just as tall as the pile of books I cradled against my own chest. You would have noticed us, John and I, standing in that line because we were talking just a little too loud, like he and I often do when we’re excited, and I was doing that silly thing I do sometimes when I laugh and cry at the same time.

You may have thought I was slightly unhinged, and that may have been a valid assumption on your part because I usually am, but I wasn’t two Saturdays ago when I stood in that line at the bookstore. Absolutely not. Rather, it felt like I was one of the fortunate people who get to see the forest for the trees. That day in line I laughed aloud as I wiped my nose with my shirtsleeve, before I admitted to John, “I was so stupid when Archie was born. I never would have guessed at this.”

A few Decembers ago I couldn’t even get Archie to hold his head up straight for a photograph for our holiday card, but this year Archie asked for books and his father and I are making sure Santa remembers to drop them off in our living room tonight, in a bag bearing our son’s name, Archie. Archie.

Beautiful.

An aside… This is the first year Archie, Kit and Jack are genuinely excited about Christmas. What I mean by that is they really get it now, the whole thing, as much as a small child can anyway. All three children are eagerly awaiting Santa’s visit, and they’ve learned enough about Jesus and the Nativity at school for Jack to shout aloud to an elderly man at the post office the other day, “Hey, you! Do you know Jesus?” I know that Jack was talking about the sticker I’d patted onto his chest, the big, fake stamp from the book of stamps I was using to mail our holiday cards, the one depicting Botticelli’s “Virgin and Child with the Young John the Baptist” (chalk that one up to all those art history classes I took in college). I have no idea what the elderly man at the post office thought Jack was talking about, though.

I hope your world is beautiful, too, this Christmas.

But Archie doesn’t know how his gas passing pleases me. I am his mother so when he does it I tell him it’s impolite, and then I instruct him to ask to be excused, or even to feign embarrassment at the very least. Archie usually does as I say, but he laughs, too, great big guffaws that take his breathe away and make him red in the face. So far in the instances that mark these occasions Archie’s joviality has jumped from him to everyone within earshot so much so that these friends or strangers laugh, too, right along with my son.

Today at the store, while we were standing in line at the cash register to purchase one last Christmas gift, Archie burped and then laughed his belly-shaking string of hee, hee, hee’s. He wouldn’t stop laughing long enough to excuse himself, so when the lady behind us in line began to laugh, too, I turned to her and offered, “I’m sorry. He just learned to do this.”

“It’s fine,” she assured me. “Boys will be boys!”

That lady was still smiling when Archie and I left the store. I was smiling, too, but from a different place in my heart.

Here are the cakes I delivered to Archie’s teachers and therapists on Thursday. On Friday I took another handful of cakes, just like these, to Kit and Jack’s teachers and preschool administrators.

It was John’s idea to make the recipe we did, the College of Charleston Cake from Special Recipes from the Charleston Cake Lady. Teresa was John’s step-mother and Archie, Kit and Jack’s paternal grandmother. She passed away last year, but I’m sure Teresa would have been pleased to know that we shared one of her favorite recipes with the people who make a significant difference in her grandchildren’s lives simply by showing up to work each day.

No worries, though. At least our first batch of cakes has been distributed. Tomorrow the twins will have their own cakes to deliver, and I doubt I would have been able to stuff fifteen cakes into the back of my station wagon if I’d had to deliver them all on the same day considering that today’s load was a tight fit.

When I was small I watched my own parents make these incredible fruit and nut pastry rolls for my teachers, for my brother’s teachers. Their roll baking was a whole-day ordeal, and I remember we’d pick dried flour out of the cracks in the huge wooden butcher block that stood in the middle of our kitchen for days after that one. My parents gave that butcher block to my brother, and I suppose I inherited their penchant for producing teacher gifts at home, in the kitchen.

May you all not make the same mistake I did this morning. And may Archie enjoy one last day of mind-expanding school activities before he’s home with me until after the New Year, making mischief and keeping my days merry and bright.

Let’s say, hypothetically of course, that John and I decided to bake cakes for Archie’s teachers and therapists to present as holiday gifts. And let’s say, for the sake of this story, that I searched the Internet for colorful cake boxes, and then refreshed my screen and searched again for rolls of coordinating grosgrain ribbon to use as adornment for those cakes. Let’s say, and again I’m speaking in a what-if sort of way, that when those boxes and that ribbon were delivered last Friday afternoon that it’d rained the day before, and the day before that, but that I’d forgotten about the weather when the deliveryman carried the big brown box that contained the gross of pink cake boxes into my garage and leaned it up against the concrete wall.

Because there wasn’t any water in my garage, and because Archie, Kit, Jack and I were riding bicycles in the driveway with Sophia and her mom, the sun shining bright upon our faces, let’s say that I forgot to look at the condition of the hypothetical brown box containing the hypothetical pink boxes that will hold the hypothetical cakes that John, Archie, Kit, Jack and I will hypothetically deliver to Archie’s teachers and therapists tomorrow on Archie’s last morning of school before the holiday break.

But John did remember the rain, and on Saturday morning he thought to open the big brown box that contained the gross of pink cake boxes. It’s a good thing he did, too, because all of those pink boxes, every last one of them, was so wet on one side, the front flap side, that the thin cardboard of each box had swelled and warped from the water it’d absorbed. “Maybe you could use a hairdryer to fix them?” my mom suggested, but John and I knew that wouldn’t work.

So we took photos of the ruined merchandise, and John called the delivery company, and then he called the cake box manufacturer. He was put on hold a lot, and bickered with one or two people over how the damage had been caused after all, but in the end the cake box manufacturer agreed to send us a new gross of pink cake boxes in a new, and preferably dry, big brown box.

That new gross of pink boxes would be delivered today, we were told. “Keep checking the front porch,” John reminded me a few times before he left for work today. And I did check the front porch several times throughout the morning, and then again before I stripped off my wet workout clothes in the laundry room, stuffed them into the washing machine, then started a load of darks before I dashed upstairs to take a quick shower and get dressed before I was expected to pick my children up at school.

While I was in the shower I heard the dog bark like she does when someone passes in front of our house. Please don’t stop here, I thought to myself as I rushed to rinse the soap from my hair. But the dog began to bark louder, and then louder still, and I was sure that her carrying on heralded the arrival of that new gross of pink cake boxes. It was raining this morning again, as I was showering, while the deliveryman was leaving the big brown box on our front porch. I was thinking about the water, and then I was wondering what we’d do if those boxes were ruined, too, and all that thinking and wondering spurred me to hurry through the rest of my shower.

So I hurried to condition my hair, to wash my face, to rinse the soap from my body and then to towel off, but I didn’t push my way through those steps so quickly that I anticipated the delivery guy to still be in my front yard when I ran down the steps, toward our front door, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around myself. In the shower, while I was thinking and worrying, I decided to go to the door and pull the big brown box inside as soon as I finished showering. I certainly didn’t expect the deliveryman to still be there, but there he was, sticking one of those door handle notification things with the adhesive on one side on our front door.

I saw him and he saw me, and for a moment I thought about ducking into our dining room then running back into our kitchen, away from the man peering into our front door’s window. I thought about all that, but then I saw the notification on the door and I knew I didn’t want to wait for that delivery guy to return my big brown box to the warehouse, and that I didn’t want to wait in line at that warehouse later with my three children in tow to pick up my big brown box, and that I really needed to have that gross of pink cake boxes here in my house tonight so I could package the hypothetical cakes that John is hypothetically baking right now for all of us to hypothetically deliver to Archie’s teachers and therapists tomorrow on Archie’s last morning of school before the holiday break.

So I opened the door, wearing nothing but a bath towel. And I called to the delivery guy who was walking across our yard, back toward his truck that was idling against the cul-de-sac’s curb, wearing nothing but a bath towel, “Um… Do you have a package for me?”

The delivery guy turned to me, shrugged apologetically when he saw that I was wearing only a towel, and then told me that he didn’t have a delivery for me, but that he was stopping by to pick up a return. He wanted the first gross of pink cake boxes, the ruined ones, because when John was bickering with the cake box manufacturer over how the damage had been caused after all, apparently my husband had agreed to send the waterlogged boxes back for their inspection.

So I explained that I had to open our garage door, and then I had to ask the deliveryman to meet me there. I couldn’t lift the big brown box of damaged pink cake boxes so I had to wait for the deliveryman to do it. And then I had to wait for that deliveryman to figure out if he needed my signature, or not. And, really, that deliveryman was flustered, and inside my own head I kept telling myself that I wear running shorts that are more revealing than the bath towel I had tucked underneath my arm, but still. He was embarrassed, and I was embarrassed, and all I really wanted was that new gross of pink cake boxes for the hypothetical cakes that we’re hypothetically making tonight to present as teacher and therapist gifts tomorrow morning, hypothetically speaking.

The funniest part of this entire story is not that I had to make small talk with a deliveryman wearing only a bath towel, but that it happened today after I’d shared a phone conversation with another mother with whom I’m working on a fundraising project for the Meyer Center. We were talking about a program we’re hosting tomorrow night, and I joked that I may actually take a shower before attending.

“Well, I hope that’s something you do every day anyway,” she replied dryly, almost sarcastically, and it took me a beat or two to realize this mother had no idea I was kidding around when I’d made the comment about the shower.

“Oh! Of course I take a shower every day,” I told that mother. “What I meant was that there’s a difference between the sort of shower I take after I go to the gym, and the kind of shower I take before I’m preparing to be seen somewhere.”

The mother I was talking to didn’t reply, and I felt a little insulted that she didn’t know me well enough by now to understand how obsessively compulsive I am about the cleanliness of myself, my children, our clothing and our home. But I guess that’s ok because although she doesn’t understand, I think my deliveryman does.

“Go away, Mommy,” Kit said before she tipped the red nesting cup, one of a set we use as tub toys, against her lips. Her cup, like Jack’s yellow one, was stuffed full with a wet washcloth. After she pretended to drink, when she pulled her cup away from her mouth, Kit looked up at me then announced, “Me and Jackie Moore are drinking coffee.”

I sighed, thought a beat and then asked, “Well, I wonder what Grinell would have to say about that?” Grinell is our Elf on the Shelf. He appeared on our fireplace mantle while Archie, Kit and Jack were napping the day after Thanksgiving. That elf came with a book, too, and after we read it together, John, the kids and I, we spent a few minutes considering a name for our new friend.

“It has to be something elfin,” I mused.

“How about Grinell?” Kit posed and I remember that John and I looked at each other then, and that I could tell by the look in my husband’s eyes that he was as stunned as I was by Kit’s unique, but perfect, suggestion.

In case you’ve never heard about the tradition of the Elf on the Shelf I should tell you that, in a nutshell, Grinell magically transports himself to the North Pole every night after Archie, Kit and Jack have gone to bed to report to Santa about the kids’ behavior throughout the day. He’s a tattletale, that elf, for the big Boss Man himself and so ever since that afternoon in late November Grinell’s helped John and I discipline our kids.

The minute I mentioned Grinell tonight in the bathroom, by the side of the tub, Kit dropped her makeshift coffee cup, jumped up and lifted her arms toward the towel I had draped over my outstretched arms. As I dried off my girl, before I shooed her in the direction of her father, Kit wanted to know, “Where will Grinell hide tomorrow?”

“Don’t know,” I answered. Since that elf first arrived at our house he’s perched on picture frames, stuffed himself into pottery, peered over ledges and even arranged himself inside, behind and on top of various Christmas decorations. Yesterday morning Archie, Kit and Jack found Grinell dangling from interlaced, felt hands off the corner of a framed collage of black and white photos of Kit as a baby. That made my children laugh, of course, but what surprised me was how their laughter was loud enough to fill our home with merriment so palpable it felt like bubbles floating all over the place.

Tonight after Archie and Kit were dressed and ready for bed, as I sat on the floor beside John while he zipped Jack’s sleeper tight up underneath my boy’s chin, Jack turned his face toward me and asked, “Will Grinell tell Santa to bring you a birthday present?”

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be 34 years old.

“Santa doesn’t bring birthday presents, Jack,” I responded.

“Oh…” Jack said before he looked away, off into a corner of the bedroom. I watched his face and could almost see his mind whir away underneath his damp hair as he processed this new piece of information about the world and the way things in it work.

“But we got you a present!” Kit offered, her voice threaded with excitement. John shushed her, Kit said sorry, and that was that.

Before I go to bed tonight I’ll drink another glass of wine, search for a new hiding spot for our elf… somewhere too high to be touched by little hands, but low enough to be seen by anxious eyes… and then I’ll steal into the rooms of my sleeping children, lean low over each of them and tuck my face in close enough to feel their breath as they sleep. Before I go to bed tonight I’ll tell John that I feel young and old, both at the same time, and then say jokingly that I know I’ll feel older still if Jack wakes at three o’clock in the morning again and insists this one more time with the sort of anticipation children feel on Christmas day, “Mommy, tell me if Grinell came back again.”

Jack likes to set up his piecemeal train set, comprised of trains from several collections and tracks of varied brand names, on a child-sized table in the middle of our playroom. He’s careful when he puts together his train set, that Jack, and he always derives much pleasure from his finished product.

So it always makes Jack scream and yell when Archie insists that the train set his younger brother has painstakingly constructed is his own. “That’s my tracks, Jack!” Archie will announce loudly, playfully.

“Noooooooo…” Jack will holler in response as he locks his knees and pushes up on his toes.

Jack’s resistance usually encourages Archie to take his teasing just a little bit further. “I’m gonna knock those tracks down!” Archie will yell, but because he speaks the words through a smile they come out sounding jovial, almost exultant.

This exchange between Jack and Archie happens nearly everyday now, but the first time it happened a couple weeks ago, the first time John and I overheard the boyish banter, we turned toward each other, opened our eyes wide and then raised our eyebrows. “He sounds like a big brother,” John observed.

When the twins were born, when I was still in the hospital, I remember my father holding Jack and talking to him. We’d made the decision not to bring Archie to the hospital to meet his new siblings because he was in the middle of the treatment protocol that by then had knocked his leukemia into remission, but that still had to be completed as a matter of course. We couldn’t risk exposing Archie to the germs in the hospital lobby, its waiting rooms, elevators and corridors, John and I had agreed and everyone whose opinion mattered, our family and friends as well as Archie’s doctors and nurses, concurred.

So my father was talking to my newborn son about his older brother and I remember clearly what I heard him say. “Soon you’ll meet your brother, Archie. He’s your big brother, but you two will have a unique relationship,” my father explained. “Although he’ll always be older than you, one day you’ll be his big brother.”

My father’s words seemed poignant to me then, even through the morphine haze that hung around my head like so much fog, and they affect me now, too, but in a different sort of way. Now we are three years into Archie’s tenure as the oldest sibling, and although he is not as accomplished as Kit and Jack in many ways, he still seems older in other, more important areas.

And things, the way situations play out between my three children, must feel the same to Kit and Jack, too. It seems to me that those twins have learned to look out for Archie in a way that mimics the manner in which I parent him, but they’ve also found a way to respect Archie like other children do with their own older brothers. It’s remarkable; really, to stand by and watch Archie, Kit and Jack learn the roles they play in each other’s lives. Sometimes doing so means I’ll have the opportunity to let go of an old misconception and admit here to you how wrong we were then.

In years past I’ve shopped fancy stationary stores, picked a thermographed design and then personalized it. But last year I realized how those cards didn’t reflect the sort of family we’ve become, so I found a photo card I liked in a craft store and spent more hours than I’d anticipated putting those paper frames together, and then mounting a photo inside them that John and I took of the kids one cold Sunday morning at the neighborhood park, the one with Archie, Kit and Jack stuffed, side by side, into a tire swing.

I liked that card a lot, the homemade one, and I still have a copy of the photo of my kids laughing the way they did that day last December on my refrigerator right now, but the truth is that I didn’t want to spend hours and hours putting together holiday cards again this year. I remember how I worked at the kitchen table, a pile of cards there, a pile of photos here, mounting tape in front of me, and envelopes that still needed to be addressed stacked on the counter, just out of reach. I remember, too, how I snapped at my children when they came by the table to see what I was doing, to ask me to play with them instead, and I liked that part of the memory least of all so I told myself earlier this month, No, not again this year; this time I will do something else.

So I scoured the Internet for photo cards, the pre-printed kind, and when I finally found a design I liked well enough I went through our recent family photos, dozens and dozens of them, to find a shot in which all three children were smiling or looking at the camera, but that endeavor proved more difficult than I’d imagined. I shared the photos I had found that sort of, maybe, if-you-go-ahead-and-turn-your-head-to–the-side-and-squint-a-little fulfilled my stipulations with John and he harrumphed then said, “We’ll take a picture this weekend that we’ll be able to use.”

That conversation happened last week, and although we took lots and lots of photos over the weekend there wasn’t a single one that made John nor I smile in a relieved sort of way and say yes, that’s the one when it popped up on the computer screen on its way from our camera’s memory chip to our computer’s hard drive. So on Sunday night I pulled clothing from my children’s bureau drawers, picking out the outfits they’d wear to school on Monday morning, the same ones they’d wear for our holiday card photo. “We’ll just take a picture of them in front of the tree before I take them to school tomorrow,” I told John when I finished looking at the weekend’s photos, resigning myself that we’d have to try again. “That’s who they are anyway, you know? They’ll look themselves this way.”

On Monday morning John dressed Archie, Kit and Jack in the outfits I’d selected, and I arranged our children in front of our decorated tree. I made them hold hands, and then hug, and then put their arms around each other’s shoulders all while John captured one image after another. Someone pulled someone else’s hair, and someone else scratched, or bit, or pushed another one. “Enough,” I finally told the kids who were growing impatient with John and I. Then I looked at my husband and asked, “Enough?”

“I’m sure I got something we can use,” John responded as he handed me the camera, then went upstairs to take a shower before leaving for work.

And he did. John took a lot of photos that could complete our card. So I went through all of them and tried to find the one in which each child looked like his or her own self, like the freeze-frame images I conjure inside my head when I think of each child’s name. As I studied the images I found several photos that portrayed Kit and Jack accurately, but fewer that captured Archie’s essence the way I know it to be.

When you instruct Archie to smile for a photo he’ll do what you ask, but many times he does so after you’ve taken the shot, after the flash has burned away. That’s just his way with photos and I can’t explain why things are this way, but I know it isn’t because he can’t follow a photographer’s instructions; rather he’s slow to do so. His actions are delayed, retarded.

So that is often how he looks in photos when the person taking the shot hurries it to capture the smiles of the other subjects. His mouth may be open, or he may be squinting, or he may be looking away from the lens and so his mind appears unengaged, vacant. This means that when I look at photos of Archie standing in a group I often see a face I don’t know staring back at me, one that doesn’t look at all like the freeze-frame image I conjure inside my head when I speak his name inside my heart, Archie. I don’t see him there inside the frame, and I’m discouraged to think this means the world may not see my son the way I know him to be either.

I was thinking of this yesterday before I placed my holiday card order, as I was out, running errands. In the car I was playing children’s music to entertain Archie, Kit, and Jack, all three of them buckled into their car seats. One song ended and then a Justin Roberts song began. I listened to the words, and then suddenly felt as if I was hearing them for the first time.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men were really quite confused
Everyday they arrive at ten and they get the same bad news

And Humpty say, and Humpty say, and Humpty say,
Oo oo oo if you only knew
If you only knew oo oo about this view
You would see folks like you and I right beyond this wall
And you would wonder why we ever built the thing so tall
And you’d do oo oo oo if you only knew
If you only knew oo oo about this view

When the song finished I hit the repeat button and played it again, then again. I played the song and I sang along, and I’m not sure if Archie, Kit and Jack were amused by my fervent singing, or startled by the intensity in my voice when I looked at them in the rearview mirror and asked, nearly shouting in excitement, “Do you get it? I mean, really, do you get it?!”

When we got home again I sat down at the computer and opened the file containing the photos John took that morning. I found one in which Kit looked caring, Jack looked cunning, and Archie looked… connected, content, composed… although still not essentially himself, but close enough. I selected the photo and uploaded it to site I’d found that would print our holiday card and told myself it would be good enough.

It seems to me sometimes that we parents of children who are differently-abled expend so much effort trying to convince the world how similar our kids are to their typical peers that we ultimately do our own children a disservice. Our kids are different, and when we don’t acknowledge that it’s as if we’re saying we’re not ok with the people our children are. I suspect sometimes that in order to protect Archie we need to expose him, his forte and as his foible.

So Archie may not look like he does inside my heart in the photo on the front of our family’s holiday card, but he looks as close to his true self as he was willing to reveal to the camera Monday morning. That’s why I decided yesterday, in the car as I listened to the words of that song, that when I ask the world to accept my child for who he is I also have to agree to show them how he is, even if its not the most flattering image I could offer.

Maybe it’s that our best self isn’t a constant, but rather a state of being that fluctuates from one situation to another. If my child shows you his best self, in a moment from a morning, then will you offer him your best self in return? Because that’s the kindest thing we can all do, I think, to reciprocate in kind. I think of that song and I wonder on what side of the wall we’re living. Maybe I’m pacing across that wall, trying my best not to fall. Or is that Archie up there, calling to me, “If you only knew oo oo, Mama! If you only knew!”

To look at more photos from our adventure aboard the Polar Express, please click here.

Here’s a video I took this morning during the Rangers Class Dance Recital at the Meyer Center. The clip is only a portion of the class’s performance, but it’s long enough to convey all the things that made the event so special. And by watching the clip you’ll be able to see that Archie and his classmates did a really great job performing the routines Vernelle, their dance instructor, taught them.

Vernelle told the parents who attended the performance that she doesn’t mind admitting that she’s eighty-six years old, and that’s she’s mostly deaf and almost blind, too. Vernelle also explained that she’d once owned a dance studio off Augusta Street, and that she taught children to dance there for something like thirty years.

Vernelle’s experience was obvious in the way she deftly managed the children. And she must have taken great care when she taught Archie and his classmates the steps for each routine because I could see Archie anticipate the next step in many instances, and watched as he performed a toe tap or arm wave a few beats before he was intended to do so. For my boy to know something that well, it usually means he’s been well practiced.

After I left Archie’s dance recital, I drove across town to pick Kit and Jack up at their school. When I did both children ran into the hall to tell me that St. Nicholas had visited them that morning and left presents in their shoes. He’d come while they were in their classrooms, the teacher explained, and left candy in the shoes each student had left pushed up against the walls in the hallway.

Kit and Jack told me that St. Nicholas rang his sleigh bells as he left and that’s how they knew he’d been there. Kit and Jack’s voices were lilting as they spoke, and their eyes were filled with wonder. As they spoke their eyes danced, and when they did the twins’ transferred their enthusiasm for the magic of Christmas to me.

At the Ladies’ Holiday Luncheon yesterday I told a reporter from News Channel 7 how fortunate I felt that a place such as Archie’s school existed. I tried to explain what Archie’s time there meant for our family, but when I watched the sound bite play during the evening news yesterday I realized the words I spoke hadn’t done my emotions justice. I wish I could somehow open my chest and tape-record the pride I feel inside on days like this when I watch Archie participate in a special school activity, or how grateful I am that Dr. Meyer went out of his way to attend the performance, too, or how it makes me feel sort of humble when a woman like Vernelle thinks it’s a worthwhile endeavor to volunteer her time to teach my boy to dance.

But the truth is that I’m just as thankful for Kit and Jack’s school, for the way it, too, feels like a perfect fit for them. Those twins are so excited when we pull into the church’s parking lot on school days that they can’t get out of the car fast enough to run the length of the sidewalk into the building, to their classroom.

And then in the car on our drive home this afternoon I listened as Kit and Jack explained St. Nicholas’s surprise visit to me, and then they talked to me a bit about today’s letter “L” show-and-tell, then I looked at the road in silence and marveled while Kit and Jack named colors in Spanish… the rojo leaves on the Maple tree, nearly ready to drop, and the azul sky over the farmer’s field, its barbed-wire fence running along right next to the road. I listened to Kit and Jack jabber, and I thought of Archie’s arabesque, and for a moment or two I felt as if everything in the world was just right, just for now.

Like I did last year, I spent the morning stuffing gift bags, one for each guest who will attend the festivities tomorrow. Into each bag I placed a handful of chocolate-covered pecans, make-up samples, a container of women’s daily vitamin supplements, a generous gift card to a local spa, and a handful of magazines and flyers. I put all of that in each gift bag, but none of those things stirred in me the feelings I felt when I looked at the cover of the Meyer Center brochure every time I picked it up, every time I tucked it into another bag.

The brochure’s cover looks a lot like the school’s web site. On it is the photograph of the same little boy and the same quote you see at the top of the site’s homepage: “If a disability is a hurdle, then this is where they learn to leap.” I don’t mind telling you that I am nearly moved to tears every time I recite that quotation inside my head. I don’t mind writing that I can barely read it aloud without my voice breaking by the sentence’s end. And I should say, too, that although I admit these things here to you now doing so feels a lot like divulging a vulnerability I’ve only just discovered myself.

That quotation about disability may make me feel exposed, but just this morning as I pulled into to the drop-off line along the backside of Archie’s school my sweet boy shouted, “There it is! There’s my school!” And then Archie called it his school again and again, the words falling from his mouth in a singsong-y sort of way, “My school, my school, my school!”

Archie’s been doing this now, calling the school his own, for several mornings in a row. He’s so proud when he says so that Archie’s little five-year-old self seems wise for his years. And that quality Archie displays when he expresses his enthusiasm for his school, for his teachers and his classmates, if it is wisdom after all, makes me wish I could be half as astute as the person my son is becoming.

After we’d left Archie at his school, while Kit, Jack and I were walking into their school, I saw the priest who visited John and I in the hospital that one particularly awful morning when Archie was newly born and very ill. Today the priest walked out of the church’s side door and he smiled at me. I know the priest didn’t remember me, or that day. But I remembered it and him, and I always will.

I guess that happens a lot for me this time of year. In my mind the holidays are so tied up with Archie’s messy beginning that it’s hard to celebrate Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas without remembering where we were and what happened on those days the year Archie was born. I never expected it to be this way, and it isn’t as if I walk through a world of unpleasant memories during the holiday season, but still those memories are here and they bubble up to the top sometimes when I read a quotation on the front of a brochure, or run into a person who walked through my life back then.

I was watching television last night when a character in a favorite show of mine mused aloud that if his self from twenty years ago thought of his self today, and then imagined what he’d be doing twenty years in the future, that his self then would never have guessed what his self would do today. This morning I thought of that television character and what he said as I put those brochures in all those bags.

I thought of Archie, of his diagnosis and his medical history, of his shortcomings and his struggles, of his quirks and all the little things he does that sometimes irritate me. I thought of Archie and all the things pertaining to him about which I could choose to be unhappy. Then I thought of myself twenty years ago and knew that she never would have imagined today, but instead of feeling poorly about that I felt wise like Archie and knew, just knew, it is my great, good fortune that he came along to set me straight.

Jack watches for Barack Obama’s appearance during the news programs we watch. And he searches for Barack Obama’s face on the cover of the newspapers at the grocery store, all of them stacked neatly by the sliding glass doors behind the cash registers. Jack even remembers the building where I took him and Kit to vote that Tuesday morning one month ago, and each time we drive past it he hollers, “Look! That’s where we went to vote! I ah-voted for Barack Obama. Who you ah-voted for, Mommy?”

Last Monday when I took the twins to school Jack said something about Barack Obama on his way into the classroom. One of his teachers heard him speak, too, but neither she nor I could make out what he’d said save the President-elect’s name.

Since the twins attend a Catholic preschool, I wasn’t sure how to respond to Jack’s statement. You see, a local priest, who is not in our preschool’s parish by the way, recently came out publicly against Barack Obama and his supporters, announcing to the media that no one in his congregation who voted for the Democrat should seek to receive Communion during Mass. After all, just a few days earlier one of Archie’s therapists had joked with me about the tenuousness of Jack’s attendance at a Catholic preschool after he, just like that, announced his support of Barack Obama while we were walking together, the therapist with my children and I, down the back hallway of the Meyer Center.

“Oh, you should hear him during the Pledge of Allegiance!” Jack’s teacher said to me that Monday morning when I looked at her, bewildered about how to react to Jack’s pronouncement. Miss Katie’s amusement was obvious when she went on to explain how Jack likes to call out Barack Obama’s name instead of reciting the Pledge, and when Jack does relent and recite the words with his classmates that he often substitutes Barack Obama for flag.

That’s when I explained to Miss Katie, “You know, I think he equates the flag with Barack Obama because…”

“…they always show him with the flag on television,” Miss Katie and I said together, finishing my thought in unison.

When I told my parents about Jack’s own adaptation of the Pledge of Allegiance my father declared, “Well, your grandmother would have been proud!” My grandmother, my father’s mother, was an active member of the Democratic Party, often volunteering to work as a member of the election committees in her town. I know, too, that my grandmother also put her name in for an elected office at one time or another, but I’m not sure what office she sought nor whether or not she won the bid.

While Jack’s affection for Barack Obama would have pleased my grandmother, it certainly would have annoyed my father-in-law. Bill, who had attended college and dentistry school with James Edwards headed up the Governor’s bid for office, and then later served as a member of his administration. There’s a photograph of John as a little boy playing the piano at the Governor’s mansion. Bill and Jim are standing behind John, and they are smiling as they watch John play. I remember John and his father talking about that day more than once, and I wonder sometimes if its that moment Bill remembered when he asked John to help him cast his absentee ballot for the South Carolina Republican Primary from his hospital bed at Roper in Charleston. Bill was as Red as they come, and he was determined not to let a little thing like his impending death get in the way of his support of the Republican Party.

With a family history such as our own, our household can’t help but be interested in the local and national political scene. So we watch the news together, Archie, Kit, Jack, John and I, and sometimes the kids listen to John and I argue over politics and policy, but mostly Archie, Kit and Jack listen as their parents discuss the topics at hand, the two of us noting when we agree, and where we agree to disagree.

Our doorbell rang this morning, after the twins and I had taken Archie to school, after we’d stopped by the grocery store on our way home to pick up more laundry detergent. It was Rebecca, one of our neighbors. I’d told her about Jack and Barack Obama during Bunko a couple weeks ago, and she’d enjoyed what I had to say.

She had a book for Jack. She’d found it at Target, she explained, and then remarked, “I think I know someone who’ll enjoy it very much!”

“Jack, look!” I exclaimed, holding the book’s cover up for him to see. “Who’s that?”

“It’s John McCain!” he hollered, pushing up on his tiptoes.

Rebecca and I both laughed, tossing our heads backwards, then shouted, “No!”

“It’s Barack Obama!” Jack hollered again, this time smiling, and then laughing, too.

Jack and I thanked Rebecca for the book, and she left, going about her day. After Rebecca had I gone I sat with Jack awhile, looking at the book. When we’d finished, before Jack climbed down from my lap and went about his own way, he shut the book and looked at its cover. “Is that Barack Obama?” Jack asked in the way he does when he already knows an answer but he wants me to confirm it before he declares it aloud.

“Yes, that’s him.”

“Is he beautiful?” Jack asked then.

Chills ran up and down my arms before I could open my mouth to answer. “Yes, baby. He is.”

And that right there is a point over which I know both my grandmother and Bill would agree if they were here now to talk about such things with my youngest boy.

My dad, who was once a software engineer like my husband before he became Leader of the Free Computer World (I jest, kind of…), analogizes my ambivalence toward technology to the shoemaker’s daughter going without shoes. And, really, if you set aside my keen prowess for online shopping I have to agree that comparison sums the situation up rather neatly.

So all of this is to say that the comments and login here at Archie’s Room are functioning normally again. Thanks for hanging in there.

Apparently there’s an error with the comments link here, on my blog. When you select the red “Comments” link at the end of an entry, you should be redirected to the login page. If everything were working correctly, you would login there and then you’d be automatically linked back to the comments section on the blog under the post you were reading when you decided to leave a comment.

But there’s a broken link somewhere in that process, and it’s not working, and you’re all receiving that strange forbidden error message instead.

Our home’s resident computer expert, John, and his friend Rakesh are working on the issue, trying to fix it. But until they do, there is another way you can leave a comment if you don’t mind doing so a little differently than you’re used to. Here’s how:

If you look on the right-hand side of your screen, you’ll see a heading titled “SUBSCRIBE.” Under that heading there is a red “Login” link. When you find it, click on that link and then login.

Once you login, hit the back arrow until you’ve arrived at the blog again (it should take you two clicks to do so). When you’re back at the blog click on the red “Comments” link under the entry where you’d like to leave a comment. As soon as you do you’ll see that you’re logged in and able to comment as you’d like. After you’ve finished commenting, be sure to log out again.

Thank you all for reading what I write here. I appreciate all of your comments very much, and it frustrates me that some technical glitch is getting in the way of our communication.

Technical issues aside, I hope you all had a nice holiday. Yesterday Archie, Kit, Jack, John and I went to see the Disney On Ice Mickey & Minnie’s Magical Journey with my parents and my brother’s family. Everyone had a great time, and there were even a few moments when I was so enraptured with the performance that I forgot how much my nose hurts.

When we were watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Thursday morning Kit ran from across the room to leap into my lap. I didn’t see her coming until she was right in front of me, but by then it was too late. That’s when her forehead smacked the bridge of my nose, hard enough to produce a crack that was loud enough to be heard by people standing on the other side of the room.

There wasn’t any blood spilt, and I don’t have two black eyes. But my nose looks swollen, and I still have a headache like you wouldn’t believe. I may have broken my nose, but we still enjoyed a nice day together, all of us, and I have to tell you that I’ve wondered several time since Thursday morning just how many madcap family stories begin with the phrase, “When we were watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade…”

When my family lived in Carlisle, our house on Georgetown Circle was near the Dickinson College auxiliary athletic fields. Having those soccer and baseball fields so close to our house granted my brother and I a lot of opportunity for adventure. Sometimes together with our friends we’d watch the college students as they practiced. Other times we’d wait until those students left and then we’d kick the soccer ball around ourselves, or race around the gravel track that surrounded the athletic fields. We’d go over to those fields at night, too, but what we endeavored to do in the dark wasn’t always as noble as the activities we pursued during the daylight.

I remember going for a walk around that track late one evening with a girlfriend who was spending the night at my house. We were walking laps and talking about the sorts of things that interest teenaged girls when suddenly there was a rustle in the line of scrubby trees and shrubs that separated the college’s property from the cornfield behind my neighborhood. I remember the sound of crunching leaves, and then I recall seeing something move in the shrubs, and then there were two people in dark clothes running out of the darkness and toward my friend and me.

My friend screamed and ran, but I stood my ground, unconsciously moving one foot in front of the other to feign a boxer’s fighting stance, then I turned toward the bodies running in the dark, choosing, just like that, to confront them head on.

It turned out that the people hiding in the bushes were my brother and Brett, who lived next door and was the sort of friend I sometimes called brother. They’d followed my friend and I out of the house, down to the track, and then while they waited in the bushes beneath the trees Patrick and Brett stuffed themselves into two huge, black garbage bags they’d taken from our garage. After their initial charge from the shadows, after they’d scared my friend and I, accomplishing what they’d set out to do, both boys began laughing, giving themselves away before my friend ran too far, or I took a swing at the boy charging past me.

Later that night I told my mother, of course, and she chastised the boys. They both apologized and would have even if my mom hadn’t made them, I’m sure. Patrick and Brett knew they scared us, and they were sorry for it.

We still talk about that night, and when we remember it together my brother, who went on to study psychology, always remarks how struck he is that my instinctual reaction was to stick around and fight. “You just stood up straight and raised your shoulders, like you were trying to make yourself look bigger than you really are. You were going to take me on, and I bet you would have taken me out, too, if I’d given you a chance.”

I’m telling you all this because the memory of that night has followed me around, down through the years. Even now I sometimes think of it when I’m faced with a difficult situation and I need to decide what to do. That night my brother conducted his first psychological experiment and through it determined his sister’s stress response. To me, how I reacted on that track feels like the kind of moment that defines a person. For me, that night confirmed who I intrinsically am. I am fighter; I know that. I look a challenge in the eye and I move forward, through it all, as best I can.

This is what I was thinking about last night, as I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep again. These days rest doesn’t elude me completely, but it doesn’t envelop me as entirely as it did before I stopped opening our statements from Morgan Stanley client services. We are poorer today than we were a month ago, or a month before that. I admit that my family lives a comfortable life, but still the uncertainty of the financial markets affects us, too, and I worry about what will happen in another month, and in a month after that.

So I toss and turn at night, and I worry about money, and expenses, and job security, and something else that’s been bothering me but I’ve been unable to name aloud. It isn’t that I don’t want to give the bother a name; rather I’m unable to name it because I don’t know it. It’s just something that’s been bothering me, something I wish I could figure out because maybe then I could move in a direction that would make the bother go away. I could fight it, face up to it, and then maybe I’d sleep through the night again.

In the mornings that follow these wakeful nights I feed my kids breakfast, and then take them to school. I drink coffee, and I kiss my husband goodbye in the garage after we’ve buckled our three children into their car seats. I go through the motions and I do the best I can and I’m sure no one notices this thing that bothers me, this thing I can’t identify. There are times when I don’t notice it myself, when we five are humming along and there is no time for discontent.

Last week in the car, on the way to school, I heard myself sigh aloud and felt that sigh fill the car with angst. I hear myself sigh on the phone, too, as I talk to my friends, and the sound of it reminds me of when I was small and I’d lie on the floor under the kitchen chair where my mother sat and talked on the phone to her own friends. She’d twirl the long, yellow cord around her finger, and she’d smoke her cigarettes, inhaling when it was her friend’s turn to talk. And then she’d sigh, and I know enough now about girlfriends and talking on the phone to be sure that whomever my mother was talking to sighed as well into her own phone’s receiver somewhere across town.

When I was small I thought my mother’s sigh meant she was tired. It sounded like a yawn, and in a way it felt like one, too. But now I think I know that the noise wasn’t so much a sign of my mother’s fatigue, but rather was an indication of so much more.

Last night as I lay awake tucked inside our dark and quiet house, I reminded myself again that sometimes the best way to fight back what bothers me is to remain resolute in my commitment to maintaining a positive outlook. Life happens and mostly it’s hard. Five years ago I learned that it’s up to me to determine if the hard stuff is deserving of my sorrow, or if it’s something to be celebrated. I learned to say that things are what they are, that life is what it is, and I found a way to be ok with it that, to even be upbeat about it, and I was glad to have made that perspective my own.

In the car this morning, on the way to school, I was listening to the hosts of a radio talk show discussing Ernest Hemingway’s example of flash fiction. Hemingway held that an intriguing and intricate story could be told in just six words. To prove his point he wrote, “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

The talk show hosts asked listeners to call in and share on-air the six words that best described their own lives. Some callers choose six words that described happy lives, but there were more callers who picked six words that described unhappy lives. And then the hosts answered a call from a woman who talked about her struggles with an abusive husband, about her battle with cancer, about her experiences of being homeless, and about how all those things pushed her to become the woman she is today. Surprisingly enough, the six words that woman used to describe her life were, “I wouldn’t change anything at all.”

I’ll think about that woman and her six words tonight before I fall asleep. I’ll remind myself that sometimes fighting is nothing more than a matter of perspective. I’ll write six word sentences inside my head about the things I care for the most, and I’ll make sure the words I choose are mostly bright and shiny ones because that’s what life intends them to be, after all. And maybe then I won’t wake up and toss and turn, bothered by all the things swirling around inside my head, whatever those things are anyway.

As you can see, the painting is lovely. Manjiree blogs, too, and she wrote about the painting here. I love that she painted her daughter’s teddy bear, and I’m particularly enamored with Manjiree’s use of the apple as a representation of good health. I hung the painting in Archie’s bedroom, in just the right spot, and it makes me feel good to know that someone I’ve never met thinks enough of my son to send him a piece of someone she loves, alongside her wish for Archie’s wellbeing.

So thank you, Manjiree! It truly means a lot to me to know that you’re out there, interested in our life and Archie’s future. People like you remind me that the world will open wide for my son if I have the courage to open myself to it first.

It was so cold that my feet felt like stiff blocks of ice stuffed inside my running shoes, but…

Yesterday morning I competed in the South Carolina Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Dan Davis Memorial Turkey Trot 5K at Furman University. Marcy’s husband, Rourk, encouraged me to register for the run last fall, so I did. Just like that. Suffice it to say that it doesn’t take much to convince me to sign on for an activity if I’m interested in the cause, or if I have an affinity for the person whose doing the asking.

Did you know that I’ve only run three 5K races in my entire life? I participated in the Greenville Candlelight Charity Run this past June, and I once ran a 5K at Furman with my brother the October before Archie was born. While yesterday’s run followed a course that differed slightly from the 5K I ran over six years ago, it was similar enough for me to declare it the same race route I covered when I was twenty-seven years old.

Back then it took me approximately thirty-three minutes to finish the course’s 3.1 miles. I remember my brother, the marathoner, laughing at me in that good-natured way siblings often do while wondering aloud, “You couldn’t have pushed a little harder to finish inside a half-hour?”

I’m only mentioning this so it means something when I tell you that yesterday I finished the race in 23:27, placing fourth in my age group, and 26th in overall women’s. To be honest, I was amazed by my success and was thrilled to clock a new PR, one that bests my old PR by four minutes.

I’m not writing all of this so you’ll think I’m some sort of great runner. And I’m not putting all of this information down here to make anyone who may be reading this feel anything negative about her own self, or her personal accomplishments. I’m writing about this because I still can’t believe I’ve actually arrived at this place I once hoped I would, and because there are still so many derivations of this dream I’ve yet to accomplish. It’s also a nice thing to write, I think, because this story serves as another notch in the belt of the old adage that holds all you need to do sometimes is give it a shot if there’s something you want bad enough. So I want to document the run here for all those reasons and also because, as Rachel says, if I don’t blog it, you’ll never know it.

This fall I ran this 5K and that half-marathon. I’m registered for the Myrtle Beach half-marathon on Valentine’s Day, and I’m going to run the Cooper River Bridge Run again this year, just like ever other runner and also-ran in South Carolina. I ran that race last year in 56:45, but I can’t wait to find out how quickly I can get over that bridge this year. Something tells me I’ll do better than I think I will if I can find it in myself to give it my best shot.

So we go to the store, and Kit, Jack and I walk up and down the aisles. I find what I want to buy, and then my children and I spend some time looking at the decorated Christmas trees, and the glittery ornaments piled in bins throughout the store, and the gingerbread house kits stacked in the middle of the floor between racks packed tight with baking materials.

At one point Jack’s convinced he hears Santa’s voice, so he says so aloud and then his observation makes Kit squeal, and then her squeal incites a riot of sorts among the children who are there, too, out shopping with their mothers.

We women look up and around, and when we catch each other’s eyes we agree silently to use Jack’s excited declaration to our own advantage. “You better watch out. You better not shout,” I warn my own children in a singsong sort of way before I skip a few lines of the song to add, “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake…”

Soon we are standing in the checkout line, and soon I’m handing money to the cashier to pay for the few items I’ve tossed into my cart. The cashier thanks us so I thank her, too.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Kit says loudly and with great gusto, determined to be heard and thanked as well. The cashier knows so and obliges. I smile gratefully, then I place my hand on Jack’s head to steer him toward the glass doors at the front of the store.

As I do so I instruct Jack, “Say ‘see you later.’”

“See you later, toots!” Jack speaks with enthusiasm.

I looked at the cashier then. I was wide-eyed with shock, but the cashier seemed tickled by Jack’s statement. She was chuckling so I followed her lead and did so, too.

I would have chastised Jack if I’d thought he used the word derogatorily, but I know he’d only meant it as a term of endearment. I don’t say toots myself, and neither does anyone else I know who regularly cares for my children, so I have no idea where Jack’s heard it before, but still there the word was, tacked onto the end of a sentence that slid out of my three-year-old boy’s mouth.

So on one hand I have Jack who may be channeling some imagined misogynistic role model, but one the other hand I have his older brother who is learning to employ Socratic irony in casual conversation to prove some point Archie hasn’t shared with me just yet.

Just yesterday, for instance, Archie’s home speech therapist wanted to know from where wood comes. She wanted Archie to answer that wood comes from trees, but instead he told her that wood comes from Lowe’s.

Amy was amused by Archie’s answer, and decided to dig a little further to find out what other truths he had to tell. So Amy asked, “What happens when you bring the wood home from Lowe’s?”

“Daddy paints it,” Archie replied.

And then just last week Amy asked Archie, “Where do eggs come from?”

“The grocery store,” he answered, and even though Amy was hoping instead to hear the word chickens she couldn’t really tell Archie he was wrong after all.

I shared all these stories with my mom, of course, and when I was finished talking and she was done listening she wanted to know, “What kind of kids are you raising over there?”

I paused a moment to think and almost answered I have no idea until I opened my mouth again and said instead, “The same kind you raised in your house.”

So if you’ve written me and are wondering why I haven’t responded, this is why. Hopefully I’ll be able to resolve my e-mail issues sometime later today, but until then… Call me, ok?

So now I’m nearly 34 years old and I still have this thing about thank you notes. I still don’t especially enjoy writing them, but I always feel compelled to share my appreciation and sincere sentiment with someone when they’ve done something nice for me, or for my children.

This is the last week Archie will go to Furman with his classmates for the swimming program conducted by students who are majoring in special education. Last week Archie’s teacher asked we parents to bring snack items to school she could use to fill eighteen exam-time care packages for the students who participated in the program. They’d be gifts of appreciation from our children, she explained.

So I took the kids to the grocery store and together Archie, Kit, Jack and I picked out eighteen miniature cans of Pringles, eighteen packages of Ramen noodles, eighteen Little Debbie Nutty Buddy bars, and eighteen Nature Valley granola bars. When we got home from the store I put all the snacks together in a big shopping bag and then tossed in our remaining Halloween candy, too (we had enough Halloween candy leftover to create a week-long sugar high at a small elementary school). But even after doing all that I knew there was still one thing left for me to do.

On Thursday night I sat down at the computer and composed a rough draft of a thank you note for Tommy, Archie’s swimming buddy and someone my son has come to regard as a valued friend. The night before that John and I had taken the kids on a special trip to the store to print a couple photos of Archie to tuck inside the note card.

As parents of a child who is differently-abled, John and I have been reminded again and again how important it is for us to learn to advocate for our son. As parents of three children, we’ve learned how important it is for us to learn to advocate for all of our children, for the one with Down syndrome and the two without it, as well. So we do so a hundred times a day in a hundred different ways, most of which John and I do unconsciously and effortlessly, as a matter of course.

And sometimes John and I advocate for our children using the skills and manners we were taught when we were small, like when we take the time to write a sincere note of appreciation with words straight from the heart:

“Dear Tommy,

“I wanted to take a moment to thank you for the positive impact you’ve made on my sweet boy, Archie. I can’t tell you how eagerly Archie anticipates Wednesday mornings. As soon as his father or I enter Archie’s room to untangle him from his bedcovers, he sits up and hollers, ‘Tommy! I see my Tommy and go swimming!’

“He cheers again later, too, when his father dresses him in his swim diaper and swimsuit, and then chatters about the little yellow Meyer Center bus, and the pool, and you all the way to school.

“It means so much to me that you spend time each week getting to know Archie, and doing all that you do to help Archie become his best self. I hope you know that everything you’ve done to benefit Archie also benefits our family in ways you may never be able to imagine until you also become a parent, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

“Thank you again for your time, and your kindness, and your compassion. Please know that Archie will always remain one of your biggest fans, and that I’m quite sure he’ll still be talking about your time together in the water for many Wednesday mornings to come.

“Our entire family wishes you many future successes, and we hope you’ll continue affecting young lives as you’ve influenced Archie’s.

“Sincerely,
Anne Moore”

First Jack turned his head in the direction of Kit’s pointing finger, and then he gasped. “Home?” he questioned loudly and with much emphasis, and then added, “I love my home!”

We’d left the house a half hour earlier, Archie, Kit, Jack and I, and turned left out of our neighborhood toward Archie’s school on one side of town. After I dropped Archie off at his school’s back door, into the arms of a friendly teacher’s aide whom Archie greeted by name as if he’d known her his whole life, I made a “u” turn onto the road I’d just exited and then turned right out of the parking lot and toward Kit and Jack’s school.

When the twins spotted the road home I was staring at the stretch of road in front of me, navigating the traffic and trying to determine the best and fastest way to get from where we were to where we were supposed to be. I was thinking, too, of what I needed to accomplish today, and what I’d left undone yesterday. I was thinking of gas tanks and grocery stores, workouts and flu shots, dirty floors and the pile of dirty laundry I’d left on the floor, near the partially-opened pantry door. I was thinking of all the things I needed to do, but Kit and Jack were thinking of all the things we’d already done.

They said home, not house, so I think that means that girl and boy of mine were thinking of the night before, after dinner, when I remained in the kitchen cleaning and John sat at the old, stinky piano in the family room playing Christmas carols. Archie was seated on the bench beside John, a little boy tucked into the curve of his father’s elbow through which he’d hooked his own arm. Archie’s hand was resting on John’s forearm, and Archie’s fingers were splayed wide across his father’s taut tendons that bounced as John’s fingers moved across the piano’s keys.

Before he began playing John had carried in two chairs from the dining room and placed them on either side of the piano’s bench, one for Kit and one for Jack. They all sat together there in front of the instrument, Kit next to Archie next to John next to Jack, all of them singing the words to the tune reverberating through the old, stinky piano. They sang the words with their father and those children of mine were happy, alive in the moment, oblivious to the dishes I was washing, or the sticky rice I had to pick up off the floor, or the laundry that I still needed to put away in the drawers in the dressers in their rooms.

They said home, not house when the twins spotted that road this morning, so I think that means Kit and Jack were thinking of our family’s life in a larger sense, in terms of what matters most. And in that way those three-year-olds were wiser this morning than their mother who couldn’t see the forest for the trees until it was pointed out to her, in the sort of term that matters most.

I hope today, this Sunday in particular, marks the end of the week, the final day in a string of days filled with things to do, appointments to keep, chores to finish and obligations to uphold. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining about our full days. I’ve relished them, really. But still there’s been so much to do.

Last week I was Wednesday’s mystery reader for Kit and Jack’s class, and I was the Play dough helper, too. On Friday I spent the morning sitting at a desk located in the lobby of the twins’ preschool, greeting visitors and giving them badges to wear that grant them access to various parts of the building. Parents are asked to volunteer at the school as a greeter as often as they’re able, and on Friday I made an effort to uphold that obligation.

I also had to visit my doctor last week for my annual exam, and I also had to take Archie to see one of the Infectious Disease pediatric specialists on staff at the Children’s Hospital. We’d met with them before, Archie and I, once at MUSC when they diagnosed Archie with chicken pox a few days after he’d endured open-heart surgery, and then again here in Greenville when Archie had leukemia and he’d contracted some sort of infection in his central line. This most recent visit was for far less dramatic reasons, but it was still a visit with a specialist that introduced an entirely new series of questions that, for now, remain unanswered.

Archie’s pediatrician suggested we visit this new doctor to see if he could discern why Archie has a chronic sinus infection that is often accompanied by drainage from one, or both of his ear tubes. I agreed, especially since the last of Archie’s combination sinus-and-ear infections lasted for a few months and took several rounds of various antibiotics to finally resolve.

We went to see the specialist and answered a series of questions a la Dr. House, then we sat together, this doctor in one chair and me a few feet away in another chair holding Archie on my lap. So we sat with the doctor while he stared at Archie for several minutes filled only by an uneasy, enduring silence, and Archie’s chatty interjections about what he expected the doctor to do with his stethoscope, or the blood pressure machine mounted on the wall. And then the doctor would ask another question pertaining to Archie’s medical history, and that question would be followed by more uneasy, enduring silence, and more of Archie’s chatty interjections about blood draws, and doctors taking pictures of his heart.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining about the doctor. He was very kind to Archie, even directing some of his questions to Archie, not to me. And he was tolerant of Archie’s anxiety when it was time to put the EMLA cream on Archie’s skin, right on that place where your elbow bends and your arm folds over on its self and the two halves meet in the middle. But still it was another appointment with another specialist whose here to write another stanza in the riddle that is my biggest boy’s life.

After an hour’s worth of question-asking, and staring, and long, silent minutes, Archie and I were sent away from the doctor’s office with a page full of orders for blood tests to measure neutrophil counts, and t-cells, and antibodies. And there was even an order for an assistant in a lab somewhere to take a good, long look at Archie’s twenty-second chromosome, to see if it’s all there.

“Are you talking about DiGeorge syndrome?” I asked the doctor. “Because if you are Archie was tested for that once when he was in the NICU.”

“I saw that in his records, but they only ran a FISH then,” the doctor explained. “And I need to see a complete karyotype.”

When I told my mother later about the doctor’s order for a new karyotype she insisted, “I don’t think Archie has another syndrome,” but I don’t share her confidence. And when I write the word confidence I don’t mean it to imply resolve in the Pollyanna-sense, rather I mean that’s what my mom believes, and that she certainly has every right to believe such a thing. But me, well, I’ve learned how to announce confidently and without emotion that life’s a Tabula rasa and we never know what the next day holds until its finished.

But this next week… I know for sure this next week will bring a PTA meeting, and a new fundraising project benefiting Archie’s school, and more appointments, and maybe another play date with a fun, new friend, and lots of promises to keep, and many miles to go before I sleep.

While we were watching the news, after we’d finished cheering and clapping, Kit pointed at the television, at a shot of voters standing in line, and asked, “Mommy, are we going there?”

“Not there,” I answered, “But somewhere a lot like it.”

“To vote for the president?” Kit’s pronunciation of the word president wasn’t accurate, but her articulation was near enough for me to understand her intent.

“Yes, Kit. You’re gonna help me vote for the president.” So after the twins and I took Archie to school, we drove to my assigned polling place so I could cast my vote.

The line was divided in half. Voters with last names beginning with the letters A through K lined one side of the sidewalk, and voters with last names beginning with the letters L through Z lined the other side of the sidewalk. While the line representing the beginning of the alphabet was long, the line representing the end of the alphabet was only a few voters deep, so Kit, Jack and I didn’t have to wait long at all.

Before I knew it I was standing in the voting booth, casting my vote. Kit was standing beside me, straight and tall, and Jack was walking in circles around my legs. He wanted to know where Barack Obama was, where John McCain had gone. “He thought the candidates would be here,” I explained to one of the volunteers as I grabbed for the collar of Jack’s shirt.

I thought I’d have more to say about my trip to the polling place than this, but I don’t. And maybe that’s the most amazing thing of all? That such a huge privilege is such simple process. That my two youngest children could watch me vote, and that they sort of understood the importance of my actions. That when I picked my oldest son up at school the first thing he asked me was, “We go vote now?”

All of that seems extraordinary to me. Go, America.

Crayola crayons, 2008.  Thank you, Marcy, for sewing the perfect costumes for my kids.   

Crayola crayons, 1978.  Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the inspiration.  

If you’ve looked closely at the photographs I’ve posted of Archie, you’ve probably seen the accessory he wears, attached to his shirt or pants, that looks a lot like a length of twisted phone cord. Archie’s therapists refer to that piece of plastic as chewlery, an oral motor tool that deters Archie from chewing on his clothes or hands while still allowing him to work through his chewing impulses.

Those therapists call it chewlery, but here in our house we just call it Archie’s chewy.

Archie’s speech therapist at school has purchased many chewies for our boy. John and I have also bought several ourselves, and at the recommendation of Archie’s school speech therapist we recently purchased several high-grade chewies from an online therapy tools store and have begun swapping them out with the key chain chewies we used to pick up at the grocery store. The new chewies last a lot longer than the ones we used to buy, so John and I don’t mind making this switch. I’m sure that our school speech therapist is happy for it, too, because she used to pay for the chewies she gave Archie out of her own pocketbook.

So every morning John or I clip chewy to the neckline of Archie’s crewnecks, to a buttonhole on his dress shirts, or to a belt loop on his pants. I admit that we sometimes forgot to accessorize Archie with chewy, and that sometimes Archie discards chewy in the car on the way to school and I don’t notice it lying on the floor, under the seat, or tucked into the corner of Archie’s car seat until I’m halfway across town, too far from the school to turn back then.

I’m not sure what happened today, but I do know that when I picked Archie up from school this afternoon, while I was walking with him down the hall and out the building, I noticed that someone attached chewy to Archie’s shirt with a paperclip.

I’m not even going to mention how unsafe it is to put a paperclip on an item we’ve taught Archie to put in his mouth because that seems obvious to me. But I will tell you that I’m angry someone poked a hole through my son’s brand-new shirt that he wore for the first time ever today when they could have, I dunno, attached the paperclip to the fabric loop sewn into the back of Archie’s shirt, or even used a safety pin to fix chewy to Archie’s shirt, or even, better yet, just looked in Archie’s backpack to find the black, plastic clip that is usually attached to chewy that was right there, in the bottom of his bag, underneath Archie’s change of clothing and extra diapers.

So I’m angry with all of that, of course, but I’m also angry with this.

Because Archie and Jack wear the same size, there are no hand-me-down clothes in our home, and there have been no hand-me-down clothes for a few seasons now. That’s ok because it’s how things are in our home, and John and I move through the year knowing that we’ll have to buy clothing for three kids every spring and fall. But while I love to shop to fill my children’s wardrobe, I don’t like to fight with their father when he says I spend too much money on their clothing. I’m not joking when I write that the one constant thing that causes discord between John and me is how much money I spend on our kids’ clothes.

Please know that I don’t throw caution to the wind while I shop, and I do shop sales as often as I can, and each year I find myself shopping increasingly less expensive stores, and that each time I do buy one of my children a new shirt, or pants, or a pair of socks that my stomach churns and flips because I worry about the cost of the clothing, and how much wear the child will be able to get out of it, and all of those things… but even still, John and I go round, after round about this one thing over, and over again.

So now I’m sitting here with a brand-new shirt with an unfixable hole in the collar and I’m angry.

I won’t lie to you. I can’t sing. I can’t sing at all, but I like to sing, even if I am always singing off-key. So that means Archie, Kit and Jack are accustomed to hearing me burst into song for nearly no reason at all. And I’m proud to report that they’ve learned the behavior themselves. Each of them will spontaneously begin to sing a favorite song, or even make up one of their own several times each day.

John’s learned not to be embarrassed by my lyrical outbursts, and our children are still too young to know how horribly un-cool it is for their mother to sing in public. Because we’re all used to it, the five of us, I often forget that’s just not normal for a mom to sing aloud as she delivers her children to school in the morning. But I was reminded of the unusualness of my behavior yesterday by an older man, probably a grandfather, who was in the parking lot with Kit, Jack and I, dropping off his own charge.

That man looked at me from head to toe, and then he turned away. I saw him, but I didn’t stop singing. Then he looked again, and this time I was close enough to see how his lips were pulled tight against his teeth. I smiled at the man, but he looked away instead of smiling back.

After I’d dropped Kit and Jack off in their classroom, as I was driving down the road away from the church, I thought about that man, and how he didn’t return my smile like most strangers do when I’m singing and they look at me and I catch their eye. And then later, when I was working out with Judy and running a Lava Java lap around the parking lot, I saw a lady sitting in a car beside a drive-thru window stare at me questioningly. I’d tucked a few inches of my shirt over then pressed it up into the band underneath my bra to protect the skin there that was rubbed raw on Saturday during the race.

“Let me explain,” I wanted to call out to the lady sitting in the car, but I didn’t because we people usually don’t explain away what we do, we just do what we have to, what we want to, and that’s the end of it.

If the lady sitting in the car heard the back story behind my shirt and bra, if the man in front of the school knew that I always think of the Jefferson’s theme song when it’s cold and I’m out in it because the music makes me think of a snowy Sunday morning in college when I was a junior, awake and out early, and I paused along a path in the quad because I heard someone whistle “Movin’ On Up” as he was climbing the hill behind the dorms and for some reason all of that right then, the quad and the snow and the song, seemed just perfect, so ever since that day in college cold mornings always make me think of George and Weezie.

There’s the abrasions across my rib cage, and the snow, and then there’s last Saturday afternoon when I took Kit with me to the grocery store to pick up frozen pizzas for dinner. While we were there we also picked up Archie’s birthday cake, one the twins and I ordered last week. We’d asked the bakery to make a pool cake, a theme my mom suggested after she and I watched Archie swim last week. So on Saturday as Kit and I were picking up the cake I found myself fighting back tears. I was tired, I know, and emotional, too, so I may not have felt like crying under more typical circumstances. But still I stood there in the bakery breaking down in tears to the bafflement of the boy behind the counter.

“Oh, Mommy! What’s wrong?” Kit wanted to know.

As we moved away from the counter I told Kit that nothing was wrong, that everything was right. “Because tomorrow is Archie’s birthday,” I tried to explain. “Because I am very, very happy to be here with you right now, picking up his cake.”

So I was thinking of my public song outbursts, and the lady sitting in her car in the drive-thru line, and the way I cried in the bakery the day before Archie’s fifth birthday. I was thinking of all those things yesterday, and I was thinking of my husband, too, and how we’ve now been married seven years.

Eight years ago John asked my parents for permission to propose to me. They granted it obviously, but not before my father, who knows me very well, asked John, “Son, are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

John said he did, and he did in the ways implied by my father’s question. But when I looked at this memory yesterday among my thoughts about the singing, and the chaffing, and the crying… When I looked at it then and thought of my father’s conversation with John eight years ago as a prelude rather than a back story, well… Well.

Did he know what he was getting himself into? How could he have ever known?

But I have a lot to say. I’ve been thinking of one post in particular I could write all day, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. We’re not going to do anything special, John and I. We ate leftover turkey and squash for dinner, and watched Dora with the kids before bath time. We’ll probably watch Fox News or CNN for a while and rip on the reporters and newscasters because, you know, that’s what John and I do for fun.

I know this sounds amazingly unromantic, and I agree that it may be. But it’s our life, the one we’ve made together, and when you think about that, when you really think about it, real is as romantic as you can ever hope for. You know?

Here is Dawn and me after the race. You can view more of the photos John took here. He also took some great video footage that I wish I knew how to post. Most of the footage is of Archie, Kit and Jack waiting for me at the top of the hill at mile ten. Nana and Mic helped them make “Go, Mom!” signs, which were both sweet and encouraging at the same time.

Jennifer was also at the race with her sisters, Shari and Andrea. She took several photos, all of which you can view here.

So I ran my first half-marathon under two hours, and I’m happy with that. Along the way a lot of runners complimented me on my shirt, and I was happy about that, too. Who wouldn’t be on both accounts?

I’ll post photos later tonight, like after I shower and drink a few cups of warm coffee. It was cold and wet out there today. And that was something considering it was 80 degrees here just last week.

There’s a memory stuck in my head that I’ve looked at again, and again, and then again today. I’ve seen it before, this memory, but today it looks like such an integral part of the Big Picture that I’m having a hard time letting go of it.

In my head I see Archie as an infant lying in a warmer in the NICU. He’s struggling, and I can see his diaphragm rising and falling fast, like a tiny bird’s wings when it hovers near a feeder. I remember then that I turned toward Archie’s nurse and said, “It’s like he’s running a race.”

And then I remember her turning toward me, to the place where I stood beside Archie’s bed, and she said, “He is.”

When Archie was an infant, when we went to the hospital to see him everyday, when hope was built up and then wiped clean away every hour, every single hour, I remember thinking, If I can do this, if I can handle all of this, then I can do anything. When Archie was an infant, when I watched him run his race and make his case for living every hour, every single hour, I remember thinking, If he can do this, then I owe him my best effort every day of my life.

I know that this story must sound like it belongs to Archie, but it doesn’t. It’s mine. It belongs to me because when Archie finally came home, he and I had to figure out how to live this new life of ours together. I needed to find a way to give Archie my best effort, whatever it may be, and since he was the baby and I was his mother it was my responsibility to turn it all right side up.

It’s true that nothing else, not even the leukemia days, would feel as intensely troubling as those heart days did, but still. Learning how to be a mother was hard, and learning how to mother a child with Down syndrome and health issues, a child who had doctor appointments, and clinic appointments, and therapy appointments, and his own personal nurse who visited our house on a weekly basis, and oxygen, and medication, and… well, all of that, was really hard. My normal was so not normal, and I was trying to figure out how to make it work.

I left my job. I watched a lot of television. I lost friends. I made new ones. I became better and worse at so many things all at exactly the same time. I was a shell of the person I once was, but yet I was better than I’d ever been before. There were days when it felt as if I were down on my knees in the middle of the room and everything that ever was and everything that ever would be was scattered in pieces around me and it was my job to figure out how to pick those pieces up, how to fit them together, how to make it all work for us, for me, for the baby asleep in the Pack ’n Play in the corner of the room, near the kitchen table.

There were other days when I was sure I could figure out how to put the puzzle together, how to make it all work so I could see my own face again among the pieces, but even then I felt helpless, too. Helpless, but empowered still, in a confusing, real-life juxtaposition of emotion-based realities. I don’t mind telling you that some days were harder than others, and that some days I cried more than I should have about things I couldn’t control. It took a while for me to admit that being Archie’s mother was harder than I’d imagined it would be.

And then things got easier. Not overnight, not just like that, but they just did. And I’m pretty sure now it wasn’t that things themselves got easier, but that my outlook grew clearer. I figured out how to put some of the pieces together, at least the ones around the edges and down through the corners. And that’s when it occurred to me that this reality of mine was turning out to be much more rewarding than I’d dared to hope.

Then I got pregnant with the twins, and then Archie got sick. And then the babies were born, and then we moved. Then we built this house and the bed we’d made became the one we’d lay in. Then here, alone, I learned how to manage three kids all day, every day, no matter what. Then we all grew a little more, the kids, John and I, all in our own ways.

Then I realized I’d lost myself a little for a while, and I struggled to figure out who I was now, who I may someday become. I tried this, then I tried that. Then I ended up in the urgent treatment center one afternoon because I was having an anxiety attack that I thought was a stroke. The doctor gave me a syringe’s worth of clear liquid that burned when he pushed it into my muscle, but still I couldn’t rest. “You’re the type of person who just can’t let go,” he surmised.

So I went home and tried to rest, and I tried to learn to let go. I fell asleep then I woke up the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and I was reaching out in this direction, and then I tried looking in another one. And then that’s when I remembered how it felt once to run down the road fast, and then faster, and then that’s when I decided to do it again.

A few weeks ago I ordered a top to wear tomorrow morning from my favorite web site for women’s athletic gear. The shirt is called a tattoo top, and it’s decorated with all sorts of intricate designs inspired by great tattoo artists. When I bought the shirt I hadn’t yet seen the back, so you can imagine how surprised I was when it arrived in the mail, and I put it on to try the fit, then turned my back toward the bathroom mirror and saw for the first time a phoenix, its wings open wide, stretched across the back of the top.

But if you want to know the longer version, it goes like this.

When I was running two or three weeks ago, early in the morning before day ever dawned, the road I was on ended and intersected with another one, the road I needed to take to get home again. Even though it was still dark, I could see that in the middle of the intersection were two boys. They were tall and well built, and they were young, too, most likely high school students, I deduced. When I was running and approached those two guys in the middle of the intersection I said to myself inside my head, Please, please, please don’t let them turn down this road, too.

I was running well that morning. I’d passed the pain, and I was controlling my breathing without effort. I’d hit my stride a couple miles back and I hadn’t lost it yet. I was in control, and it felt a lot like I was flying. Do you know what it is to feel like you’re flying? It’s one of the most amazing sensations in the world.

So I was feeling amazing when I met up with those guys, when they beat me to the turn and took the road just a few paces ahead of me. That frustrated me because I don’t like to run behind anybody, and I don’t like to run with anybody either when I’ve got that buzzy, flying sensation, but I assumed it would be a temporary inconvenience because certainly those tall and well-built boys would leave me behind soon enough.

But they didn’t, and they couldn’t either even though I felt them trying to. I kept pace with them; I was right on their heels. I was barely winded. It felt like I was still flying, and I felt like the boys were holding me back.

Now, the Laws of Physics hold that those two tall, well-built boys should have blown me off the road. And I knew that, of course, which is why I was hesitant to make a move to pass them until we’d wound around halfway toward home. But when those boys and I took the final turn onto the last little bit of road headed home I summoned the audacity to take it tighter than they did, to step in front of them. I passed those boys on our way up the hill and then I lost them, somewhere back there behind me, before I ever stepped on the road leading into my neighborhood.

I saw the boys again last week. They were headed up the road when I was running home. We waved at each other, the boys and I, raising our arms way up high above our heads. It felt like the sort of greeting exchanged between friends, the ones who know your mind without explanation.

We are runners, our raised arms confirmed. And we are keeping the pace.

It makes a lot of sense, really. If our lives are circular, and I believe they are, then love always exists and love never ends. It surrounds us, binding us together, as we travel in concentric circles that expand and contract, then overlap through the years here, there, and then again. The circles ensure that nothing ever really ends. Because of them there is always more. There is always more.

My mom and I went to watch Archie swim today. He goes to Furman every Wednesday morning with his classmates for a swimming program conducted by students who are majoring in special education, and Archie completely enjoys his time there, in the water.

Back when the class began, Archie was paired with a student named Tommy. My mom and I saw today that Archie talks, talks, talks to Tommy throughout the entire class, and that they both enjoy each other’s company. This shouldn’t surprise me because every Wednesday morning Archie leaps from his bed, yelling Tommy’s name and cheering hooray and yippity-do because Wednesdays are the days Archie gets to ride the bus to Furman then swim for a while with his friend. “My Tommy,” Archie calls him, and after watching them together this morning I understand why that name feels right to my biggest boy.

I didn’t think about the circles, or about love existing without a beginning or an end either, until the end of Archie’s swim class. The program’s protocol dictates that the Furman students help their partner out of the pool, wrap them in towels brought from home, then walk their partners into the locker room where the students help the children out of their wet bathing suits and into their dry school clothes. I watched Tommy pull Archie from the water, and then dry him off with the green frog towel I’d packed in Archie’s bag. Tommy hooked the head of the towel over Archie’s wet hair, just like I would have, and held his hand as they walked together to the locker room.

When they passed by my mom and me we waved hello and how-do-you-do. I told Tommy how much Archie looks forward to their time together, and the smile Tommy offered me in return was so genuine that I know for sure he’ll be a great teacher someday. I watched Archie walk away then, his back turned toward me. He was still holding Tommy’s hand and the green frog towel was still hooked over Archie’s head, hanging down around his back like a bride’s veil.

“Maybe it’s just because his birthday is this weekend, but I never knew then when he was born that this is how it would be now,” my mom confided to me as we walked together to the parking lot.

I worried then, too, what our lives would hold before Archie was born, and then again when he was sick. But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that there are times now when I think I always knew that we’d get here, that we’d arrived at a new normal where our hearts would be filled with acceptance, and pride, and joy. I thought about all of this as I was driving home, and then again when I got home and sat down at my computer and I read this post, and that’s when the fourth, fifth and sixth paragraphs leapt off the screen and tied one part of my brain to another, bridging two thoughts, and I knew then how applicable these three paragraphs are to my own life.

Yes, I thought as I read that portion of the post. Of course. Love isn’t linear, time is circular, and so is progress.

And that’s when I remembered a book I read when I was younger, too young still to understand what the author was really saying. There are a few pages in the beginning of the book where Robert Olmstead, the author, describes one of the nightly visits God makes to a baby’s room.

“God comes to me at night,” the baby narrates. “He tells me of my fate and then makes me forget. That’s why sometimes I cry out in the night. He says he does it for all sentient beings. Or did he say penitent? Screw that. He does it for geese, bears, rabbits, chipmunks, bobwhites, walleyes and possum. He does it for all his critters here and abroad. It’s a service he provides so the moment the need comes to get off the dime, you’ll know what to do. You won’t have to think about it.”

“And when the big moment comes,” the baby continues, “you’ll remember what he told you and it won’t be such a kick in the teeth.”

God and the baby talk and play some more until, “It’s time you started forgetting, he says. It will happen with a floof, like the sound a skirt makes when it’s thrown up over a woman’s hips, but before that, let me ask you – have you ever eaten fried bread? Do you know the joke to the punch line, ‘Wrecked ’em, hell, it killed him’? Have you tried the one where you take two pot lids and bang them together or bang one of them on the linoleum? Oh, what a glorious sound, he says, singing the words into my head as if he alone were all the choirs that ever lived or ever would. And with that we go about the business of putting off my memory for as long as we need.”

If love isn’t linear, if life is circular, if progress is open to definition, then everything we know and everything we’ll ever know is a matter of perspective. It is all in how we see it. It is all in the words we write upon that place in our hearts describing the little boy with the green frog towel holding the hand of the college student as they walk together across the tile pool deck on a cold autumn morning in the middle of October.

It was always meant to be, and it will always be.

I say this to John a lot, usually in the evening after dinner when I’ve finally run out of patience with him, with Archie, Kit and Jack, with the day itself. I’ve whispered the phrase under my breath, and I’ve shouted it aloud, too, in an angry, edgy voice. Often times I’ll say it while emphatically sweeping my outstretched arms across the children’s heads. And if I’m really annoyed I’ll tack on another question, just for argument’s sake.

“Are you even listening to me now?”

When my rational thoughts prevail again, I assure myself that my husband really does hear what I’m saying most of the time, and that my children really do try their best to do as they’re taught, as they’re told. And when the kids show me that they’re tuned in, when Kit carries her dirty dish to the sink without being asked to do so, or when Archie warns Jack against running into the road, that’s when I’m sure I’m getting through at least part of the time.

I know, too, that Archie, Kit and Jack absorb a lot of the children’s programming they watch on television. That’s why I’m careful about what they watch, and how often they watch it. But what I didn’t know, not until a few days ago, was how attuned my children are to the programming I watch, the programming John watches, on television. I didn’t know either how intently Archie, Kit and Jack listen when John and I talk about what we’ve seen on television.

At the dinner table a few days ago Jack announced, “I want-ta a talk a Barack Obama.”

I asked Jack to repeat himself so I could be sure I heard him correctly. I had.

Of course John and I laughed, so that encouraged Kit to parrot Jack’s statement, and then after we laughed some more Archie said Barack Obama’s name in the deep, down guttural voice he used when he was small and we instructed him over and over again, for no other purpose than to amuse ourselves, “Talk like Donald Duck, Archie! Talk like Donald Duck!”

That was Friday, and when we asked them then who they’d vote for if they could, Archie, Kit and Jack unanimously agreed, “Barack Obama!”

But wait! There’s more! Apparently my children are non-partisan because yesterday, as we were driving around town, Kit pointed toward a shop window and declared, “Oh! I see John McCain!” I looked in the direction of her outstretched arm, but I didn’t see a campaign sign, nor an old man with white hair wearing a dark suit and a red tie.

Jack looked also in the direction his sister was pointing. “Oh! I see John McCain, too! Right there!”

I looked again, this time where both Kit and Jack were pointing, but still I didn’t see John McCain. Then Jack yelled again, this time aiming his finger down the street the other way, “Look! It’s Lightin’ McQueen!” And that’s when I understood.

Sometimes when I want to keep Archie, Kit and Jack awake in the car I’ll claim to see Sleeping Beauty in the windows of the mattress store, or Mater in the parking lot behind the tire shop, or Uniqua playing peek-a-boo behind a neighbor’s fence. We’ve played this game so often that my children now initiate it themselves, and when they do I always enjoy seeing what their imaginations will conjure up next.

Last night during dinner John asked the kids again which candidate they’d cast their votes for if they could. Kit changed her vote, Archie talked like Donald Duck again, and Jack remained firm in his convictions.

I never guessed my children would incorporate the real-life faces they see everyday on the network news into the ebb and flow of our days. But they have, and they do. And I’m happy for it because it means they’re paying attention.

While you’re perusing the photos, be sure to take a good look at Denise. If you know Denise, you’ll see that she’s lost over 140 pounds in the last year! Isn’t that an amazing accomplishment? It’s even more amazing when you consider what a wonderful pastry baker Denise is. If I could make the sorts of sweets she does, well, geez… I can’t even imagine.

According to Archie, it was the best excuse. Or at least he said as much last night as John was dressing him in his pajamas, before bed.

“Did you like your birthday party, Archie?” John wanted to know.

“I loved it!” Archie answered. I only wish I knew how to write those three words in a way that would convey to you Archie’s pronunciation of them because it was noteworthy, I tell you.

About a month ago, when we were at the Indigo Girls concert, Marcy and I decided to throw a duel birthday party for our oldest boys. We’d pick five children’s books, we decided, and we’d find five friends to read each book. They’d dress as characters from the book they were assigned to read, and we’d find a way to conjure them from the books we’d picked.

So we created a unique invitation for each guest, a Little Golden book with a bookplate pasted inside announcing the party, and finished it off with a ribbon to mark the reader’s place and a big sticker on the book’s cover that read: “PLEASE OPEN THIS BOOK.” I wrapped the books in kraft-colored paper, and mailed them off to the children included on our guest list.

Then Marcy and I created personalized medallions for each guest that identified he or she as an official book club member and a good friend, and we handed the medallions out yesterday when we called the book club meeting to order. Afterwards, we asked our guests to recite a poem with us that magically invited characters from the books in our reading list to join us. When it was his or her turn to read, the character would knock on a door leading into the room and we’d gleefully invite them to join us.

A cowboy read from Cowboy and Octopus; an apple that had fallen from one of the trees in her book read The Little House; Miss Clavel joined us to share her story, Madeline; a mouse scurried in to read, Frederick; and Farmer Eli himself dropped by to read from his book, All the Places to Love. When Farmer Eli finished reading and went on his way, Archie signed more then called out, “More books!”

He wasn’t the only child who enjoyed our special book club meeting. All the children there were enthralled. They listened intently and responded enthusiastically to the books. Later, after everyone had gone and I was talking about the party with my mom, she remarked that all the children were very well behaved and polite. I agreed with her wholeheartedly, and felt fortunate to call so many good parents and kind children my friends.

This morning John played a video recording of the party for Archie, Kit and Jack as they ate breakfast. When we got to the part of the party during which all the guests sang and all the children got to blow out the candles on the gorgeous cake Denise made, Archie sang along with the audio track, “Happy birthday to Ryan and MMMEEEEE!” That made John and me laugh big belly-rattling laughs, and felt like the best sort of affirmation a parent could ever receive.

That should be the end of it, but it’s not. I want to tell you, too, that Marcy and I asked our guests to bring a children’s book to donate to charity in lieu of gifts. She and I designed bookplate stickers guests could sign then affix inside the book they brought, indicating who donated the book in honor of Ryan and Archie’s 5th birthday celebration.

We collected 36 books last night. When I looked through the titles this morning, it occurred to me that the books were carefully selected by our guests to match the occasion. I’m flattered by that, and humbled, too.

Marcy gave me her blessing to call Jamie at the children’s hospital pediatric oncology clinic tomorrow morning. That’s where the books are going, to a fine place where families will surely enjoy them as they pass the time away, dreaming that the days ahead will bring a bevy of birthday celebrations like the one we were fortunate enough to share with our fine friends and family last night. Fate has favored my biggest boy and I feel thankful for that, as I feel thankful for each of you.

(Photos are forthcoming. John is working tonight, but I know he plans to post the pics we took tomorrow. If you can’t wait until then, go here to see the party through Marcy’s camera lense.)

I happened upon the snake last night when I got home from Bunko. I spotted it on the stoop, near our door, and I called to my neighbor who had walked home with me. “Robin, there’s a snake by my door! I think it’s a baby copperhead!”

Robin watched me from the yard as I inched closer to the snake to get a better look. She waited while I summoned John to the door. He’d been sleeping on the couch, and it took him a few beats to understand what was going on. “Kill it,” I ordered.

But when John disappeared inside the house to find a spade the snake slithered away, burying itself beneath the pine straw. We got a flashlight, John and I, and poked around for the snake, moving the pine straw aside and raking at the ground with the spade, but we couldn’t find it. It was gone, ours to discover another day.

“I wish you would have seen where it went,” Robin called to me from the yard. “I don’t like knowing it’s out here now.”

Last night I dreamed of snakes. They were everywhere outside. They surrounded our house and wanted to get in. In my dreams I told John that we could keep them out, these snakes, but in my heart I worried that I was wrong.

Before Archie was born, when I was very, very pregnant, John and I were asked to give our neighborhood’s garden club a tour of our yard. We lived in a different house then, and we’d filled our yard with flower and herb beds, climbing roses and blooming trees. It was beautiful and we were eager to show it off to our neighbors.

The tour was scheduled for a weeknight, and John worked the preceding weekend to ready our yard. He’d spread fresh pine straw, too, because it was fall and the time to do so, and because he wanted to refresh the garden bed as well. Our yard looked liked Eden, and our neighbors enjoyed their evening there.

After they’d gone, as I was carrying a plate of cookie crumbs and an empty pitcher into the house, up a step and then into the back door, John hollered at me to stop, and then instructed me to not move at all. He pointed to my feet and as I looked down I saw a baby copperhead coiled near my swollen ankle.

I got inside without the snake biting me, and I watched through the door’s glass as John pummeled the snake to a pulp. We’d received Archie’s diagnosis of Down syndrome and learned of his heart defect just a couple months before that night, and I remember thinking how angry John looked as hit that snake again and again with that shovel.

I didn’t see John kill the snake this morning. I heard scraping, I thought, as I lay in bed suspended somewhere in that place between sleep and awake. Yes, I do think I hear a scraping noise, I remember thinking before I turned my face into my pillow again.

If you looked on our front stoop right now, near our door, you’d see a few lines gouged into the concrete. The spade is leaning against one of the columns that holds up the porch roof, and I assume John left it there as a warning, if not as a precaution in case there are more snakes buried beneath the pine straw.

“We can’t have poisonous snakes in our yard where our kids play,” I breathed loudly in a panicky sort of way last night as I pushed the dirt around in our garden.

When I came here to share this story with you, I didn’t see yet how the snake on our porch today and that snake on our porch five years ago were connected. But I see now, after typing out these words for you.

Tomorrow is Archie’s birthday party. It’s his fifth, but it’s also his first. We never shared the celebration with friends before, and in a way we won’t again this year because the day he was born isn’t until next weekend.

There are so many things I want to share here, but I can’t. I have these thoughts and feelings and stories I want to tell, but I won’t. At least not yet, not until I’ve sorted through them some more and summoned more spiritual starch to help them stand.

What I can write now is that the old snake, the one from five years ago, threatened my baby physically. But the new snake, the one from last night, it feels like a figurative representation of a different kind of threat, of something bigger. Would you understand if I told you that it feels to me sometimes that there are snakes all around us, passing judgment on things they don’t understand? Would you know what I mean when I say that I feel now’s the time for me to decide what to do about all these snakes? Would you be surprised if I admitted to you that I’m not so sure how to go about doing it?

So Jack found the blanket and he’s been carrying it around the house, rubbing its satin edge against his cheek, and whispering sweet nothings to it like, “Oh, blanket dog! I found you!” Then this morning Jack brought the blanket in the car with us, and when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw that he was holding the plush dog’s face forward, as if it were looking out the window, down the road.

One of Jack’s hands was on each side of the dog’s body, his fingers tucked underneath the dog’s patchwork arms, and when Jack turned his head to look out the backseat windows I saw that he made sure the dog’s head turned, too. They looked like synchronized swimmers, that plush dog and Jack, and I did my best not to giggle with joy at Jack’s tender ingenuity.

Jack may have made me proud in the car, but he embarrassed me later this morning. We went to the bookstore, the twins and I, to find a birthday gift for one of their classmates, and to pick up a few last things for Ryan and Archie’s party this weekend. All went well until it was time to leave and Jack decided I should buy him one of the Thomas the Tank Engine toys the bookstore stocks. I told Jack to put the toy back, or I’d do it for him. It took a little prompting, but Jack finally did return the toy to the display shelf. I mentioned Santa then, and that he’d be visiting in a little while, but still Jack was frustrated so he was crying, and hollering, and making a general spectacle of himself. All the while, despite Jack’s tantrum, I was walking as fast as I could to the register in the front of the store. Kit was trailing behind me at a quick clip, and Jack was bringing up the rear, stomping and stammering spitefully the whole way.

The next thing I knew Kit was sitting on the floor, complaining that she’d lost her shoe. She needed my help with the buckle, she explained, so she could get the shoe on her foot again. When I kneeled to help her, Jack recognized his opportunity to run to the back of the store, over to the Thomas display. I caught him by the arm before he made it there, though, and it didn’t take me very long to realize that a mother just can’t hold onto an unhappy three-year-old with one hand while she buckles his twin’s shoe with the other.

So we three were staled in an aisle in the middle of the store. Kit was sitting on the floor, I was kneeling beside her, and Jack was lying facedown on the ground, screaming crazy things about Thomas and Santa while trying to wriggle away from me. That’s when I decided to sit on Jack, just a little and just on his feet, while I helped Kit with her shoe.

I didn’t buy that toy, Kit made it out of the bookstore with both shoes on, and Jack did cease his hysterics long enough to introduce himself to the lady at the register. “I’m Jackie Moore,” he said between sobs. “What’s your name?”

I told my mom all of this later, when she came over to watch Kit and Jack so I could go to the PTA meeting at Archie’s school. She agreed it was great fun, of course, and I knew then that the problem with discipline in our household is that we adults get a genuine kick out of willful displays of naughtiness. I certainly don’t like mean or spoiled children, not at all, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that a part of me loves it when Archie, Kit and Jack have the confidence of their convictions to last a round or two with me.

At the PTA meeting we talked about the literacy program around which the school’s curriculum is based, and how the grant that supplied each student with a copy of each month’s book recently lapsed. The staff will still teach the books, we were told, but our children will no longer bring a copy of the book home to share with us unless a benefactor comes forward to fund the purchase of the books.

The education director shared this news with us, and as she spoke she shuffled a stack of books in front of her. I recognized the titles, all of them, and remembered how proud Archie was to bring home those books. I remembered, too, how I wept once in a chair in the corner of my room after John and I had put our children to bed because during story time that night Archie recited to us the most recent book he’d brought home from school. My tears were full of joy and relief, adoration and appreciation, and that release felt like a deliverance of sorts, away from something I could barely identify into another immense unknown.

Today at the bookstore, before Jack’s outburst, I selected a book to read to my children, before bedtime, after their bath. The book I bought is called The Little Island and although I recognized the cover I didn’t recall the story inside. Later, tucked into a chair in our family room, I read the book to Kit and Jack and it was this part that made my heart leap inside my chest:

“‘What a little land,’ said the kitten. ‘This little Island is as little as Big is Big.’

‘So are you,’ said the Island.

‘Maybe I am a little Island, too,’ said the kitten – ‘a little fur island in the air.’ And he left the ground and jumped in the air.

‘That is just what you are,’ said the little Island.

‘But I am part of this big world,’ said the kitten. ‘My feet are on it.’

‘So am I,’ said the little Island.

‘No, you’re not,’ said the kitten. ‘Water is all around you and cuts you off from the land.’

‘Ask any fish,’ said the Island.

So the kitten caught a fish. ‘Answer me this or I’ll eat you up,’ said the kitten. ‘How is an island a part of the land?’

‘Come with me,’ said the fish, ‘down into the dark secret places of the sea and I will show you. Show me another way or I’ll eat you up.”

‘Then you must take it on faith what I tell you,’ said the fish.

‘What’s that?’ said the cat, ‘Faith.’

‘To believe what I tell you about what you don’t know,’ said the fish.

I read those words to Kit and Jack and I wondered silently inside, Who is the cat, and who is the little Island? Where is my faith, and what do I believe down in my dark secret places?

I think I know. And I’m sure you do, too.

I blame the leprechaun for the missing items because I know I haven’t misplaced them. I have an elephant’s memory, and a visual one at that, so if I say that I washed Archie’s hooded sweatshirt with a zipper and then put it away in the third drawer down from the top of his dresser, well then, I washed Archie’s hooded sweatshirt with a zipper and then put it away in the third drawer down from the top of his dresser. I’m not saying I’ve never lost anything, nor misplaced anything, but the things I know the leprechaun’s taken? They always turn up again as soon as I’ve stopped hunting for them, in a place I’ve already searched three times. Just try to explain that phenomena yourself without blaming a mythical figure. I bet you can’t do it either.

I once had a friend who was semi-obsessed with fairies. She was an artist, too, and liked to paint green, wooded glens filled with tiny, fantastical creatures, their swirling, whirling dancing illuminated by moonlight. This friend told me once that every house had a fairy in it who looked after the home’s residents. These fairies lived in the rafters above the ceiling, she explained, and I truly believe my friend was sure she spoke the truth.

I used to think of those fairies my friend talked about at night, when I lived alone, before I met John. I figured they must be kind, and that I shouldn’t worry about them hiding in my room’s dark corners while I slept. I haven’t seen that friend in years, not since Archie was born, and I wonder what she’d say to me now if I ran into her somewhere out in the wild world and stopped her just before she walked away, after we’d greeted each other and asked how do you do, then confessed in a whisper, “Hey, remember the fairies in the rafters? Well, I’m sure I have a leprechaun in my pantry who likes to mess with me by stealing my stuff just long enough for me to forget about it. What do you think about that?”

I write this, but still I wonder why last month at Bunko everyone laughed heartily when I, in a moment of self-depreciating humor, explained away something I’d done by saying, “Oh, you know me! I’ve always been a few cards short of a full deck!”

I wanted to come here tonight and write about Jack’s train tracks, and how he always pieces the wooden lengths of track together very meticulously across the floor, or all around a tabletop. And I’d hoped to write, too, that dissembling Jack’s train yard with its wooden track and accompanying accessories at the end of the day feels a lot like picking our day apart, piece by piece, and naming it.

Here, I’ll think as I pull the track apart and toss it piece by piece into the crock we keep in a corner of the study, near the bookshelf. This length of track represents breakfast and how the twins threw a fit because I set out blueberry breakfast bars instead of apple ones. Then this length of track represents the kiss Archie gave me, out of the clear blue, for helping him put on his shoes.

This length right here could stand for me forgetting my wallet and not knowing so until I got to the register and didn’t have the money to pay for the Zyrtec I went in the store to buy in the first place. And then this length of wooden track, this last one Archie pulled from the middle of the railroad and tossed across the room, this last one could stand for the hot pot of coffee I shared with a new friend while our children played together in the other room.

I could continue, you know, but I’m tired and spent. I’ve run out of track, and my train is out of steam. I’ll write more about Jack and his trains tomorrow night, but tonight I’m going to go and rest a little.

It’s been one of those days.

“Him cute,” Kit said of that scarecrow when she spied him hanging from a doorknob at my parents’ house. My mother offered Kit the decoration, telling her she could take it home if she wanted it.

When Jack heard this, he insisted on bringing a scarecrow home, too. Since there were no more scarecrows to be had, my mother offered him the jack-o’-lantern, and that’s how both decorations came to find a home in the pile of odds and ends stacked on the corner of my countertop.

I’ve hung the Halloween craft projects all three children have brought home from school on our refrigerator, but we’ve yet to pick pumpkins to carve. We have the one pumpkin Kit, Jack and I brought home from the apple orchard, but we haven’t yet made our family pilgrimage to the pumpkin patch. Time feels so elusive these days. It seems as if it could be ours to hold onto if only it wouldn’t keep slipping through our fingers.

Or at least that’s what I thought last night as I scoured the Internet for three specific Halloween costumes I have in mind for Archie, Kit and Jack. Everything is sold out, or unavailable, and I wonder how it is I’m the last parent on Earth purchasing trick-or-treat attire for my children. If I could sew I know exactly what I’d make, but I can’t so I won’t and that’s that.

And, really, that one sentence is the sum of our days more than anything else. I do what I can, and that’s all I can do. I think it’s enough usually. Always, I hope it’s enough.

In high school Sunday still meant church, then homework or going to the library to meet a study group so we could work together on an assignment, and then CCD. Oh, how I loathed CCD. One time two guys I knew from school, two guys I’d known since nursery school, and I planned the Friday before to meet outside the church and bag class. We did, and we thought we were so cool running across the road, away from the building, that we laughed so hard we nearly peed our pants.

We walked around a nearby neighborhood, those two guys and I, kicking stones and picking handfuls of leaves from bushes until we realized it was nearly time for class to be dismissed. That’s when we headed back to the church, and that’s when we saw the police car parked out front, near the office door. We did what any sensible pre-teen would do in that situation, which was run away and hide in the tool shed near the playground. And we stayed there, peering out the dirty window on the door and plotting our next ill-conceived move until I saw my mom, recognized her anger and concern, and knew the jig was up.

Now my Sundays aren’t nearly as exciting as they were then. Now Sunday means a trip to the grocery store, chores to complete, and loose ends to tie up. And Sunday means that John has to go back to work tomorrow, and that they’ll be an entire week’s worth of days before he’s home again.

I’m already looking forward to next weekend. Saturday will bring my not-so-long long run, spending the rest of the morning outside with the kids, and Archie’s birthday party. He and Ryan are sharing a party this year. Ryan’s birthday is today, and Archie’s will be a week after the party, but that won’t matter because next week Archie and Ryan will be crowned kings among us and the celebration alone will be worth the price of every Sunday I’ve ever survived. They are miracles, those boys, and somehow this delinquent who once skipped Sunday school earned the right to know them both, and for that I’ll be forever grateful.

“Favorite thing?” Archie asked me, the notes of his speech swinging upward as if he were singing while he finished his question.

I’m not sure if he was seeking clarification, or buying time to answer, so I responded, “What do you like best of all?”

“Hmmm?” he wondered aloud, sticking the tip of his tongue out between his lips as he hummed that sound. Archie also tapped his head with his spoon as if it was a pointer finger and he was imitating a college professor mulling over an undergraduate’s particularly thoughtful question. Then he finally answered, “I love vanilla!”

After Archie finished the nutritious part of his meal, he asked for vanilla Crème and vanilla pudding. I gave him both, of course. And we’ll be headed out for vanilla ice cream, too, a little later this evening.

“If you take a good nap, we’ll go out for ice cream tonight,” I promised Archie, Kit and Jack earlier today when John and I tucked them into their beds for a nap. And they did take a good nap, those kids, so I got one, too. Thank heavens I got one, too.

“I have to tell you a funny Jack story. At lunch we were sitting, just talking and eating, and all of a sudden Jack starts singing, ‘Kung Fu Fighting!’ I immediately burst into song and the two of us were singing and karate chopping while the other kids just kind of looked at us like we were aliens! We were laughing and totally into it! I loved it!

“I had a funny Kit time today, too! As she has a hard time getting on the potty, I help her on and off (we are getting stools to remedy this situation). So as she is done and pulling up her Snow White panties (she told me numerous times that Snow White was on them, and she seemed extremely proud), she turns around, looks in the potty, takes a few minutes to look at her poop, then matter-of-factly says, ‘Wow, that’s a really good poop!’ I laughed and had to tell her I agreed since she was so serious about it!”

I have more stories to tell you, too, but I am tired. Tired and cross for no good reason other than we’ve lost an entire year’s worth of tuition and fees in the stock market these past two weeks if, say, Archie, Kit or Jack we’re a college freshman at Kenyon this academic year.

I’m tired and cross and feeling slightly surly that I’ve got my long run tomorrow morning, my last truly long one before the race on the day preceding Archie’s fifth birthday. If I leave before dawn I’ll will the cars on the road to turn off their high beams as they’re approaching me (a note to safe drivers, if you ever meet a runner along the side of the road in the dark of the morning or night, don’t turn on your high beams in an effort to aide your own sight or the runner’s sight; doing so only renders the runner blind, therefore increasing the likelihood of an unfortunate accident), and I’ll try to remember where the houses are that have decorated for fall with scarecrows. Because those scarecrows with their unnaturally white faces and tattered clothing? They’ll scare you to hell and back if you unknowingly happen upon them in the dark, let me tell you.

Earlier this week, John, the kids and I drove through the parking lot surrounding the shopping complex next to Total Wine. When we did Archie began clapping his hands and stomping his feet against the seat in front of him. “Oh, look!” he shouted. “It’s Gran Marn-me-eh!”

“He means ‘Grand Marnier,’” I translated for John. “That’s the liquor we bought at that store for Kit and Jack’s party.”

“How’d he remember?” John wanted to know.

“I have no idea,” I told him.

We may rarely drink liquor in our house, but there’s always a bottle of wine open in our refrigerator. I don’t mind admitting that there are days I truly look forward to pouring myself a glass of wine as soon as the digital clock on the microwave flashes “5:00.”

Last weekend, when John was in Charleston, Kit and I went to Whole Paycheck to pick up a pizza for dinner. My parents were at the house helping with the kids, and my dad had given me a fistful of cash to pay for our food. I knew I had more money than I needed to cover the cost of the pizzas I ordered, and I also knew Dad wouldn’t mind if I spent some of his money on a few bottles of decent wine. So while Kit and I waited for the pizzas to bake, I selected a couple bottles of Pinot Grigio and Grüner Veltliner to pack into the child-sized shopping cart Kit had insisted on pushing up and down the aisles.

It wasn’t until Kit was trailing behind me, rattling past the seafood and meat counters, pushing her squeaky cart filled with clinking wine bottles, that it occurred to me that maybe a mother shouldn’t allow her three-year-old daughter to push her hooch through the grocery store.

Archie had his six-month check-up at the oncology clinic at the hospital. I don’t really get to schedule these appointments. Rather, an administrative assistant at the clinic assigns a date to me, one exactly-precisely-nearly-to-the-exact-day a half a year away from whatever day we were there last time and then asks me, “Morning, or afternoon?”

When Archie was small I always requested mornings. He did better then, and almost every mother I know would agree with me that mornings are usually the best time for appointments for babies and small children. But now that Archie’s older and attending school regularly, the afternoons work better for us.

So this morning after I dropped Archie off at his school, and then drove across town to drop the twins off at their school, I met John in the parking lot outside his office where we traded cars, and he took one car seat out of the backseat of my car and installed in the back seat of his, behind the driver’s seat. He’d have to pick the twins up at school, we agreed, because Archie’s clinic appointment was only a few minutes after the twins’ appointed pick-up time. And that’s why John’s car is parked where mine usually sits, and why my car was left in the street.

But that’s how we made it work today. And that’s how I know that all the way to the hospital Archie argued with me about seeing the doctor. He told me he’d rather go home and take a nap, and he insisted several times that there would be, “No blood today, Mama. Please? No blood today?”

Archie pouted when he asked about the blood. He turned his mouth into a perfect sideways letter “c,” and it was hard for me to ignore the memories of needles, and i. v.’s, and long, tedious hospital stays, and tests, and procedures, and medicine-that-makes-you-sick-so-it-can-fix-what’s-wrong that glistened in his tearful eyes. When Archie was small and in treatment, my parents, John and I would tell each other, “He’s so young now he’ll never remember how awful this is.” I realized today how wrong we were then, how saying such a thing was just a way of comforting ourselves.

He may have been frightened, but Archie acted like a professional patient in the parking garage, on the elevator, in the lab, and at the clinic. Everyone was excited to see him and remarked again and again about how much Archie’s grown, about how much he’s matured. I don’t notice his growth because I see him and talk to him everyday, but when I watched Archie at the clinic today then remembered how I used to carry him in, strapped in his infant car seat and hooked up to a canister of portable oxygen, I realized how much our frame of reference has changed. And I was both glad and thankful for it at the same time.

But the best part of the visit? It wasn’t the part when Archie greeted the staff by name, and it wasn’t the part when the doctor, one we’ve never seen before, told me, “You know, he’s nearly three years out from treatment and at this point we don’t expect to see a relapse. The chance of that happening at this point is next to nothing.” No, the best part of the visit was neither of those things.

For me, the best part of the visit was before we greeted the staff, or saw the doctor. It was when Archie walked into the waiting room outside the doctor’s offices, where tubs of toys and games are stacked, and craft projects and children’s books fill the shelves against the wall. We walked into that room and Archie pointed at those books and asked, “We read a book, Mama?”

“Yes, let’s read a book.”

And then Archie told me, “I want to read Mr. Brown Can Moo… Can You?”

Of all the things I’ve ever heard in that clinic, I think that sentence spoken by my son about whom one speech therapist at the hospital once predicted, “He may never speak a word judging by how poorly he suckles this bottle,” and about whom another doctor once observed, “But he’s accumulating brain damage left and right.” Of all the things I ever heard there it was this sentence of Archie’s that nearly brought me to my knees.

Did I ever tell you that I used to read that book to Archie every time we visited the clinic? We always picked it from the shelf, and I always read it, and that book always made Archie laugh, even when he was bald and puffy and had orange-tinted skin, even when he was small and cuddly and strapped into the infant car seat I’d balance on the couch next to me as I read. It always made him laugh, and Archie and I knew that book was tucked away on that shelf, and it was ours to share every time we visited that clinic.

I probably never told you that I used to read that book to Archie every time we visited the clinic because I’d filed that memory away, somewhere in my head, and I didn’t think of it today until Archie reminded me. Yes, the little boy who’d probably never speak, the little boy whose brain was addled by toxic chemicals, and lack of oxygen, and whatever other things happen to sick babies that damage brains which doctors know, but mommies don’t. Yeah. That little boy.

I picked the toy cars up, all of them, after John and I tucked Archie, Kit and Jack into bed, after the kids brushed their teeth, after we said our prayers together, after I read a book to them, after John dressed all three children in their pajamas, after we pulled them dripping wet from the tub. Right now John is sitting outside Kit’s door, standing sentinel until her eyes flutter shut one last time and she drifts off to dream of pink things and princesses.

On Saturday night Kit ended up in our bed. She staggered into our room, half asleep and whimpering, and I lifted her up, then over me, and placed her in the space in the middle of the bed between John and me. She tucked herself into John’s side, turning her back toward me. I turned away, too, to lie on my other side facing the wall like I always do. I’ve always complained that I need my own space at night, separate from the kids, and I think somehow they know this is so, too.

Some time that night, before dawn, Kit flopped onto her back in her sleep and shouted clearly, “Princesses!” then again, “Princesses, princesses!”

“John?” I whispered across the mattress, over the body of our baby girl.

“I know it,” he responded sleepily.

I laughed a little then, and wondered where this Kit person who likes fairytales and feminine things came from after all.

Tonight, though, I knew all three kids were my own. If you’re my neighbor and you’ve ever heard my voice through an open window as I read to my children, you’ve probably wondered what’s going on in our house. Tonight I read The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything and I yelled the words loud and in a comic, accentuated kind of way each time that old lady hollered, “Get out of my way! I’m not afraid of you!” Archie, Kit and Jack loved it when I raised my voice, and I was glad all three of them still wear diapers to bed because they were laughing so hard at my rendition of the story that I’m sure they peed themselves.

By the end of the book Archie, Kit and Jack were acting out the story, too, clomp-clomping their feet, and clap-clapping their hands, then nod-nodding their heads. And that’s when I was sure they were mine, these theatrical tots, enjoying a good book just the way their momma always hoped they would.

I’m telling you this because Archie just finished playing with the six milk-bottle pins and the cow-shaped ball that moos as it rolls when he remembers to turn it on, and he just talked himself through picking up those pins and that ball and placing them carefully in the blue plastic carton with handles I found at Target to hold everything together and keep it packed away somewhere, out from under foot.

“Clean it up, clean it up,” Archie recited over and over as he carefully put each pin in the carton. “Time to pick up, it’s time to pick up,” he continued.

And he did, pick it all up that is, and once all the pins and the mooing ball were neatly arranged in the carton Archie carried it in front of himself, held out with both arms much like an altar boy would carry the Host to the gilded tabernacle at church on Sunday after Communion is finished. He carried the carton filled with all the parts of the toy and put it away in the office, next to the stone urn into which I toss Matchbox cars and Disney figurines several dozen times a days.

Archie’s off now, onto other things. He stopped by the piano to play and sing loudly, “Sing, sing a song… Sing it loud, sing it strong!” and then, “Fly’s in the buttermilk, shoo fly, shoo…” He sang both songs in their entirety and then moved on again, to the chair in front of the television to recite a book. He’s there now, still reciting the words as he remembers them, moving from one book to another, down through the pile he stacked beside him on the chair.

To see Archie now you’d never know he was the same boy who two hours ago lay prostrate across the wooden floor in the kitchen, whining his yah-yah-yah’s and eee-eee-eee’s, an annoying string of noises muffled only by the one thumb Archie tucked into the corner of his mouth. He’d told me he was hungry, and I’d told him that he would have to wait until his father got home from work to eat dinner. That exchange had happened a few times, the one with him asking and me dodging, and each time I put Archie off he whined a little louder.

Eventually the phone rang and John was on the other end, telling me he was going to be a little late. “Well, shit,” I said matter-of-factly, and then hung up before John could utter a reply.

When I clicked off the phone Kit looked at me and announced, “Archie ah-hurtin’ my ears.”

“Mine, too,” I assured her before I went about finding something for all three kids to eat for dinner.

So they ate, and Archie stopped complaining, and then he started playing. That’s when I was reminded of the little boy whom I love best of all, and felt proud enough of his behavior to come here now, to my computer, and share it with you.

If you know me at all then you know that I’m a very candid person. In fact, sometimes my honesty verges on bluntness, and I know people either find that refreshing, or entirely off-putting.

I always make an effort to maintain that honesty here, too, in my posts. For one thing, telling anything but the truth would be fraudulent, I think. And for another thing, well, I have this distinct memory of sitting in the geneticist’s office with John and my parents the morning after we received the amniocentesis results confirming Archie’s Down syndrome diagnosis, and I remember asking the doctor if there was someone we could talk to who could tell us what to expect, how to feel.

I was thinking of a counselor, but the doctor recommended talking to parents of babies and children with Down syndrome, and of course I understood that was an astute suggestion, but I wasn’t ready to do that yet. I felt a little like I was sitting in the back of a classroom, unprepared for that day’s lesson, when the professor called on me to reflect on some question he’d just posed and I had no idea what to say. I thought I should do some reading first, before I found another parent to talk to.

That’s the lengthy description of this second thing. I know that parents who have received a diagnosis of Down syndrome find our family’s web site, that they discover this blog, and its my hope that these stories of mine serve as a sort of witness for these parents, as evidence that it’s not as bad as they’re afraid it may be, as proof that they’ll adapt, too, and come to recognize that this new life as a parent of a child with Down syndrome can be just as good as their old life, the one in which they never even thought about extra chromosomes and everything they entailed.

I remember telling a husband and a wife all of this two springs ago. They sat in our family room, on our couch. The wife, who was largely pregnant, was tucked into her husband’s side, underneath his arm. Archie, who hadn’t napped, was whiny and disagreeable, and I felt like his behavior was making a liar out of me as I explained to these parents how able and delightful Archie truly is. Because the day was warm, John had opened our windows earlier that morning, and the breeze blowing through the house made the curtains billow on their rods and somehow those open windows and the subsequent breeze felt like nature adding her two-cents to our conversation.

The husband and wife wanted to know how to reach the level of acceptance I was describing. I remember telling the couple that there was no formula or path to follow, but that one day they’d just know they’d arrived. What I didn’t tell them is that, for me, getting here had a lot to do with being able to say aloud that Archie is different, and that for the most part I’m ok with that.

I always tell people that our family is more alike than different, and I believe that to be true. I also believe that intrinsically Archie is more alike than different, too. He is a little boy with needs and wants, hopes and dreams. He plays, he loves, he learns and he teaches. But I know he’s different, too. I think what’s happened is that his differences are so much a part of him and apart from him that his life feels typical to us. We wonder aloud to each other, and to ourselves inside our own hearts, how can Archie be so different when he fits into our family so seamlessly?

It’s as if we forget how unusual our life really is until a therapist points it out to us during an I. E. P. meeting, or when a family member we don’t see often asks us innocently enough, “Is he eating real food yet?”

That’s when we find ourselves asking, “What? Everybody doesn’t have to supervise his or her almost five-year-old during mealtimes? They don’t pause at the bottom of the steps to watch as he climbs the stairs, just in case he falters? Really?”

A few weeks ago I was standing in the hallway at Archie’s school, speaking with his speech therapist. I don’t remember what we were talking about specifically, but I remember saying, “All these parents like to say, ‘Oh, he’s just the same as any other kid,’ but that’s not true. Archie is different; their child is different. Why is that so hard to admit? Why is saying so a bad thing?”

I think what we’re really saying when we claim sameness is that we don’t love our children with Down syndrome any less than we would love them if they didn’t have Down syndrome. We’re acknowledging that first flush of grief we felt at the time of our child’s initial diagnosis, and then we’re recognizing the fluidity of that grief and how it coexists with love, and we’re also pointing out what happens when grief and love mix together and seep in all the cracks until all we’re left with is acceptance.

It’s liberating to be able to say such a thing to the school speech therapist, and to write it here, too. But I have to admit that it’s a little isolating, too. Because a lot of people won’t understand how I can say such a thing, even some people who have a child with Down syndrome won’t understand.

Marcy and I talk about this a lot, and when we do I often joke that she and I should wear those t-shirts runners wear to races that say, “Run your own race,” but that somehow we should change the words to reflect the decisions we make raising children with Down syndrome. Together she and I worry that other parents of children with Down syndrome will judge us if stand up and say that our boys with are different, and that we’re making decisions to allocate for those differences.

I was talking to Judy the other day, at the gym. I was on the elliptical and she was asking me about potty-training the twins. She wanted to know about Archie, too, and I had to admit aloud that John and I haven’t done much with Archie and the potty. “The time lapse between Archie realizing he has to pee, and then when he actually pees is so small that it’s discouraged me from trying too hard just yet,” I explained.

“But maybe that’s his one-hundred percent?” Judy offered. “You know? Maybe at this point that’s the best he’s able to do and you should celebrate it rather than feel discouraged by it.”

I think Judy’s right. So today I’m asking every parent of a child or adult with Down syndrome to join their voice with mine and declare that, yes, our children are different. But that difference isn’t bad, it’s just different. Say it to yourself, then say it to your friends. Write it on your blog if you’d like. And then tell everyone that it’s ok with you that your child with Down syndrome is different because as long as he or she is being their true self then it’s your job to be true to them. Say it because conformity is overrated after all.

“Since October is National Down syndrome Awareness Month,” I scrawled in looping, lazy letters, “and because Down syndrome begins with the letter ‘d,’ I thought these items would be great for this week’s show-and-tell.”

After I finished writing the note I tucked it between the t-shirts, then packed my collection of things into a purple Coplon’s bag. When I handed the bag to John on Friday morning I asked him to be sure to tell Kit and Jack’s teachers that there was a note from me inside that would explain what I’d sent to school. He promised he would, and then together he and I helped Archie, Kit and Jack out the open door, down the step into the garage, and into their car seats.

John took the kids to school on Friday, first driving Archie over to his school, and then backtracking across town and passed our neighborhood to Kit and Jack’s school. It wasn’t just “d” show-and-tell day for Kit and Jack; it was also “Donuts for Dad Day” and John was expected in the twins’ classroom when school began. So he volunteered to take everyone to school yesterday morning, that husband of mine, and we agreed I’d meet him in the parking lot at Kit and Jack’s school later to switch out cars so that I’d end up with the one that contains our many car seats, not the one with golf clubs tucked into its trunk space.

It made me smile to see all the fathers taking their children into school while I sat parked beside the church, drinking my coffee from my travel mug. They were all dressed up, these daddies, and they didn’t look at all like the mommies wearing their workout clothes, or jeans and t-shirts who usually populate that parking lot.

I was glad John was able to attend the special morning program at Kit and Jack’s school. He’d left for Charleston on business Sunday evening and didn’t return until Wednesday night when he came home to shower and change clothes before leaving for his office. Even though the application he’d went to Charleston to install tested well in the lab, there’d been a glitch with the rollout so John and several colleagues needed to work until they could fix the problem. So John worked Wednesday night, all night, and then stayed late Thursday night, too, until he decided everyone needed to sleep, to take a break. That’s when he sent everyone home, telling them they’d start again fresh in the morning.

Sometime in the middle of all that work I warned John that if he missed “Donuts for Dad” that I’d have to kill him. He knew I wasn’t kidding, so he made sure to make it to school that morning, but later that afternoon, as I was driving down the road toward Kit and Jack’s school to pick them up, my phone rang. It was John and he’d called to tell me that he was probably going to have to leave after work to go back to Charleston. They thought they’d found the problem, he explained, and if the patch worked he’d have to leave that night to install it and finally get the stores up and running.

I was angry. I was upset. I yelled, and I may have cried a little, too. John was patient with my outburst initially, but asked me if I was done after I crossed the line and hollered something like, “Well, if you hadn’t gone on that stupid golf trip two weekends ago I wouldn’t be so pissed at you for being gone all this time for work!”

Later, when I’d collected my children and was in the process of moving them upstairs for their nap, I yelled at Jack who was stalling on the potty, telling me he had to poop when I was sure he didn’t. Then I flipped out on Kit, too, because she balked at trading her panties for a naptime pull-up. My mom was at the house because she’d picked Archie up from school, and she gave me that look of hers, the disdainful one, and I knew immediately that I’d earned it.

“I don’t know why you’re taking your frustration out on them,” she scolded. “This is not their fault. If you have to be mad, be mad at John.”

And that’s what I want to write about today. I want to write about perspective and how it can be such a fickle thing. On Friday morning, in the parking lot, it brought me pleasure to watch how proud John was to march Kit and Jack into school. I was happy he cares so much to work hard at his job, to work hard for our children and my benefit. And I was relieved, too, that the weekend had arrived because I was looking forward to spending time at home with my family.

But as soon as I’d talked to John and I knew he’d be working again, I was frustrated, and felt trapped by my children, by our life, and I wanted a break. I told John as much, too, and it took me until the early hours of this morning, after I’d had some bad dream and rolled into John, asleep on the other side of our big bed, seeking the reassurance of this life to dismiss that dreamy one, that I was able to let go of the anger and surrender to just being, just doing, just taking it all as it comes.

I left for my long run before the sun rose, and I knew when I returned that John would be waiting with one foot out the door. He postponed his trip until today, telling his colleagues that he’d leave again for Charleston after his wife finished her run, and I was happy for that. I was even happier when he told me on his way out the door that my parents would be here soon to take Archie, Kit and Jack for the day. He’d arranged it, he said, and then kissed me goodbye.

So my parents are caring for the kids today, and I haven’t called once to check on them. Mom suggested visiting the park, and Dad mentioned a trip to the toy store. Archie, Kit and Jack are in good hands, I know.

I took a sinfully long shower, then actually took the time to do something nice with my hair. Afterwards I went out to pick up a sandwich for lunch, and now I’m sitting here, writing this. I know the kids will be home soon, and I hope John will be able to sleep in our own bed tonight. But for right now I’m doing my best to surrender to just being, just doing, just taking it all as it comes.

Here’s a photo of Jack and Kit at the apple orchard.  I’m not sure why I can’t ever take a photo when both children are looking at the camera.  I try.    

And here’s a photo of Kit’s cute red shoes and my black-toed and blistered feet.  We were at the park, enjoying the cool autumn weather.  I hope it sticks around for a while

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So instead I’ll name for you what we’ve done today, and what we’re doing right now. Archie is in the other room, tucked into the armchair nearest the television, reading It’s Pumpkin Time aloud. I know he’s actually memorized the book word for word, page by page, and that he’s reciting the text from memory, but still. If you didn’t know Archie doesn’t read yet you’d think he was.

And sometimes I believe it myself, that he really is reading words printed on pages in front of him. When we’re at a bookstore, or driving down the road, and we pass a familiar book cover or road sign, Archie will call it out, clear as day, and I’d be lying if I told you this trick of his doesn’t catch me by surprise every single time.

Archie just got to the last page of the book. I know because he called out “Happy Halloween!” and then I could hear his fingers rustling the last page and the back cover together. Then, as I was typing that last sentence, he came to me, my son did, handed me the book and declared, “I like that book.”

During Archie’s I. E. P. meeting Tuesday morning, while discussing a goal with his speech therapist, I abandoned my original thought mid-sentence to say this: “See, I have this theory. I watched a program about savants a few weeks ago. I learned that savants see every detail of a picture or a puzzle, but that they are unable to grasp…”

That’s when Archie’s speech therapist interrupted me, then finished my sentence, “…the Gestalt.”

“Right,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

We talked more about my theory during the I. E. P., and the speech therapist told me that she’d love to see an MRI of Archie’s brain because she’s sure there’s something unique about the way he processes auditory and visual stimuli. “I’ve never met another child with Down syndrome who can memorize then recite books or songs like Archie can.”

If you think that all this, the way Archie talks and the way he memorizes things, is wonderful, then I agree with you because I think so, too. But do you know what I feel badly about? It makes me a little sad that I suspect there’s something unusual contributing to Archie’s success, rather than being the sort of mother who has the confidence to explain it all away by saying simply, “Archie’s just a smart kid. That’s all there is to it.”

Yesterday morning a very loud, very muscular dog lunged at me during my run. It was so dark I didn’t even see that dog charging across the road toward me until a white Volvo station wagon coming down the road broke hard to avoid hitting the dog, and then stuck around long enough, its bright headlights blinding the animal, to allow me the time I needed to escape unscathed. I’ve run that road at least a hundred times and I’ve never seen that dog before. I didn’t see it on the way home yesterday, and I didn’t see it again this morning, but now I know it’s out there and I’ll be looking for it again.

Right now Jack is playing with a stuffed dog. He’s trying to decide if he’d rather take the dog or the “d” block from our alphabet block set to school tomorrow for show and tell. It’s “d” week, and both Kit and Jack need to find something that begins with the letter “d” to share with their friends. We try to be creative, the twins and I, but sometimes it’s not easy to find something that both fits the parameters of the assignment and is still unique.

Earlier this afternoon Jack was building walls with the alphabet blocks. I helped him for a while, and we talked about the letters and pictures on the blocks. I was surprised how many letters Jack could name, and how dexterously he approached building his wall. I told him so, too, and he acknowledged my compliment with a proud smile.

I can hear Kit in the other room, playing with Archie. She’s bringing him toys, little plastic ones, and it sounds as if he’s throwing them around the room. They’re talking about the toys, too, naming them and saying whom they belong to. I just heard Kit say, in a raised voice, “No throw it!” but still I heard something skid across the floor.

Before I began writing this, all three kids went upstairs to play. I heard them stomp up the steps, and then there was quiet for a bit, and then there was crying. I went to see who was crying, to find out what had happened. When I got there I discovered Archie sitting wide-legged on the landing. His head was tossed backwards as far as it could go, and his arms were stretched out on both sides. He was crying hard and when I asked him what was wrong his whole face frowned and he pointed toward the gate at the top of the stairs. It was shut, baring Archie’s entry.

“Who closed the gate?” I called out, but no one answered. So I walked up the few steps above the landing to open the gate, and that’s when Jack came running out of his room to stop me.

“No Archie!” Jack yelled. “I want Archie to stay downstairs!”

“You will get no where in this life being mean to your brother,” I told Jack sternly but evenly. “I’ll promise you that.”

Jack recognized my anger and backed away from the gate, granting his brother entrance. And then a little while later Jack and Archie played together, some nameless game Jack initiated and I was happy for that.

If I were a good writer I’d find a way to neatly tie together all these pieces of our day here, in this last paragraph. I’d know how to tell you that it feels to me as if those dogs are related, the real one and the toy one, and that in a way Jack felt a little like a dog in waiting today, too. I’d find a way to say that dog on the road is like a detail I’ve missed when instead I saw the big picture. I’d know how to tell you the way Archie’s keen memory fits into his whole self, and what it may mean for him in the future. It would help if I knew all those answers in the first place. But today I’m only seeing all these details.

But still, today was a full and busy day. It was the kind of busy day you’re trying to finish before you’ve ever begun, the kind that sets you up to miss the sorts of things none of us should rush past without seeing. You know what I mean because you’ve had them yourself, these bearish sorts days.

I went with the twins and their teachers and classmates on a field trip to an apple orchard. Together we visited with a menagerie of farm animals, picked our way through a maze, rode on the bed of a wagon through rows and rows of apple trees, ate apples and bought a few pumpkins to bring home. There was a little program, too, put on by one of the women who lives on the farm, and she talked about Johnny Appleseed and the sorts of products at the grocery store that come from apples, and corn, and pumpkins. That was my favorite part of the day, watching Kit and Jack sitting at attention, the both of them rapt pupils.

On the way home from the orchard I asked the twins what their favorite part of the morning was. Kit liked the wagon ride and Jack liked the animals, they said. I asked them, too, if they remembered what they’d learned about Johnny Appleseed and they told me that they did, and then they recited the words of that woman who lives on the farm, the one who introduced my kids to one of the characters I remember knowing a lot about as a child, but who I’d forgotten to introduce to my own children until today.

While we were at the orchard, Archie was across town with his classmates, learning how to swim. Archie’s teachers report he’s a regular fish, following his instructor’s commands explicitly. I’m happy to hear he’s finding success as a swimmer, and I’m sure that’s something he inherited from both his parents: His creek-rat daddy, and me, competitive swimmer that I once was.

Late this afternoon I took all three kids to an appointment with Archie’s audiologist to finally have silicone earplugs made for Archie to use during those swim lessons at Furman, and then next summer at our neighborhood pool. On our way to the audiologist’s office I pulled behind an SUV that had an oxygen tank loaded into its trunk space. I recognized the tank as the portable kind, the ones with a valve on top that plugs into plastic tubing that supplies a cannula that rests on its wearer ears and directs oxygen up his nose. It feels odd to say so, but seeing that oxygen tank took my breath away.

Those days, the oxygen tank days, seem so far behind us now that I rarely think of them. They’ve become so much a piece of our family folklore that the days marked by Archie’s surgeries, and hospitalizations, and home medical equipment, and medicines seem ordinary to me, totally typical because they were once so commonplace in our lives. I forget how unusual that life we lived was until I see it through the filter of a day like today. My baby depended on an oxygen tank to survive. He wasn’t an elderly man like the driver of the SUV, on the other side of life. Rather, my baby was just getting started. And, no, that isn’t a typical experience for a new mother no matter how many ways you try to cut it.

But my baby, my Archie, has grown and now he takes swim lessons. The oxygen tanks are gone, and we have earplugs instead. That’s much more than a fair trade, I’d say.

Because I mentioned fairness, I should tell you that we’ve been to that orchard before, the one we visited today, Kit, Jack and I. John and I took all three kids there two falls ago. It was Archie’s first fall after finishing his cancer treatment protocol and we were out and about in the world again. More than a year had passed since Archie’s leukemia diagnosis, the twins had just celebrated their first birthday, and our life finally felt normal again. Archie had just learned to walk, but I carried him on my hip most of that morning at the farm. The twins were tykes tucked into a stroller, side by side, and John pushed them around over the bumpy, lumpy ground. I remember that back then I hoped for preschool trips and swimming lessons, but it still felt daring to do so.

And now, a couple years later, it seems to me that our family is as normal a family you’d find anywhere. That’s what I want people to know, and that’s why I’m participating in 31 for 21 again this year. You should know that we are not unlike you. We are more like you than we are different from you. We have aspirations, too, built upon memories that look like yours, even in spite of their differences.

But when I sat at the computer on Sunday night to do just that, and then when I tried again yesterday, I felt a little like Michael Bublé, the computer keys ticking off my words without the appropriate sentiment, all cold and flat.

How can I tell you how special it felt to be Archie’s mom this past Sunday afternoon without tearing my chest open and asking you to watch my heart beat on, thumping along in rhythm with all the love, support and respect you show my oldest boy every day of your lives? Is it sufficient to say that your friendship, kindnesses and generosity of spirit help me keep the beat every, single day? I hope you understand what it means for me to write that here, and I hope you understand how adored and appreciated you are, by both Archie and myself.

Thank you, friends. Thank you, family. Thank you, friends who are as good as family. Thank you everyone who told me they wanted to come, but who live far, far away. Thank you, siblings, and cousins, and aunts, and uncles who traveled from places like Pittsburgh, and Charlotte, and Columbia, and Charleston just so they could reach out and touch my biggest boy on Sunday afternoon.

How can he be nothing but extraordinary, how can John, and Kit, and Jack, and I, be nothing but extraordinary, while we have each of you standing behind us? Teachers and therapists often compliment Archie’s “support system,” and you should know that they are complimenting each of you when they say such a thing.

I wanted to share photos of the day with you here, too, but John left for Charleston after the Buddy Walk and he took our camera with him. If things continue to go according to plan with the project he’s completing, John will be back tomorrow night and he’ll help me upload the photos then, I’m sure.

Until then, I’ll borrow a trick from Kelly and let my friends do my blogging for me. Because I just mentioned her name, I’ll begin by saying that I was so pleased and flattered that Kelly and AnnaKate came to the walk.

I’m not sure if I was happier to see my brother and his family, or if Kit was happier to play with her cousins. I’m not sure if our walk emcees had more fun than we did (I’m saying that I think they may have), and you’ll see why when you look the photos they posted on their web site.

Marcy did an excellent job leading the coordination of this year’s walk, and she does a great job every day as my very good, always tolerant, and ever helpful friend. She’s a good friend to other people, too, that Marcy, some of whom are the Longs, another one of the family’s who enjoyed all of Marcy’s hard work on Sunday.

If I haven’t mentioned you, but you’ve blogged about the Down Syndrome Family Alliance of Greenville Buddy Walk, please take a moment to e-mail me, or leave a comment in the field following this post. I’d love to look at your photos, and hear what you have to say about your walk day experiences.

And thank you all over and over again. Every single day. Where would I be, who would Archie be, without each and every one of you?

But still they’re there in the closet, in some half-frozen state of suspended animation secured only by my I-better-check-again-to-make-sure-those-frozen-ice-packs-are-still-actually-frozen obsessive-compulsive neurosis, and those butterflies are just waiting to be… what? maybe defrosted, reanimated, awaken… tomorrow afternoon at the Buddy Walk.

So, yeah, tomorrow is our Buddy Walk. John and I will meet Marcy and Rourk at Furman in the morning, and together we’ll begin setting up tables and route markers, signs and t-shirts, while we await the arrival of our volunteers.

Time will pass, then the hot dog carts, and the DJ, and the walk emcees, and the clowns, and the balloon lady, and the ice cream cart, and the photographer, and the fire truck… you get the idea… will arrive.

Then the walkers will show up, every last 400 pre-registered one of them thank-you-very-much, plus the few hundred more the cat will surely drag in, and then the walk will begin, and then it’ll be over, and then we’ll present certificates and medals to all walkers who have Down syndrome, and then… Then it’ll be time for the butterflies.

And this is what the emcee will have to say about those butterflies (I know it ’cause I wrote it):

“Certain tribes in the Native American culture embrace the belief that people with Down syndrome have a gift that enables us to see directly to the Great Spirit through our witness to their pure spirits and minds.

“There is also an ancient Indian legend about butterflies. It holds that if anyone desires a wish to come true, they must first capture a butterfly and whisper that wish to it.

“Since a butterfly can make no sound, the butterfly can not reveal the wish to anyone but the Great Spirit who hears and sees all.

“In gratitude for giving the beautiful butterfly its freedom, the Great Spirit always grants the wish.

“So, according to legend, by making a wish and giving the butterfly its freedom, the wish will be taken to the heavens and be granted.

“We have gathered today to thank these people with Down syndrome for bringing us closer to the Great Spirit. Together we grant these children and adults all our best wishes and are about to set these butterflies free in the trust all these wishes will be granted.

“Let us all count to three together and then release our butterflies. One, two, three!”

Fly, butterflies. Fly.

So I talked to the salesman who greeted me at the door, telling him what I wanted. He was an older gentleman named Clive, and although I could tell he was hard of hearing he listened intently to my description of the shoe I wanted, then asked me to sit down, on the bench, so he could measure my feet.

“Good high arches,” he remarked as I placed one foot on the metal gauge. He measured my feet as I sat, first the left one, then the right, and then he asked me to stand so he could do the same over again.

“You need a size eleven,” he concluded, moving his thumb from the line etched at ten-and-a-half, where my big toe sat comfortably, to the line delineating the marking for a size eleven. Then he held his arm up in the air, angling his elbow above his wrist. He bent his fingers at his knuckles to tuck them into his palm, and that’s when he pushed the heel of his hand down hard, toward the floor. “To accommodate…” he said, offering the phrase as an explanation for his gesture. I nodded because I knew exactly what he meant.

I tried on three different pairs of shoes before I left the store last Friday morning, and I picked a pair that Clive said he’d order in my size later that day. He and I both agreed it was the right shoe for what I’ve planned. He scrawled the name of my new shoe, as well as the other two shoes I’d also tried that morning, on a little slip of paper I tucked into my purse. Beside the shoe’s name he penned my size, and beside that he wrote his name, too, so I wouldn’t forget: “Clive.”

It wasn’t until I was a mile down the road that I realized I was absolutely overcome with emotion. I’d been moving toward that morning, the one in which I went to pick out those racing shoes, for a long time and I don’t think I ever understood until right then, tucked behind the steering wheel of the driver’s seat of my car, what a thing it was for me to have made it so far. That’s the embarrassing part of my story, the part when I confess how my chest heaved with huge hulking sighs as I drove home from the running store last Friday morning.

I promise you that I’m going somewhere with this.

In July I decided I wanted to run a marathon. When I told John over dinner he said, “Let’s make it happen.” He sent me to his trainer, the one he sees every weekday morning at 5 a.m., the one who has helped him drop three pants sizes over the past nine months. This trainer of his has run marathons herself, and she’s trained Marines on United States military bases across the world. She talked to me, looked me up and down, and then decided we could work together, she and I.

This trainer, Judy, advised me to train for a half-marathon before tackling a full marathon. I agreed and she suggested a local race, one that’ll take place at the end of October. I registered for the race and then signed onto Judy’s training program for me, one that she printed on a piece of computer paper, one that she titled, “Anne Moore’s HALF MARATHON TRAINING.”

I’ve wanted to write about this before; I’ve wanted to tell you about it all. But at first I was afraid to say anything. “What if I can’t do it?” I worried. “What if I can’t keep up with the training?” That’s when I decided it would be best to wait awhile before I shared my secret.

Time ticked forward, and work out days rolled into early morning runs, one right after another, day by day. Saturdays soon became for me a time of weekly reckoning as I’d take to the road early, most mornings before dawn, to complete my long run before the sun rose too high in the sky and the humidity hung too close to my skin.

I thought then that I should write about it all here, but I didn’t know how to do it without coming across as if I was writing my own scouting report. Back then I could have written something like, “I ran five miles this morning, mostly up hill.”

And then a few days later I could have written, “Yesterday at the gym with Judy I did burpees and box jumps, barbell thrusters and pistol squats. I threw wall balls and did a hundred air squats, then I hung from two metal bars and did knee raises, up to my damn ears, over and over again. I finished the laps of lunges carrying a 50-pound barbell across my shoulders, then did kettle bell swings and kettle bell plie squats, followed by pull up’s until my arms failed me. I did it all until I wanted to sit down on the floor of the gym and cry because I couldn’t do anymore.”

I could have written all of that, but I didn’t because I knew you didn’t want to read it. It was just a recounting of work logged, of time put in. There would have been no heart in those words save what it took for me to get it done. It lacked magic, I worried.

To be honest, the magic was missing for a while. I got up early and did the runs, before the kids woke up, before I had to take them to school. I went to meet Judy at the gym when Archie, Kit and Jack were at their summer classes, or when my mom or a babysitter could stay with the three of them for an hour or two. I sweated, and I hurt, but I never missed a run or a workout even when I was sick. I was out to get the job done.

But then, suddenly, the magic was there. I’d feel it as I ran down this road, or that one. It felt like chills across my arms and down my spine, and sometimes it made me hold my arms out straight, one on each side, as I reached out into the space around me and wrapped myself into it not by folding my arms around my chest but by leaving them out there, out wide, and letting the space, and the air, and the moonless morning, and the humidity, and the passing light of the intermittent street lamp fold into me. I felt whole. I felt alive. I generated intensity and it fueled me on.

I wanted to write about it then, too, to tell you how it felt to fly down the road, faster than I ever have before, all the while listening to that Killer’s song I loved before it ever launched that Nike commercial on my iPod, how I kind of want to cry the good sort of tears every now and then when the lead singer voices over, “Time, truth and heart” at the end of the song. But the intensity of it all, of admitting all of that aloud, was so real that it scared me. I worried that talking about it would make it dissipate, and I didn’t want that to happen. I needed it, the intensity, to push me out of bed, to propel me down the road the next morning, or through the next workout day. So I decided to keep it secret, if only for a little bit longer.

Of course a lot of people knew all along that I was training for this half-marathon. I couldn’t keep it a secret completely, after all. John knew, and then I told my mom. After that I told Marcy because I tell her nearly everything worth knowing. And I ran with Dawn, my neighbor, a few mornings because she’s registered for the run, too, so our running together means that she knew. Then that’s when it started coming out during conversations with friends and acquaintances.

I guess that’s when I realized the intensity wasn’t magic after all. I knew it wouldn’t go away if I talked about it with other people. That it just was, and it was mine to call upon when I needed it. That I owned it.

And that’s what this is all about, really. It’s about owning something that is all mine again. This isn’t about my kids, and this isn’t about my husband, although my kids cheer for me when I walk in the door after my runs while they’re sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast, and John affixes the Velcro strap of my iPod holder around my upper arm every morning before I leave the house without saying anything more than what needs to be said: “Have a good run.”

So I do. I go out, and I keep the pace, and I say things to myself as I go, little commands like, “Bring it,” or “Put the hammer down;” “Own it,” or “Are you a mouse or a man?” to which I always answer, “No, I’m a woman” and that one thing alone always makes me run faster than I ever thought I could.

And I think of my children, of our future and our past, of everything I need to do that day. I think of Clive and my shoes and how I’ve wanted to do this, this marathon thing, since before Archie was born.

Then I think of all of you, of what you’ve said to me when we talk to each other over the phone, or of what you’ve written on your blogs, and that’s when this solitary thing, all of this running, feels more like communing with my friends, with each of you.

Did you know you’re out there with me in the mornings, running along the road with me? I think of Erin and how she wore running shoes under her gown at her wedding, and I think of my brother and cousins, too.

I see some of you driving by on your way to work and I wave. I think of some of you and remind myself to call, or write you later that day. I look for lights on in your house, for cars parked in your driveway. I smile at your kids as they stand at the bus stop, and last week I cheered for one of you as you slogged away down one side of the street while I tore up the other. “You go, girl,” I hollered and you, tired and dragging, pumped your fist in the air in acknowledgement of my gesture.

So let me write now that on Saturday, October 25th, one day before Archie’s fifth birthday, I’m going to run my first half-marathon in downtown Greenville. If you can, will you come holler my name from the side of the street and clap for me when I run past? Will you support me? Will you let me share all of this intensity with you? All of the time, all of the truth, and all of the heart?

Please say you will. I hope you will.

“Hey Anne,

“It’s Megan. It turned out so good. Y’all are such a cute family, and I haven’t stopped thinking about you. Ken is going to post [the video] ASAP. Keep checking. We have been having a few problems with getting video on the web so our IMD team is working on a new solution, so it will go up, it just might take awhile.

“I got so many e-mails after the segment aired from people saying thank you for talking about this, and informing us. Please keep in touch and if we can ever do anything to help y’all you know how to get in touch with me.

“Tell Archie hello for me. Have a great day and let me know how the Buddy Walk turns out this year.

“Thanks, Anne!

“Megan”

I just wanted to say that Marcy and I are so grateful for the media attention the Buddy Walk is reciving this year. This walk really is a big deal, and our children really do deserve to be celebrated for their sameness, as well as their uniqueness.

Marcy will be live in the studio, talking about the Buddy Walk on Sunday, September 28th. And the video that accompanies Marcy’s appearance was shot at my house and features a lot of boring talking by me, and many, many adorable shots of Archie, Kit and Jack playing with Ryan.

Hopefully the show will post the video on their web site, and if they do you know I’ll link to it here.

When my children are grown, please let them instead remember me as the mother who walked past the pile of shopping carts yesterday morning at the grocery store, and agreed instead to let them walk beside me and not lose my composure as they wandered over there, and then back here, like a gaggle of goslings, all while they helped me find and carry the few items we needed.

Then let them remember how I danced and sang as we walked down that last aisle, to the check-out line, in time with a song that played on the store’s intercom speakers, one I remembered from high school when I used to ride in cars with rolled-down windows and sing song lyrics with friends so loudly that we were sure our voices would be gone the next morning. Let my children remember how they danced down the aisle, too, and how we all laughed at the fun we made.

I thought of that phrase again tonight when the pediatrician’s office called to tell us that the culture of Archie’s pussy ear drainage came back positive for Group B step. This is the same bacteria that grew in Kit’s urine culture a few weeks back, Jack’s throat culture two Sundays ago, my throat culture two Wednesdays ago and then again today, as well as the culture taken from the infected cut on John’s finger last week.

Kit is better, Jack is better, and Archie and John are getting better. I started my second antibiotic prescription today, one the doctor claimed would attack the strep bacteria like an atomic bomb, so hopefully I’ll be feeling better again soon, too.

And that’s that, really, but still there’s one more thing: If you run into my husband anytime soon, please don’t tell him that I used to watch Sports Center with my ex-boyfriend. Let’s not go and give him any ideas, or anything, ok?

On the days Kit and Jack go to school, my mom will often pick Archie up for me from the Meyer Center so I can pick the twins up at St. Mary Magdalene’s. Pick-up at both schools is pretty much scheduled for the same time, and since I haven’t figured out how to replicate myself and my car and be at two places on the opposite sides of town simultaneously, I really appreciate my mom’s help.

Today Mom had a tennis match during pick-up so she asked my dad to pinch hit for her. He did because my dad’s never met a problem he couldn’t solve, and then he wrote me this e-mail after he got back to work, before the end of the day. I didn’t ask Dad if I could share his e-mail here, but I will anyway because there’s one more thing my dad will never pass up: An opportunity to tell the world how much he thinks of his grandbabies.

“Anne,

“Today is a great day. Your mom always has a special account of her experience when she has the occasion to pick up Archie at the Meyers Center. Well, today was my turn.

“Once I found my way to Archie’s classroom I was greeted by Archie with his usual enthusiastic ‘Mic.’ In his own way he introduced me to two of his new teachers while I tried to explain why he doesn’t call me some derivative of grandpa. We said good-bye to Ryan and a new student that Archie identified by name who I wasn’t familiar with.

“Upon exiting the classroom I was introduced to another teacher that I hadn’t before met. On the way out Archie was inquiring whether he should be looking for Momma’s car or Nana’s car. Of course he had to hit the handicapped door controls on the way out to clear the way for our exit.

“By the time we hit the parking lot Archie was on the lookout for Nana’s car while waving to and bidding everyone we saw good-bye. Upon spotting Nana’s car he directed me to the rear door by jumping from the sidewalk into the parking lot, then climbing onto the cement stop block, jumping from it, all the while telling me there is no middle car seat in Nana’s car.

“We buckled up and before I even had the chance to start the car Archie was requesting we sing ‘McGinty.’ The ride home was filled with songs and sightings by Archie of Dr. Horne’s office, the ‘big houses’ under construction, donkeys eating grass, etc.

“The most precious moment of all was when we arrived at your house. He was all smiles when you, Kit and Jack came out of the house to greet us. When Kit and Jack came around to the passenger’s side of the car out of your sight I unbuckled Archie and helped him out of the car. He and Kit embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in days. He reached for Jack’s embrace only to have Jack pat him on the back as if to say ‘this is how guys greet each other.’ Archie returned the pat and off the three of them went to follow you into the house. You have a great family, cherish it.”

We were in the car last night, coming home from the grocery store. Archie, who has an ear infection, was worked up about something. He wasn’t in pain, or upset about anything real; it was more an imagined insult that was ruffling Archie’s feathers, I was sure. When he gets like that, all agitated with something he’s unable to identify or describe, he’ll cry, and moan, and generally carry on in compliant until either John or I can figure out what’s up and rectify the wrong.

So we’re driving home, and Archie is worked up and screaming now, and Kit, Jack, John and I are generally ignoring Archie’s vocalizations because by that point the whining, and the moaning, and the screaming had become so much a part of our evening that it was nearly white noise ringing in our ears.

We pushed on like that, all five of us looking out the window, winding down the road, until Archie’s ahh-yah-yah’s and eeh-eeh-yee’s were interrupted by a burst of laughter from the back seat.

That’s when I turned around and saw Jack laughing, laughing, laughing, so much so that I had to laugh, too, as I asked him what was so funny. Jack screamed then, a silly, mimicking cry, and I know immediately what he meant.

“Is Archie’s screaming funny?” I asked him and Jack nodded, then laughed some more and in that moment I was thankful my youngest boy inherited my sense of humor, as slightly off-kilter as it may be, because I saw then that it’ll serve him in the same way it has served me.

So we all laughed, Jack, Kit, John and I, and our laughing interrupted Archie’s yelling so much so that he had to stop carrying on to tune into what was happening around him. And that’s when Archie laughed, too, and his current spell of sounding-off was diffused for this interruption.

Last week, when I was finally taking my shower, Jack pressed his face against the glass of the shower door and announced, “I have to poop.”

“So go on my potty,” I told him.

“No, it’s scary,” Jack replied. Like many modern master bathroom’s, our toilet is located in a small room separated from the main bathroom by its own door. It’s kind of claustrophobic, that toilet room, and dark, too, when the light is turned off. So although I understood Jack’s hesitancy, I was in the shower after all.

“It’s not scary, Jack,” I told him. “It’s just a potty. You can go by yourself now, or I’ll help you when I get out.”

So Jack walked away and busied himself with other things so nicely that I didn’t think it was odd at all when he took off his shorts and underwear out there in my bedroom, in front of the television. And I didn’t notice anything unusual either when Jack came back into the bathroom and fished my comb out of the drawer beside the sink. I did think it was a little peculiar, though, when Jack raked the comb across his bare bottom a few times, but because I’m the kind of mom who allows my kids liberties when they’re not doing something hurtful to themselves or others, I just ignored it.

By the time I was getting out of the shower and toweling off, Jack was playing with the water spigot on the bathtub and I was asking him nicely first, then telling him in no uncertain terms that it was not ok to turn the water on and off, on and off. That’s when he grabbed a hand towel from the bathroom counter, and held it under the spigot draining into the tub. “I get my towel wet,” he narrated. “Then I clean up my bummy.”

That’s when I saw that Jack had pooped, so I cleaned him up, tossed the dirty towels over the banister and down the stairs, and helped Jack put his underwear on again. I found my comb, began to brush the knots from my wet hair, and wondered aloud why it still smelled like poop in the bathroom. I looked all over the floor, in the tub, on the counter and in the sink before I realized that my comb had poop-laced tongs and I’d just dragged most of that poop through my clean hair.

The other post I’m thinking of would be about something I’ve been working on for the past few months. I’ve alluded to it here, and a few friends know what I’m talking about already, but I’ve never explicitly written about what I’m doing. I did that purposefully, the not telling thing, and I think by admitting so I’m blowing this announcement up into a much bigger deal than it is.

It’s crappy of me to write this, I know, to say that I have a secret I haven’t yet shared and then not go on to share it still, but I think I want to keep my news to myself for a few days more. (Am editing this paragraph to add that, no, there will be no more babies for me. Good God, don’t even entertain that thought for a second longer. Please. Now go wash your brains out with soap.)

But the post I want to write tonight is about how I only showered a few hours ago, right before dinnertime, because that was the first opportunity today’s to-do list allowed me. About how Kit was up last night, sick, and about how Jack slept longer this morning than he ever has before. About how both Kit and Jack missed their second day of school today because I decided instead to keep them home. About how John and I joked this morning that it felt as if we had a newborn in the house again because every couple hours last night Kit would sit straight up in bed (she was sleeping in our bed, between us), then announce in her tiny voice, “My tummy hurts,” after which the room would suddenly fill with an awful smell and John and I would find ourselves disagreeing again about whose turn it was to get up and change Kit’s diaper this time. “Not mine,” I’d mutter, turning my face into my blanket.

“But I did it last time,” John would counter.

As I recount John and my pillow talk here, I realize it’s no wonder our children would argue like this in the back seat of the car this morning:

“I sick,” Kit offered.

“No, I sick,” Jack responded.

“No! You no sick! I sick!” Kit returned.

“No, no, no! I sick!” Jack hollered louder.

And then I could see in the rearview mirror that they were hitting each other, those twins, and I wondered if I should yell, too, in an effort to end their bickering.

I also wanted to tell you about how Archie choked on a toy last night, a plastic yellow octagon that belongs to a game I originally bought to help me work on colors and shapes with the kids, but that I’ll shamelessly admit is now more of a dust collector that sits on a shelf in our kitchen.

Archie had finished dinner so we’d excused him from the table. He was playing only a few feet from us, mostly watching television as best I could tell, and I have to say I hardly even noticed he was there until he ran toward the table, all red-faced and crying, his shirt all wet, all the way down the front.

“Did you throw up?” John asked Archie as he was running toward us. After he asked that question John looked at me and I looked at him, each of us exchanging a glance that clearly said oh-hell-here-we-go-now.

But Archie only threw his head back and cried a little louder, and that’s when somehow, someway, John saw that octagon wedged in Archie’s throat. John shouted that there was something stuck in Archie’s mouth and then he jumped up from the table, knocking his chair over onto the floor, and grabbed Archie, pitching him backwards.

“No, not like that.” I said. “Not backwards. Forwards. Face down.” I remember my voice sounded very calm.

John followed my instructions, and I bent over to pat Archie’s back. But Archie didn’t cough, and that toy didn’t fall out of his mouth, so John flipped him over again to try to reach the toy with his fingers. John tried once, then again.

“Do it again,” I instructed John. On the television screen inside my head I could see that lifesaving video we watched together, John and I, in that infant safety class we took way back when, before Archie was born.

John tried again and then said, “I can’t get it. My hand’s too big.”

That’s when he and I spoke the same words in unison, “Call 9-1-1.”

So as John got up to find the phone I looked again at Archie’s face, which was tear-streaked and panic-stricken, and getting redder, and redder, and redder. He was still making noise when he cried, and I knew that was a good thing, but I was still scared enough to think, very calmly, not-now, and then not-like-this, and to do something about that string of thoughts.

I looked inside Archie’s mouth, saw the toy, and then looked away, up toward the ceiling, as I stuck my hand in Archie’s mouth, down his throat, and somehow, someway, hooked that toy with the curved tip of my finger and swept it out of Archie’s mouth. Archie cried. I pulled him close. I heard John click off the phone. And that was that. Mercifully, that was that.

So today Archie went to school, and the twins stayed home, and I cancelled a session with my trainer and instead worked on the Buddy Walk. Then I picked Archie up from school and as he, Kit and Jack napped I ironed a mountain of little girl dresses and mommy-sized blouses, of little boy shorts and wintertime pants I’ve pulled out of the back of Archie’s closet to launder, to iron, to hopefully dress he and Jack in again soon.

That’s when I finally took a shower, after I finished the ironing, before dinnertime. And then after we ate I took the kids outside to play in the front yard as John worked to tame the rose vines growing against the front of the house. Afterwards we bathed the kids, dressed them, read them a book then tucked them into bed. I think Kit and Jack are still awake, even now, but I’m certain Archie’s already asleep.

Tomorrow morning I’ll come in from my run, wet with sweat, and Archie will be seated at the breakfast table next to John. He’ll be eating yogurt, that Archie, and he’ll look up to say, “It’s Momma,” and then he’ll point to my arms and say, “It’s sweat.” John and I will laugh and tell him he’s right, and then Archie will tell us, “I slept in my own bed.” Again John and I will agree, and somewhere inside Archie’s head he’ll know that he’s done something his brother and sister aren’t very good at doing, and that although he didn’t realize sleeping in your own bed is a big deal until recently, that he still likes to talk about his newly-discovered accomplishment every morning.

And our day will begin again, rolling forward in time with its regular rhythms, and at some point later in the day I’ll think to myself that I never meant to be a housewife, that this is not what I expected from life at all.

Yesterday was Kit and Jack’s first day of K-3 at the same preschool they attended last year. The beginning of their school year was delayed a week because our parish pastor passed away unexpectedly a day before classes were scheduled to begin. The delayed start jostled our schedule around a bit, but I don’t think Kit and Jack minded the extra time at home with me. Although I may have complained aloud about having them home when they should have been at school, I was glad to have Kit and Jack around the house for a few extra hours, at least.

Those twins brought work home in their backpacks yesterday, pieces of blank construction paper with instructions attached asking mom and dad to help make Kissing Hands. If I were feeling like myself we would have finished the assignment last night, the twins, John and I, and two sets of impeccably decorated handprints would already be tucked inside Kit and Jack’s colored paper folders, tucked inside their backpacks. But instead the work sits undone on our countertop while I sit in here, typing on the computer.

I’m still running in the mornings, gulping air down my burning throat and all the while wishing I felt just a little bit better. I’m still taking care of the kids, driving them here and picking them up there, feeding them, changing them and wiping them after they’ve climbed down from the potty. And I know we’ll finish the Kissing Hand assignment tonight after dinner, before bedtime, and I’ll fill out those personality questionnaires Kit and Jack’s teachers sent home, too. But it doesn’t mean I’m not tired, that I don’t wish I could just forget my obligations and go to bed, or eat nothing but cold ice cream, or lay on the couch and watch a television show of my choosing, something that is not geared to a preschool audience, thank-you-very-much, for a little while at least.

All of this wishing reminds me of a stanza from one of those forwarded e-mails I received the other day from a family friend who used to baby sit me when I was small. It was about how little eyes see a lot, even when we think they’re not looking, and how what they see shows them that an adult does what needs to be done even when she doesn’t feel well, or when she’d rather not. When I think about that e-mail I know who taught me to keep on when I’d rather quit, and I know whose teaching Archie, Kit and Jack to do the same. And I guess that’s why I do what I do even when I don’t feel like it. Even when I don’ get it, and I don’t like it, either.

All is well in our house, too. Kit got a hair cut on Friday, Jack picked out a new pair of shoes today, and I found out a few days ago that Archie will begin swim lessons with his classmates at school in a few weeks. More on all of this later, of course, but these short sentences feel like enough for tonight.

As always, thanks for caring enough to visit us here.

On Saturday morning a physician told my aunt that the virus had adhered to my uncle’s mitral valve and that, if left unchecked, the virus would eventually destroy my uncle’s valve and kill him. My aunt was asked to decide if my uncle should undergo mitral valve replacement surgery wherein a cardiothoracic surgeon would cut out the infected valve and replace it with a manufactured one, or if it was time to sign a DNR order and call it quits. The doctors’ consensus seemed to be, my aunt told my mother, that my uncle didn’t have the reserve to survive the valve replacement surgery.

But yesterday my aunt decided that if Uncle Tom was going down, then he’d do it swinging. This morning a team of technicians wheeled my uncle into the cath lab, where they miraculously found no blocked arteries. From the cath lab they wheeled my uncle into a surgery suite where a cardiothoracic surgeon spent the next seven hours working on my uncle’s heart.

Just a short while ago that surgeon asked my aunt to come out into the hallway just outside the waiting room, to speak with him there. “Oh, shit,” Aunt Peggy thought. “This is it.”

But she was wrong. My uncle survived the surgery, and is now resting comfortably in a cardiothoracic intensive care recovery room. The surgeon explained to my aunt that he was able to cut out the infected tissue and repair my uncle’s own valve to working order, but that he had to leave my uncle’s chest open. There was some unexplained fluid present during surgery which is now gone, and the surgeon also said something about my uncle’s lungs needing a little extra room to work properly.

I have seen enough open chests to know that the surgeon couldn’t close the incision because there’d been too much trauma to the heart muscle. I suspect, too, that the surgeon is waiting to see if that valve he fashioned really will hold, or if it will have to be replaced with a manufactured one after all.

After he spoke with my aunt, the surgeon offered to buy her dinner in the cafeteria. That’s when my aunt asked the surgeon to please go away, that she needed to cry then, and call her sister, my mother. But the surgeon wouldn’t turn away from my aunt, and insisted instead that she go to the cafeteria and pick out whatever she wanted and put it on his tab. “You haven’t had anything to eat or drink all day,” he observed.

Then he told my aunt to go upstairs and look at my uncle, but to wait a bit before she left. “Give yourself time to process this,” he instructed. “And then promise me you’ll go home and get some rest.”

I was nine years old when my cousin, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Tom’s only child, fell off his bicycle while riding in a grassy field behind his school, hit his head, and died. Neither my aunt nor my uncle talk much about my cousin now, but I know that he is never far from their hearts.

Today is the 24th anniversary of my cousin’s death. Last night, on the phone, my mom told my aunt that was a sign. “A good one or a bad one?” Aunt Peggy wanted to know.

“All good,” my mother assured her. “If Tom makes it, then it was always meant to be. If he doesn’t, then Matthew will be there, waiting for him.”

I’m hoping that it was always meant to be.

Yesterday was Kit and Jack’s third birthday. Our family had a great time during the twins’ party, and we hope that everyone who came to share in the celebration had a lot of fun, too.

If you’d like to see photos from the party, you can look at them here.

This morning, after three full days on antibiotics, Kit told me when I went in her room to wake her, “Mommy, my back is all better. And my tummy is all better. And my butt is all better, too. I no hurt anymore.”

She may not hurt anymore, but right now she’s calling to me from the top of the stairs, insisting that she needs to go pee. It’s a stalling technique, I’m sure. She should have been asleep an hour ago.

But isn’t she clever to use this particular excuse to get out of bedtime? My daughter definitely knows how to play on my emotionally unstable mommy anxiety, that’s for certain.

Kit and Jack are older now, an entire year older, than Archie was when they were born. But yet they still feel so new to me, like the babies they once were, tucked away in their baskets lined up beside my bed. Even now I sometimes look at Kit or Jack when together they call to me across the room and I think to myself, “Well, now. Look at you. How about that?”

This Saturday we’ll fete the twins. Nearly fifty local friends and family members, small and tall, will join us in our back yard to celebrate this year we’ve spent with Kit and Jack, and to look forward together to the many years we hope to share with them still.

I’ve been cleaning the house all week, and John spent last Saturday in our yard, cutting and edging, pulling weeds and attempting to tame our overgrown, August flower garden. Weeks ago I found the perfect invitation to tell guests about the party, and recently I’ve searched the Internet for party favors and crafts to compliment our dual theme of princesses and cars.

Today John spoke with Cinderella’s agent on the phone, confirming the littlest last minute details of her visit, and I finally conceded that the racecar driver who originally agreed to visit and bring his car isn’t going to make it after all. My parents have agreed to bring their sports car, though, and park it in our driveway with the top down and doors wide open so our guests will be able to climb inside if they’d like to do that sort of thing. But still I’ll say that I would have liked to have that driver here on Saturday afternoon. I know that his appearance would have launched Jack over the moon.

I still have baseboards to scrub and favors to wrap, flowers to order and two birthday cakes to pick up. There’s food and beer to buy, and child-sized banquet tables to set up, too. I don’t mind admitting that this party has amassed in size more than I ever anticipated, but I don’t mind saying either that’s exactly the way I like a party to be: Bigger and better than I ever imagined.

I guess, in a way, that’s how my life has turned out, too. I never dreamed of twins, or of Archie, or of John and our life together as a family. And I never dreamed we’d have a life filled with so many friends. Just last night I told John how calm I am about this party, how I’m not worrying about all the diminutive details like I usually do when we’re expecting company. “That’s because everyone who is coming is as comfortable to us as family,” John observed aloud.

And even if saying so seems a little absurd, he is right, that John. Nearly everyone who will be here Saturday has been here before. We’ve known many of our guests for a long time, and several others for long enough. If a guest is new to us, they’re not new to our story because theirs is so similar to our own in one way or another. If their family’s story is unlike ours, it’s close enough still in what matters most. I know that we are all raising our children to look forward, to be kind, to laugh liltingly and long.

But still, this afternoon as I spent Archie, Kit and Jack’s naptime pressing napkins and tablecloths, I wondered why I didn’t just invite my parents, some aunts and uncles, and a handful of cousins over for cake this year as I have for each of my children’s past birthdays. Why all the fuss over the entertainment, the menu, the details?

That’s when I heard a door upstairs open, then shut. No child cried out, and I didn’t hear tiny feet on the stairs. “Maybe whomever it was changed his mind?” I figured as I steamed the lace trim of the tablecloth draped over my ironing board. “I won’t quit this and go upstairs unless someone calls to me,” I decided.

A half-hour later I folded that tablecloth and unplugged my iron. I put my ironing board back in the laundry room and finished folding one last load of clothing. I carried a basketful of clean laundry up the steps, and as I walked down the hall I heard their voices. They were whispering, and their shush-shush speaking was punctuated with muffled giggles.

That’s when I put down my basket and peaked around the doorframe into Kit’s bedroom. She and Jack were lying together on her bed, right next to each other, each of them looking at a big, cardboard picture book they balanced together on their thighs, all four of them. And that’s when I knew the answer to my question, the one I’d wondered as I ironed in the kitchen. Yes, that’s when I knew.

Nearly everyone who reads what I write here is a parent, too, or at least familiar with children, and caring for them, and knowing what it means when they spread themselves out, over and into every little, last bit of your life, so I won’t tell you specifically what we’ve been up to this last week because I’m sure you’re able to infer for yourself based on your own experiences.

But I will say that we’ve been busy.

A happy part of all this busy is the beginning of a new school year, and I think I should say something about that here. The twins go back to school next week, after Labor Day, but Archie started classes last Monday and it makes my heart feel whole to tell you how much he loves school, his teachers and therapists, and his classmates.

Every morning, before the sun climbs into the sky, Archie asks his father or me if it’s a school day. It’s the first thing he wants to know when we greet him. His question trumps “hello,” or “good morning,” or “how’d you sleep, little buddy.” Every morning he sits in the middle of his bed and asks, “School? School?” and now he adds to his inquiry his new teacher’s name, too, “Nardia?” And when his father or I tell him that, yes, today is a school day, Archie hollers a hearty hip-hip-hooray and bounces around a bit, all tangled up in his covers, before he hops off his bed and picks his way down the stairs, one step closer to school.

Last weekend, before school started, I imagined what it would be like when Archie met his new teacher. He’d learned her name already, and was anxious to see her face to face, I was sure. I imagined what that meeting would be like and, after a little while, began thinking of that scene in Forrest Gump when Forrest, on the first day of school, met his bus driver, and then years later when Forrest’s son, on his first day of school, met his bus driver, the same bus driver, and how both father and son said the exact same thing even though we, the audience, was told that Forrest’s intelligence was below average and his son’s intelligence was above average.

I thought of all that and marveled again, as I have before so many times since Archie’s birth, at how similar we all are without regard to intellect. The wheels in my head spun around as I wondered again how we are all so capable of learning, and doing, and having, and achieving.

I thought about that and I remembered my tears in the ultrasound room when the doctor first said the words “Down syndrome,” and how my first thought right then, right there, was that this baby, my boy, wouldn’t love learning like I do, that he’d never go to college one day.

I looked at that memory, so distinct inside my heart even now, and realized how utterly wrong I’d been because this baby, my boy, loves learning. He loves to learn, and he can learn, and he will learn. And all the while he’s learning, right here inside the busy, he’s teaching me, too, and making me guess at my worthiness of the great good fortune of being this child’s mother.

I didn’t intend to imply that anything exceptionally overwhelming happened in our household last week. So I apologize if that’s how you read my last post. It’s just that last week was, well, a lot.

A lot of bored kids, no matter what activities I devised to fill our days. A lot of fighting, biting, hitting, hair pulling and time-out getting.

A lot of potty-training accidents, all over the floor. A lot of food tossed on the floor during mealtimes, too. A lot of yelling, stomping, huffing and crying, by all three kids and me.

A lot of time spent in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s office while the doctor and I tried our best to find a way to treat Archie’s sinus and ear infections that just don’t want to go away, no matter what antibiotic we try.

Of course all of those things meant that there wasn’t much time left for the things I have to do, nor the things I like to do. So that left me feeling disjointed, and ever so slightly out-of-control. And when I feel out-of-control, even if it’s just a little bit, I have no patience for anything that stands in my way of regaining an equilibrium, which in the case of last week was the kids. That was totally unfair to them, I know, because they were just kids being kids after all, but really. Sometimes even we typically rational people, who logically know what is right, can’t get past the emotion that makes us see askew.

I kept it together, though, and we survived the week, the kids and I. But I’ll tell you that by Friday I’d even lost patience with John and my mom, neither of who had really done anything to deserve it. And I’m not proud of that, but it’s true so that makes it worth mentioning here. So let me confess now that because I know it’s inappropriate to dump on my kids, I sometimes take out my frustrations on my husband, my mother. Right there’s an ugly truth for you.

But because I don’t want to be all lemons here, in this post, I’ll end by recounting three stories from last week that make me proud of my kids, in different ways and on different levels.

At the grocery store last Sunday Jack had a meltdown. A really big one, He wanted one of those cheap, plastic toys the store stocks on the shelves across the aisle from the diapers. John denied his request. When Jack asked me for the toy, I told him no, too. Then he cried, then he screamed, then he began tossing his head and body all around, knocking into Archie who was seated in the cart next to him.

I looked at John, and he looked at me. I unhooked Jack’s safety belt, picked him up, and started walking toward the front of the store, out to the parking lot. Jack was screaming and clawing at my face with his fingernails. A store employee stepped in front of me then asked if he could help. “No, I’m not kid-napping this insolent boy,” I wanted to say, but instead I told him that we were fine, that I told my son he couldn’t have a toy, that I was taking him out to the car where he could sit out the rest of this shopping trip.

“I don’t even know why they stock those toys,” the employee said, shaking his head, as Jack and I left the store.

In the car I strapped Jack into his car seat and as I did I explained to him that I loved him very much, but that I didn’t think he needed that toy and I was sorry but that’s how it was going to be, no matter how much he carried on.

That’s when Jack told me this: “You a bad mommy! I no love you!”

I could have cried. I wanted to, but instead I climbed into the front seat of the car and waited for John and Archie and Kit to finish shopping, to join Jack and I in the car.

Later, during lunch, Jack got out of his chair and sidled up to my own. He laid his head in my lap and looked up at me with his big brown-green eyes, my eyes. And that’s when Jack told me this: “I love you, my mommy.”

I had to forgive him, of course. I know he’ll tell me one hundred more times before he’s grown and gone that he hates me, but I hope he’ll always tell me later once his anger has ebbed that he loves me, too.

Last week, on Monday afternoon, I took Archie, Kit and Jack for ice cream. The ice cream was a bribe, I admit, but they’d earned it so I upheld my end of the bargain.

At the ice cream shop, while I stood at the counter waiting to pay the woman behind it, the kids found a table for us. They sat in the three chairs surrounding the table, and I watched as Kit looked at the chairs, then looked at her brothers. That’s when she frowned, got up and pulled a chair tucked under another table across the floor and pushed it into the space next to her.

After I paid, when I got to the table, Kit told me to sit here, next to her. She patted the empty chair to her right and I realized then that I never expected a two-year-old to be so thoughtful.

There’s a book on the shelf in the other room that’s really upset Archie. It’s a college textbook, from a psychology class I once took, and the photograph on the front cover is of a statue’s profile, its brow, its eyes, its nose, its mouth.

Last summer Archie was terrified of a television commercial for John Walsh’s Safe Side video. It always aired in the morning, this commercial, between Caillou episodes. In the commercial, a lady with pigtails on top of her head would ask her audience if they knew who strangers were, then she’d say something ominous like, “Well, they can hurt you.”

Archie always screamed during these commercials, all the way through, and would run around for minutes afterwards repeating, “Hurt you, hurt you!” He was scared, and I can’t say I blamed him either. That woman with her crazy hair and portentous message kind of freaked me out, too.

So earlier this week Archie came running out of the room with the bookshelves, hollering about the “bid-e-oo” and chanting again and again, “Hurt you!” To be honest, it took me a while to figure out what he was talking about because it’s been months since we saw that commercial. But when I did discern what Archie was saying, I asked him to show me what reminded me him of the video.

That’s when he took me into the room, up to the shelves, and showed me the psychology book with the stone face on its cover. “Hurt you,” he said solemnly as he looked in my eyes. “It’s da bid-e-oo.”

I reassured Archie as best I knew how, and we took the book down and looked through it together. But I’ve watched him these past few days as he’s suspiciously looked at the shelf with the book. And as I’ve watched him I’ve remembered myself, when I was small, and how I was afraid of a book on the shelf in my parents’ house because its dark cover with illuminated dancers wearing bright costumes frightened me.

Of course I don’t delight in Archie’s fear, but I am happy for it. Because it shows me he’s tuned in, it shows me he’s drawing connections, and for that I am infinitely grateful even if my finite patience has run its course.

I’ll make time tomorrow to tell you about it, and share some of my thoughts about Archie’s upcoming school year which begins this coming Monday.

Dear Friends and Family,

As many of you now know, it has become an annual event for our family to participate in the Down Syndrome Family Alliance of Greenville’s Buddy Walk. The Buddy Walk was developed in 1995 by the National Down Syndrome Society to bring together a wide range of concerned individuals to reach out to friends, family and co-workers to promote awareness and inclusion for people with Down syndrome and to raise money for research and education programs.

Last year our local walk was a wonderful success and “Team Archie” collected over $8,000 in donations, securing a first-place finish in the Buddy Walk Challenge. I am very proud of this accomplishment and thankful for the support each of you showed Archie and our family.

What I have not shared with you is that I was the co-chair of last year’s event. I went into planning the walk with one goal in mind and it was to raise money. The event did raise over $25,000 to benefit our children and families. This amount is unprecedented in our community!

This year I am once again co-chair of the Buddy Walk, and once again I want to raise money for the Down syndrome community. Fortunately, though, the pressure isn’t as great as in the past. My goal this year is to focus on awareness and have as many registered walkers as possible on “Team Archie” and at the walk.

Many of you are wondering how you can help because maybe you live out-of-town, or even out-of-state. If that’s the case, I still want you to register as a walker because I want to add your name to the “Team Archie” banner that we’ll carry on the day of the walk to show that you’re with us in spirit. I want to send you a Buddy Walk t-shirt (which will have an “Archie’s Room” logo on the back, by the way). I want you to wear the t-shirt and when given the opportunity to share, I want you to tell people that you know this amazing little boy with Down syndrome who has made a positive impact on his family, as well as on all people who have the good fortune to know him.

If you live in the Greenville area, I want you to register and walk with us on Sunday, September 28th, at Furman University. I want you to join my family in celebrating the lives and the accomplishments of all people who have Down syndrome. I can’t think of a better thing to do on a Sunday afternoon in fall than that.

It is easy to register. You can click here to access the 2008 Buddy Walk registration brochure. In it you’ll find all the details you’ll need to sign up to become a member, in person or in spirit, of “Team Archie.” If you have difficulty accessing the registration brochure, please let me know and I’ll mail one to you.

If you have questions about the walk, please click here for more information, or simply ask me and I’ll be happy to provide you with the information you need. If you’d like to make a donation online rather than submitting a Buddy Walk registration form, please click here to do so.

Thank you for your affection and support for our family,
Anne

P. S. I know this message looks familiar to you if you also read my friend Marcy’s blog, The Upstate Update. She wrote the original copy for the message, and then I edited it. She forwarded my edited version of her message to her friends and family, and then I revised the message again, making it applicable for my friends and family. That’s teamwork at its best, I’d say. Maybe this is why were such efficient co-chairs?

Before I made my bed, I tucked Archie, Kit and Jack into their own beds. They’re lying on top of their covers, but beneath blankets pulled up tightly under their chins. I gave them a bath today before naptime, in warm water filled with bubbles. I used my bottle of body wash from the shower in the tub, and filled the aromatherapy diffuser in my bedroom with lavender essential oil. “It’s relaxing,” Kit announced as she lay on her tummy in the tub between her brothers, her chin level with the water.

I gave the kids a bath before their nap today because we spent the morning at the park. It was hot, and they got dirty there, so it seemed like the right thing to do to fill the extra time we have together now that both Archie and the twins’ summer preschool programs are over until school begins again in a couple weeks. The bubbles and the lavender would make this unusual afternoon bath even more of a special thing, I decided.

Earlier today, at the park, I pushed Archie on a swing. When he leaned his head back to look up at the sky, Archie’s body seemed long. His arched back went one way away from the swing, while his legs held straight out, horizontal against the ground below, went the other way. It was if the swing cut him in half, dividing his height in equal parts then cutting his days in two.

“You’re daring,” I said to Archie as he swung back and forth, back and forth. His hair was rising and falling in time with the swing and I know it felt good to feel the air against his scalp as he dangled his head so low.

I moved, positioning myself so I could look into Archie’s face when he swung toward me again. When he saw me he shook his head no and said, “All done, Momma.” So I moved again, this time away from Archie, standing close enough to push him as he swung, but far enough away to offer him the independence he asked me to give him.

I called to Kit and Jack as they played on the nearby slide. Are-you-having-fun, I asked. You’re-doing-a-great-job-climbing-the-ladder-all-by-yourselves, I observed. They both waved to me as they climbed and slid down, climbed and slid down. Watch-me, they’d demand, one at a time. Then they’d ask again, did-you-see-me?

Soon Archie sat up straight in the swing, pulling his head upright once more. That’s when he pointed to the large live oak in front of us and declared, “I want to climb that tree. I want to go up to the sky.”

Archie’s pronouncement made me feel so full inside that I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, right there in the park next to the swing, because I knew Archie had just had an original thought. He has them often, I’m sure, but I can’t remember hearing him share one before that felt so free, so full of promise.

This morning before we went to the park, Archie, Kit, Jack and I went to the post office to mail invitations for the twins’ third birthday party. They stood in line with me, and waited with me behind the desk as I paid for stamps we’d come for. All three kids walked away from the line with me, too, and watched patiently as I affixed the stamps to the envelopes.

Once when Archie began walking toward a door, saying he’d go-in-that-door-right-now, Jack hollered at him, “Archie, no! Come back here,” and Archie did as he was told. I thanked Jack, and complimented Archie for listening to his brother. Then I divided the pile of envelopes in thirds, handing one set each to Archie, Kit and Jack.

I told the kids to stand beside me, and I picked each child up, one at a time, instructing each one on how to open the metal door to the stamped mail slot, how to put their stack of envelopes on the back of the metal door, then how to close the door, sending their envelopes out into the world.

The twins were happy to help, and Archie was, too. A few months ago Archie would have become frustrated with all the steps, with the process, and he would have protested by throwing the envelopes to the floor. But today he moved his fingers and hands, his arms, trying as best he could, and he was able to mail the envelopes just like his sister and brother, just like me.

Earlier this week I took Archie, Kit and Jack to one of those inflatable indoor playgrounds with big plastic slides, and jump castles, and blow-up obstacle courses. All three kids ran from play piece to play piece, whooping and hollering, happy to discover what more lay beyond the toy in front of it. In the beginning, I kept close to Archie. He needs my help more often than Kit and Jack do, and it’s him I worry about most often when we’re out among a crowd of other children.

After awhile, I found myself chasing Jack in one direction, then doubling back to wave hello to Kit who’d gone off in the opposite direction. I’d finish one lap around the playground and then check in with Archie, finding him on whatever play piece he’d climbed, before I’d set out on another lap to touch base with Jack and Kit.

Once as I approached Archie, who was making his way into a jump castle, I watched a boy tuck his hands under Archie’s arms, and then watched some more as the boy helped Archie the rest of the way up the inflated ramp, into the play piece. When he was inside the play piece Archie turned to look at that boy, to look in his eyes, and that’s when Archie said, “Thank you.”

I stopped in my tracks and stood there, marveling at the little boy my baby’s become.

Sometimes it seems to me that, for Archie, having Down syndrome means finding himself is a little like finding the right wallpaper. Rather, the extent to which Archie’s extra chromosome affects his ability to get along in typical situations is often about how much he blends into his surroundings, or how much he stands out.

It used to be that the private Archie, the child we knew at home, was very different from the public Archie, the one everyone else got to met when he was out there, getting along in the world. So often I’d assure Archie’s therapists and teachers at school again and again, “But he does it at home. He’ll do it at home.” And just as often, I’m sure, those therapists and teachers doubted my credibility.

But now it seems that the Archie I know is becoming the Archie everyone else knows, too. He’s growing toward them, and away from me. He pushes me away every day with his all-done-mommas and his thank-you-for-your-kindness-friends. Archie is pushing and it makes me want to both laugh and cry, but also to insist, to always insist, push-harder-Archie, now go, go, go. I laugh and I cry because he is almost five years old, this oldest boy of mine, and he’s learning finally that he is free, that he is full of promise.

“I want to climb that tree. I want to go up to the sky.”

You will. And I’ll help you without you even knowing I’m here.

I’m sure Facebook hates me. Right now I’m trying to upload photos of Archie, Kit and Jack to my account only to be told again and again that the upload failed, that I should try again, please. Yesterday the application disconnected me again and again as I tried to chat with Dana, always saying that my network connection failed, over and over.

All of the frustration only leads me to say this one thing: Come on, Facebook. You’re full of it. Don’t you know to whom I’m married? I’m willing to bet we’ve got the best set-up on the block.

My Facebook frustrations aside, today’s been a banner day. Jack, who is right now tucked into his bed where he’s studying a picture book about cars, pooped on the potty for the third time in his life. But the best part about this third try is that he did so unprompted and alone.

I was sitting at my desk after dinner, reading Tricia’s latest post when I saw a child dart past the door. I knew from the sound of his falling feet that it was Jack, and I guessed he was on his way to the bathroom since, you know, it’s on the other side of our office, and everything.

I sat here awhile longer, long enough to comment on Jennifer’s post, then Marcy’s post. Then I read about Stacey and Jon’s night out to see Hootie and the Blowfish and I felt a little jealous that I hadn’t gone to the concert, too. But all the while I was reading I was also listening to the noise coming out of the bathroom.

There weren’t many sounds rolling down the hall, but there were enough to let me know that Jack was up to something, and that I was pretty sure I’d be all hooray and how-do-you-do when I went into the bathroom to discover exactly what was going on. So I shutdown Safari, pushed back from my desk, and rounded the corner to our downstairs bathroom. There sat Jack, with his Sheriff car balanced on the toilet seat between his legs, smiling a lot like the proverbial cat who ate the canary.

“Hey, Jack,” I said nonchalantly. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Poopin’,” he replied, then giggled.

“Did you go already?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered. Then he hunched over a bit, rounding his little boy shoulders and looking down, as he pointed between his legs, into the potty. “See?”

So I looked, of course, and there it was. There was much rejoicing then, and I called to John who was upstairs playing with Archie to come-down-here-right-now-oh-my-god-Jack-just-pooped-on-the-potty-all-by-himself-can-you-believe-it.

So John took Jack off the potty and help him wipe himself, and John and I let Jack flush the toilet because, you know, that’s all kinds of fun after all. And then all five of us jumped around a bit, and cheered, and sang a made-up song about Jack pooping on the potty.

Kit felt sufficiently jealous of all the positive attention Jack was getting, I think, so I hope this will serve as incentive for her to poop on the potty of her own accord in the near future.

And Archie? I think he was genuinely happy for Jack. Because that’s how Archie rolls. He pulls no punches, ever. What you see is what you get and I’m not sure whether to attribute that to his diagnosis, or to the fact that his mother, me, is exactly the same way.

But I do know this: Since we’ve started potty training the twins in earnest Archie is a whole lot more interested in what’s going on in that bathroom, in what Kit and Jack are wearing instead of diapers, and in whether or not he can try peeing on the potty, too.

My plan, it’s working beautifully. Wouldn’t you say?

My children are all asleep upstairs. My husband is asleep on the couch. My life feels full and whole.

They’re out there, John and the kids, and I’m in here, at the computer, paging through our music library on iTunes, searching for songs to add to my playlist titled, “Anne – Running.” I just tripped over this Van Morrison album, very much by accident. I remember buying a copy of the CD my junior year in college, in winter, and listening to the music while sitting at my desk in my dorm room in Hanna.

I’d pushed my desk up against the window, a big, wide thing, whose Venetian blinds I kept pulled all the way up, all the time. My room was in the back of the dorm so my window opened to the woods that pushed all the way up against the building, then all the way down to the highway that crept around the base of the hill upon which the college is built. When I looked out that window during winter, from right before dinner until dawn, all I could see was black.

This song reminds me of then, and to me hearing it will always feel like snow in the dark in the middle of nowhere.

But it’s this song I was searching for, and I just clicked on it’s title listed in my music library, pulled it across the screen, then dropped it into my playlist, behind a handful of songs so it’ll find me around mile five tomorrow morning and Nina Simone can call to me through the hazy, humidity and she can hold my hand as I run down the road with her.

To me, all this running is like communing with the spirits. The music pulls them in, but they are mine mostly, from then and now, pushing me faster and faster to catch up with the ones still ahead, out there down the road a little bit more.

Right now Archie, Kit and Jack are playing with the boxes, climbing on top of them and jumping off. I just watched Archie push the boxes against the steps, one right next to the other, both of them flat on the floor. Then together he and the twins decided to treat the boxes like two additional steps, climbing on them then charging up the stairs, or coming down the stairs carefully, tentatively, and then leaping off the last step onto the first box, then jumping down onto the floor.

I was supposed to work at the nursery at Kit and Jack’s preschool this afternoon. The school’s biannual consignment sale is going on right now and I volunteered to work a shift or two, as all parents of children who attend the preschool are supposed to do. So I was scheduled to spend four hours in the nursery, watching the children of the other volunteers who were working the sale.

But it turned out that Archie, Kit, Jack and I were the only four people in the nursery for over an hour, so the preschool director came by and said, stating the obvious, well-it-hardly-make-sense-for-you-to-sit-here-and-watch-your-own-kids, and then followed that up with let-me-check-with-the-ladies-at-the-sale-but-I-think-you-can-pretty-much-just-go-home-now.

So now we’re home and Archie, Kit and Jack are playing over there, on the steps and the boxes stuffed with custom draperies, and I’m sitting here watching them as I type this out and it only just now occurred to me that maybe I ought to go make them stop.

That’s something I struggle with as a mother. Where to draw the line; what to allow and what to curtail. I think I do a pretty good job of it. We have rules, and routines, and schedules, and patterns, but behind all of that I worry that we have too many rules, and routines, and schedules, and patterns. Is it wrong of me to want my children to learn that they can think for themselves, question authority, make their own informed decisions, step outside the boundaries of peer influence and do their own thing?

Because that’s how I grew up, and I’m trying to find a way to allow my kids, to encourage my kids, to do the same thing. Because if they don’t approach their lives this way I think I’m going to be really disappointed in them, and in myself as their mother and model, too.

I’ll tell you that I wander through my day searching for the balance to strike that’ll make it all happen. Most of the time I find it, I think. Or at least I try to. And I like to think that’s what counts the most of all.

It’s voodoo, I tell you. Scientists and surgeons are masterful manipulators of smoke and mirrors.

When I wrote this before, my mom commented that she believed it to be less magic and more God’s will. I’m not sure what I think about that. Rather, I do know what I think about that, but I’m not ready to say so just yet. Because I have so much to say.

But there’s another story I need to tell you first. And I will soon, I’m sure. Except I can’t right now because there are towels to fold, dinner to make, and a pile of papers on my desk that should have been sorted days ago.

I need to take care of this business, I know, but before I do I’ll leave you with this thought. If I wrote down every thing, big or small, I did all day you’d think I was making most of it up. Or maybe you wouldn’t because your list, the list of your daily deeds and dalliances, looks a lot like mine.

I’m betting that’s the case, mostly because I read the accounts of your days that you post to your blogs, too. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are all in this together.

Uncle Tom made it through the night, stable and progressing. There remains a bile duct in his liver that still won’t work, but the nurse told my aunt that there are measures to take that can fix such a thing, including, but not limited to, acquiring an ‘emergency liver,’ whatever that may entail.

When Archie was only a few days old I arrived at the conclusion that practicing medicine is not unlike performing voodoo, or turning tricks with smoke and mirrors. I still remind myself of this now, when I look at Archie and marvel at his health and ability, or when I hear news of my uncle’s progress.

I say voodoo, smoke and mirrors, and you may think that it seems as if I have no idea at all what I’m talking about, but I do. I’d even say that I understand it all in a way I hope you’ll never intimately know, like me.

On the way to the grocery store this morning, I pointed to a fork in the road and asked John, “Have you been down there lately? Did you see what they’ve done with that complex?”

I was talking about a retirement community under construction near our home. It is a site to see for sure, and I explained to John that it looks as if an entire college campus is somehow rising up out of the ground, all by itself.

John laughed at that, thought for a few beats and then commented, “Life is all about moving forward, and then one day it’s like we just stop and begin to move backward.”

“You know,” he continued. “Like we’re all grown up, and then we get old and move into a retirement community, and suddenly we’re in a college environment again. And then we get older and feeble, and we’re wearing diapers again and someone’s taking care of us like we take care of them.” That’s when John looked in the car’s rearview mirror at our three children sitting in the backseat, each of them oblivious to so much but with time still left to learn.

For the remainder of our drive to the store I thought about Archie, Kit and Jack, about my uncle and my aunt, too, about what happened yesterday, what we’ve planned for today, what we’ll do tomorrow. We like to think we can control our lives, but really we can’t. At least not as much as we like to think we can. It’s voodoo, you know. All of it smoke and mirrors.

So I will, and I’ll save my stories for another day, but before I do I want to tell you this one thing.

My uncle had his liver transplant today. He’s been on the organ recipient list for some time now, and he endured several ‘false alarms,’ being summoned to the hospital, prepped for surgery, and then sent away without the new liver he needs to survive.

Once the operator from UNOS who called to tell my uncle and aunt it was a ‘go,’ and then called again to report that the status changed and it was now a ‘no go,’ broke all sorts of rules and explained to my aunt, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the family changed their mind. There was an argument. Some wanted to donate; some didn’t.”

Then once my aunt watched the organ transplant team walk down the hall, one person carrying the cooler containing the donor liver, and when that liver was biopsied one final time before my uncle’s transplant surgery started in earnest the liver was rejected because something wasn’t as perfect as the team hoped it would be.

So today my uncle got his new liver, and the surgeon told my aunt it was a good thing the organ came when it did because my uncle’s old liver was in very bad shape.

But the bad news is that my uncle isn’t doing very well right now. So far the new liver isn’t working, and his blood won’t clot either. There is one more drug left to try, my aunt told my mother, and then we’ll know what’s going to happen next. Then we’ll know.

I’d just placed a pile of books on the ottoman, right beside Archie. He’d already spent some time paging through these books as he lay sprawled across the ottoman, his torso on the piece of furniture while his legs dangled off the side and his feet kicked the floor. When he finished with each book he tossed it aside, off the ottoman’s top and onto the floor.

When I placed that pile of books on the ottoman I sighed, and then corrected Archie. “Don’t throw books, boy. I deplore when you throw books on the floor.”

“Okay,” Archie answered, acknowledging me, and even though he agreed aloud to follow my instruction I was sure the books wouldn’t stay on that ottoman for long. I knew this, of course, so I decided that if I couldn’t make this small exchange a lesson in good behavior that I could at least make it a vocabulary lesson.

“Archie, can you say deplore?”

He was silent, as if he hadn’t heard me at all.

“Hey, you,” I prodded, poking Archie in his ribs. “I’m talking to you. Can you say deplore?”

That’s when Archie looked right at me and smiled mischievously. Then he picked up a book from the pile on the ottoman and very deliberately dropped it on the floor, right in front of him, right between he and me. And then that’s when Archie screeched, before dissolving into a gaggle of giggles, “I throw it on de-floor!”

So I wrote something special for Claire, and sent her a photograph of Archie and me together, too. Then I registered with Special Friends Online, “the No. 1 online community for people with learning disabilities … that provides a safe and secure environment for you to chat and share your experiences with other parents, carers, volunteers and people who have learning disabilities.”

To register I had to pay, like, eight pounds for twelve-months use (this is a web site based in England), with most of the registration fee going toward keeping the web site operational and safe for users who are differently-abled (that’s what makes this site stand out, it’s geared toward users who have special needs to a greater degree than it is geared toward the adults involved in their lives). I was told, too, that ten-percent of my membership fee will be donated to the international Special Olympics charity.

I’ve enjoyed using the site so far, and have exchanged e-mails with volunteers and educators who work with adults who are differently-abled, parents of children and adults who are differently-abled, and young adults themselves who are differently-abled. Another thing that’s so neat about this site, I think, is that it enables me to share with people who (so far) mostly are not American and so have different attitudes and outlooks on disability in general, and Down syndrome specifically. The story and photograph I submitted have been posted in a “Members Only” section of the site so I can’t link to it here, but I can tell you that the work the web administrator did posting my piece and picture is well done.

Anyway, I’m writing about this because I promised Claire I’d share the site with my friends and family and ask them to take a look. I’ll do nearly anything to support an organization that supports children and adults with special needs. So please go, take a look, and share your story, too.

I received an e-mail from Kelly, AnnaKate’s mother, early this afternoon. This is what she wrote to me:

“Hi Anne, I wanted to share what happened to me this morning as I dropped AnnaKate off at the Meyer Center. I took her into the morning room and was instantly greeted with… ‘AnnaKate, AnnaKate.’ I turned around and it was Archie. I did not know that they knew each other… I am assuming from the morning room.

“I said hi to Archie and told him who I was. I then told him I knew Kit. He immediately said, ‘Jack?’ I said yes, I know Jack. Then he said, ‘Mommy?’ I said yes, I know your mommy. Then he quickly swept AnnaKate off to join him as he played with the musical instruments. It was so sweet to see the children interacting like old friends… I guess they are. I took a few pictures and had to share them with you.”

Here is one of the sweet photos Kelly e-mailed me. Thank you for the photos, Kelly, and for sharing this story with me. I am so proud of all of our children. They are gifts from a better place, every one of them, here to show us who we are way down deep inside.

My mother, who plays tennis, says that on some mornings you can hear the lions roaring from the courts near the playground, near the zoo. Today a jumble of monkey cries tumbled through the trees, across the parking lot and into the playground. They called out all at once, the monkeys, wild and excited as if they’d just been presented their breakfast, up there somewhere in their habitat on the hill.

All the kids on the playground stopped what they were doing to listen, turning to face the noise peeling through the trees. “Monkeys!” Jack exclaimed, then jumped from foot to foot, his fingers stuffed in his armpits, he making monkey noises himself.

While we were at the playground, Kit and Jack befriended two boys, brothers, who were playing nearby. Jack followed the boys around from playground piece to playground piece, and soon began calling the oldest brother “Friend.” On Cleveland Park’s modern version of a merry-go-round, the oldest brother pushed his younger brother, Jack and Kit around and around as Jack hollered again and again, a little louder each time, “Do it again, Friend! Friend, do it again!”

When we left, I told Jack and Kit to thank their new friends for playing with them. So they did, and the oldest brother waved at us over his shoulder as he ran away from us, toward his mother seated on the wall between the playground and the road. It’s funny, really, because I felt kind of sad leaving those boys behind. Jack and Kit liked them, and I did, too. Our leave-taking made me think how fleeting relationships can be when you don’t have the time to help them along, give them the proper room to grow.

But I have photos to remember our morning at the park, and Jack and Kit’s brief brush with friendship. I took these photos with my cell phone. You can find more in our photo gallery.

My favorite part of the show was the ending, when the Backyardigans sang their closing theme song and invited the audience to get up and dance with them. Most of the kids in the theater scrambled into the aisles to dance, so Archie did, too.

He danced like he does at home in front of the television when we watch the show together, turning around in circles, slowly, slowly, each foot alternately held high then placed carefully on the ground again as he turns and turns, over and over. Archie held his elbows tight against his sides with his arms bent and his fists clenched tight, and he sang, too, his chin tucked into his chest. So I’ll tell you that with each note he sang I felt a little prouder, a little lighter until I felt so puffed up I wondered if I’d float away.

Here are a few photos from our afternoon with Archie’s favorite television characters. You can find more in our photo gallery.

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When Jack’s frustrated about something he scrunches up his brow, his nose and his eyes into the ugliest, meanest face you’ve ever seen, and then he retaliates by growling, or hitting, or pulling hair, or doing exactly what I told him not to do in the first place. Yesterday when Jack was upset about something and began to make his Worst Face Ever and lash out, my mom challenged him to smile. “Smile when you’re doing that!” she instructed. Immediately Jack grinned his Best Smile Ever, then forgot all about being mean, then dissolved into laughter. I wonder how long this technique to thwart outbursts will work? Forever, I hope, but probably only a few days at best.

When Archie poops he likes to stick his hands in it if he can get to it before I can. Every time. I’ve written about this before, but lately the behavior has begun occurring with more frequency. When Archie does it, when he grabs those fistfuls of poop, he cackles and laughs and starts yelling things like, “Don’t touch poop!” and “It’s disgusting!” and “It’s so gross!” So he gets why playing with poop is a bad thing to do, I think, but it’s as if he just can’t help himself. It seems Archie knows this one thing gets me every time, so he uses it against me, manipulates me with it. And I hate that, almost as much as I hate the whole hands-in-the-poop surprise-that’s-hardly-a-surprise anymore. I mean, it’s disgusting, just like Archie says.

But do you want to know what’s more disgusting? Maybe you don’t. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that sometimes, when I’m hurried, or tired, or anxious, or just plain frustrated with all three kids, that when Archie comes to me, hands full of poop, that I think first of the morning I Googled some phrase I’ve since forgotten, and then remember how I read again and again that one of the biggest reasons kids play with poop is because they’re mentally retarded (yes, the reference I remember best didn’t say “developmentally delayed,” or any phrase such as that, but rather “mentally retarded”). So when I look at Archie, hands full of poop, face alight with smiles and giggles and guffaws, the first word I think inside my head is, “Retarded.”

Please understand that I don’t think this in a mean-kid-on-the-playground kind of way; but I do think it in a factual, explanatory sort of way. And I hate that about me. And I hate to admit it. And I hate that word; above all things I hate that word. But still, I am admitting to all this here. Because you should know that even I, who lives and dies by Archie’s smile and tears, thinks such a thought privately inside every now and then. Because maybe it would help you to know that, maybe it would help you to understand this mother’s heart. And because maybe you think such a thing sometimes, too.

Apparently I had no idea what I was talking about last winter.

So far summer has unraveled me.

For the most part, Archie, Kit and Jack are home from school. Archie goes to class some weeks, but he’s off others, and even now after three consecutive summers of the same I cannot decipher my oldest son’s class schedule.

Kit and Jack just started their summer camp program this morning at the preschool they attended last year, the same one they’ll attend again this year. Both children were delighted to be back at school today, and both children told me they’re looking forward to Thursday when they’ll go back again.

But Archie is still home until the end of this week, and he’ll be home again for a couple more weeks after a few more weeks of classes. To be honest, I don’t understand the schedule enough to write about it without going out to the kitchen and taking the calendar down from our refrigerator and transcribing it here for you.

Whether or not Archie’s at school is such a big deal for me because when he’s home he’s usually bored, and when he’s bored he’s usually bad, and when he’s bad I usually run out of patience and stamina very quickly and then the entire day’s gone down the drain by ten o’clock in the morning.

Yesterday, as I was taking Kit to the bathroom to work on her potty skills, Archie emptied the two lowest shelves in our kitchen pantry, dumping a box of cereal all over the floor. He came to tell me, of course, he all exuberant and smiling and very, very proud of himself. “I spilled Cap’n Crunch!” he tattled, yelling. “It’s all ooohhhh-vvverrr!”

I tried to make him clean up the mess, but ended up finishing the job myself.

And everyday lately feels a lot like that last sentence I just typed. I need more patience. I need more stamina. Every one of us, Archie, Kit and Jack, needs some time away to do something else, something enriching of our own choosing, just for ourselves.

I type this, but when I think about this afternoon, after Kit and Jack were home from school, I remember how we all four heaped into an easy chair in front of the television and watched Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood together.

I remember watching that episode today as intently as my babies, and feeling as joyful about seeing Trolley as Jack was, and watching Archie’s eyes as he watched the video on Picture-Picture about making tofu, and letting Kit hide her face against my chest when the billy-goat puppet stealing X the Owl’s fast-growing seeds frightened her.

And I remember, too, how my chest filled with the choking sort of emotion that makes you want to shout happy things and cry tears of overwhelming joy all at the same, exact time when Mr. Rogers started tossing his blue sneakers in the air and singing, “It’s a good feeling to know you’re alive…”

I’ll tell you that my brother and I watched Mr. Rogers’ every day of our lives until we were embarrassingly much too old for Mr. Rogers’ and his Land of Make-Believe. I’ll tell you, too, that I love that show, and that I love Mr. Rogers like an old, familiar friend. And that I love the way Mr. Rogers’ Pittsburgh accent reminds me of the aunts and uncles, grandparents and friends, I grew up loving, and how it makes my heart soar to hear my children name the show’s characters and sing the show’s songs in their own voices, and how it has got to be one of my greatest joys of these summer days to share this show with my children.

We may be without a routine, and Archie may be bored to badness, and we may all need our space from each other from time to time, but for a brief half-hour every day we connect by sharing something we all find special in our own, individual ways.

And really, I’ll admit all these things to you here now, but I’m not sure I’m brave enough to tell you how I came undone last week as I was reading Charlotte’s Web with Archie and discovered again, after all these years, that the word which completed the third and final miracle of the spider’s web was “humble.”

But last night before bed Jinx emerged from my room limping with Jack in hot pursuit. Sure, my youngest boy seemed nonchalant enough, but I could tell by the way he averted his eyes that he had something to do with that limp when I asked him, just like this, “Jack, did you do something to hurt Jinxy?”

Of course he didn’t, he claimed. Oh no, my Jinxy’s hurt, he whined. Then all three kids gathered round our dog and petted her, their little hands running up and down the length of her spine, combing her fur down then matting it up again.

This morning the kids petted the dog like that again, this time while we five, the dog, the kids and I, huddled together in the veterinarian’s office. Jinx was still limping this morning so I decided it would be a good idea to take her to see the doctor.

“I’m not sure what’s wrong with her paw,” the vet told us. “But she’s bearing weight on it so I don’t think the injury is too bad.” Then she gave me a prescription bottle holding ten tablets of canine analgesic and asked me to please keep my youngest boy away from the dog for the remainder of the day.

Jack was holding the dog’s leash in the veterinarian’s office, of course, and he dissolved into hysterics when the vet’s assistant took Jinx out of the room to give her a booster I’d overlooked until today. All the while Kit sat on one chair, holding my purse and earning today’s recognition for our family’s Poster Child for Good Behavior, while Archie sat on the other chair in the exam room, muttering phrases like, she-gonna-wipe-wipe-wipe-and-clean-clean-clean-then-she-a-take-your-blood, she-take-a-pictures-of-your-heart, she-take-a-your-blood-pressure, look-a-in-your-ear, open-your-mouth, stick-out-your-tongue, and as he’s speaking I’m realizing just how unusual my four-year-old boy’s breadth of knowledge pertaining to the medical field is.

On the way out of the vet’s office, as I was herding my small circus act to our car, a lady got out of her own and asked me with a huge, warm smile on her face, “Are they triplets?”

No, I told her. I was holding Archie’s hand so I touched him on top of his head and told her that he’s the oldest, and that the two children huddle around my legs are twins, but that my oldest and these twins are very close in age. Then the lady smiled wider and warmer and offered, “I know it’s hard now, but one day soon when they’re older you’re going to have so much fun.”

I hope she’s right, this lady in the parking lot. I hope then it won’t be all doctor’s offices, and spilled cereal on clean floors, and time-outs and throwing toys. I know that she probably is right, this lady, and for that I’m grateful. And I’m grateful, too, that she took the time to tell me so.

She looked so put-together, so well-heeled, while I looked tired and mismatched and anxious, I know. I like to think she saw a younger version of herself in me this morning, this lady in the parking lot. I know that she probably did. And I’m grateful for that, too.

It’s the small kindnesses passed from mother to mother, from woman to woman, that do so much to propel me through my day. Thank you all for the kindnesses you’ve shown me, each of you who read what I write here. I appreciate them so much, and I promise, too, that when I become the well-heeled woman in the parking lot that I’ll pass your love down again, to the next set of mammas raising babies.

I found Archie standing on his bed with the corner of his sheet in his mouth, the cotton wet and crumpled. Next to him the top dresser drawer was wide open and half empty, its contents dropped on the floor in a pile beside the bed.

When I opened the door I surprised Archie. He sucked in his breath and then asked loudly with an exaggerated annunciation, “Oh! Who made this messy mess?”

“You did, Archie,” I answered. That’s when Archie dissolved into laughter, the shaky and surprisingly silent hee-hee-hee he snickers when he finds something particularly hysterical.

I got down on my knees and picked up the pajamas, the trinkets, the lullaby CDs, all those things I tucked away in that top drawer imagining them safe there and free from harm. It’s hard to believe Archie is now tall and agile enough to reach these tiny treasures.

As I cleaned, Archie would stop laughing long enough to offer aloud phrases I’ve uttered one hundred times before to all three children, why-did-you-do-this, what-were-you-thinking, please-help-me-clean-up-these-clothes, this-wasn’t-a-nice-thing-to-do, and I realized then how funny adult sentences sound coming out of small mouths, as well as how accurately Archie remembers every little thing I say.

Last night before bed I helped Jack search for Yellow Blanket, the little satin and velvet security blanket he’s favored since he was an infant. It’s been missing for two days now and while I’m convinced it’s in our house somewhere, I can’t find it.

“Where’s Yellow Blanket?” I asked Jack as I lie on the floor, my arm under the couch up to my shoulder, sliding my hand back and forth, back and forth across the carpet underneath. That was the third time I’d checked beneath that couch, and the fourth time I’d picked my way through that room looking for the missing blanket.

“Don’t know,” Jack answered, then shrugged his shoulder.

Later, after Archie, Kit and Jack were in bed, John helped me plow through the house again to look for that blanket. “Where do you think it went?” he asked me as he held still the stool I was standing on while looking on top of the bookshelves in the library.

“Don’t know,” I answered while shrugging my own shoulders. When I heard my own voice speaking that phrase I realized how accurately Jack’s inflection matched my own when he spoke the same words earlier that night.

Just this afternoon I heard Kit try to comfort Archie when he was sent to time-out for throwing a toy against the window blinds in the family room. (See, it is entirely possible that Yellow Blanket landed on top of the bookshelves in the library.)

“Shh… shhh…” Kit whispered while putting her index finger against her lips. “Sweetie, sweetie, it’s ok.”

Shh. And sweetie. Again, those are my words plucked from my own mouth when I didn’t even know they were paying attention.

We were all sick with a stomach virus, and after the first day the kids decided that they didn’t so much love the beach anyway, and we’d rented this huge beach house with enough bedrooms for everyone only to find ourselves all sleeping together in the same room, in the same bed. So.

Last year, during our drive home from the beach, John and I promised ourselves that we wouldn’t sign up for the same torture this year, wouldn’t subject our babies to the sheer agony of another beach vacation. I swear, they were so miserable that we left a day early to put an end to the torment. John would take a week off work, we decided. We’d make day trips to attractions near home, we agreed.

So that’s what we’ve been doing. John’s home from work this week. On Monday he golfed in a tournament benefiting Camp Spearhead while Archie, Kit, Jack and I got together with Jen, and Marcy, and their beautiful babies. On Monday night my dad, my brother, John and I took Archie to an awards ceremony and dinner associated with the golf tournament and had a wonderful, wonderful time meeting Spearhead campers, parents and enthusiasts. “Hey, look!” we’d say. “This is Archie and he’s a future camper!”

And honestly? It felt so, so good to say that out loud.

Then today John and I took Archie, Kit and Jack to the Georgia Aquarium. We had a really good time and were sure to take photos I’ll post to our photo page later this week.

Tomorrow Archie has an early-morning appointment with the ENT, and after that we’re going to met Kit, Jack and John at the movie theater to see WALL-E. On Wednesday night, Kirby, the only babysitter we’ve ever had who isn’t Tiffany, nor is related to us, is coming to play with the kids while John and I go out to have a nice dinner together. And I’m happy to say, my consummate-planner side notwithstanding, which I have no idea at all what we’ll be doing on Thursday, or the rest of the week.

Maybe we’ll go to the neighborhood pool? Maybe we’ll head up to the mountains to visit this place, or find another one like it? I’m not sure. But I am sure we’ll be together. And that’s vacation enough for me.

But other times Archie, Kit and Jack get along like birds of a feather. They play together, sing together and dance together. One will share with another without being told to do so. Someone else will put their brother’s wellbeing above her own, and another will try to help his sister when John, or Nana, or I am somewhere else, busy in another room.

Just today Kit ran up to Archie and gave him a gigantic hug when he arrived home after school. She cried, too, when she, Jack and I dropped Archie off this morning. “No Archie go school,” she insisted. “Archie come wit-a me!” Yesterday it was Jack who greeted his brother at the door open-armed, and who fussed when it was time to leave the house in the morning, time to take Archie to school.

On Wednesday morning as the twins were watching Sesame Street and I was picking up around the house, Archie’s teacher called. He’d been bit by another student, she said, and then went on to explain that it was the school’s policy to offer Archie blood work because the bite had broken through his skin.

I panicked, of course, the moment the teacher mentioned blood work. “To screen for what?” I wondered as I shooed Kit and Jack into the garage then lifted them into the car. “For communicable diseases?” I speculated as I pulled out of our driveway just a little too fast.

At school I signed an accident report, a paper consenting to blood work, some other document about HIV and Hepatitis B. I’m signing and I’m wondering how it is we’ve arrived at a place in this world that makes these sorts of documents necessary, commonplace. I’m talking to the teachers and worrying about the next step, about what may be, and it’s Jack who knows what it is that has panicked his mother and asks in a tiny, tinny two-year-old voice, “Oh, no… Archie got bit. Is Archie ok?”

He was, and he is, and although Archie put up a valiant fight, three nurses and I managed to hold him down long enough to allow a fourth nurse to take his blood for these tests that I signed my consent. “He is really strong,” one of the nurses remarked to me as she was holding Archie’s wrist and shoulder, and I had managed to immobilize his head in my armpit.

Archie may be physically strong, but he is strong in other ways, too. And he shares his strength with those around him, or at least inspires the same strength he possesses in those people who share his life. It’s trite to say so, I know, but Archie has made me the person I am today. And he’s making his sister and brother into the children they are, the adults they will someday become, too.

Another morning this week, the twins watched Sesame Street in my bedroom as I was getting dressed in the bathroom. Elmo’s World was on, and this episode was about pets. I heard one child talk to Elmo’s goldfish Dorothy about his pet, and I knew just by listening to the sound of his words coming out of his mouth that the child who was talking was differently-abled. I peered around the doorframe to look at the television screen and saw that the child, a little boy, was in a wheelchair.

I went back to getting dressed, in my bathroom, and soon another child was talking to Dorothy about his pet. I knew instantly that this child had Down syndrome. Again I peered around the doorframe to look at the television screen, and when I did I saw that I was right.

I looked at Kit, seated on the floor, and then at Jack, perched in a chair. I must have caught Jack’s eye because he turned his face to look at me, then smiled. “Archie!” he said as he pointed at the boy on the television screen. He smiled wider, then bounced up and down as he does when his enthusiasm boils over. He clapped his hands, turned his face toward the screen again, then offered, “Like Archie! I wuv Archie.”

I do, too, Jack. We all do.

Just in case you didn’t already know, my Aunt Penny can tell you that John or I often update the photo page at Archie’s Room proper, so even if you never see any photos posted here there are always smiling faces (and sometimes frowning ones, too) waiting for you over there. But next time I’ll try to remember that you all like your photos served up on a silver platter. Yes, I’m listening.

I also wanted to say that John reminded me of something important the other day. While he admits to teasing me when I used the BabyPlus belt during my pregnancy with Archie, he wanted me to tell you, too, that he encouraged me to wear that belt again after Archie’s prenatal diagnosis.

See, I gave up wearing the belt for a couple days because I just couldn’t bring myself to do it after we learned about Archie’s heart defect, and then received confirmation of his extra 21st chromosome a few days later. I was upset, and angry, and it felt a lot like the baby I was getting wasn’t the one I’d ordered in the first place. But John insisted we carry on treating the baby like we’d planned, and right then that meant wearing the belt again, each morning and each night.

So I did. And now I’m glad for it. I wonder sometimes if that belt wasn’t a large contributor to Archie’s linguistic success? He’s an extremely adept auditory learner, my Archie, and while I certainly don’t think any one thing makes or breaks a child, I do think all things contribute to, or detract from a child’s ability to learn.

And even if that belt didn’t do a thing for Archie developmentally (or the twins because I wore it during my second pregnancy, too), it did something for me. It offered me two quiet blocks of time during the day when I did nothing but focus on everything special inside, and that time came to groom the way I think today, of my children, of my life, of this world.

I’m such a silver-platter person in real life. I can’t believe I forgot to be one here, too.

So I participated in the 12th Annual Greenville Candlelight Charity Run last night. Nearly 2,000 runners took part in this event, the largest 5K nighttime race in the Upstate.

It was odd for me, running at night instead of the early morning. When the run started at 9 p.m. I felt like I ought to be winding down my day, not gearing up for a fast three-mile run. But I wanted to do it just the same.

Tera told me on Tuesday night that the run was scheduled for this weekend. Her husband was racing, she said. So after I went for a run Wednesday morning, before the kids woke for the day, before it was time to gather everyone up, load them in the car, and take Archie to school and begin our day together, I got online and registered for the race.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t run much at all since the twins finished school at the beginning of May. I was too lazy to get out of bed early enough to complete my runs before the kids woke up. Or it was too hot for me to run during the day when my mom could watch the kids, or in the evening when John could do the same. Then there was that stomach virus that I picked up from the kids, the one that left me weak, and light-headed, and completely unmotivated to do much more than what needed to be done to get us all through the day. But when Tera told me about the race last week I decided it was time to stop making excuses and get out on the road again.

So I ran Wednesday morning, and then again Friday morning. I felt fine, but not fast. I decided I’d do alright at the race because the course was plotted up and down the Clemson University ICAR complex on Millennium Boulevard, the route I usually run when Archie, Kit and Jack are at school, or in the mornings, or on the weekends. It would be familiar to me, I reasoned. After all, this race is in my own backyard.

Saturday evening before dinner John and I loaded the kids into the car and drove a mile-and-a-half to the registration tent where I picked up my race materials. I was given bib number 727. John joked that this was also his initiation number when he pledged Pi Kappa Phi at the College of Charleston, and that I should go buy a lottery ticket and play these numbers.

As I was finishing the race Saturday night, the last time I looked at the race clock, I saw the time 27 minutes, 27 seconds and thought to myself that I really should have bought that lottery ticket. I told John this after the Hicks family dropped me off at home, and together he and I joked some more about numbers, and lottery tickets, and what it would be like to win a lot of cash.

Then this morning, while watching the morning news, I was surprised to see that yesterday’s evening Pick Three number was 772. John reminded me that he-told-me-so, and then we laughed at what could have been.

Even though I didn’t win yesterday’s lottery, I am satisfied with the race I ran. I am not a sprinter. In fact, after I helped John wrangle Archie, Kit and Jack upstairs for their bedtime bath, I left the house on foot, running the distance to the campus in the hopes of finding my stride before the race start, of shaking those nervous jitters. I figured if I ran the race, the actual event, under 30 minutes that I’d have done well.

So I was excited this morning to see that my chip time was 27 minutes, 12 seconds. This 33-year-old female placed 130th out of 618 women.

When I swam competitively as a kid, my dad would always met me poolside after my events, put his arm around my shoulders and together we’d talk about the race I’d just swum, about my time. “Not too shabby,” he’d always say when I’d done well. And if I’d done really well he’d add, “Not too shabby at all.”

So I’d label last night’s run not-too-shabby. It’s too late now to say I wish I’d actually trained for the race, but it’s never too late to say I know what I can do to run better next time.

And if I ever joke about buying a lottery ticket in the future, would someone please make me do it?

I shouldn’t be surprised by all this growing. Just this morning Kit, Jack and I hauled three big bins of clothing to the consignment shop. The bins were piled full of last winter’s shirts and sweaters, pants and dresses, all too small now for my three children. What remains in their closets are a handful of jeans, too worn for the shop but just right for outside play those early autumn days that, I’m sure, will be here sooner than I now realize.

I stashed away a few special items of clothing, too, to help me remember when Archie, Kit and Jack were small. I didn’t keep their dress-up clothing; I never do. Instead I hang onto well-worn shirts, the ones I help the kids put on early in the afternoon, after school, when they exchange their good clothing for comfort pieces.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time sorting through our collection of books, deciding which books to move to the shelves, newly built and freshly painted, in my study. Last month my study was our playroom, a first-floor room filled with toys and children’s books, a craft table and a stereo that plays all Archie’s favorite CDs over and over again.

As wonderful as our playroom sounds in words written here for you, the kids had lost interest in it, deciding they’d rather play on the kitchen floor, or upstairs in their bedrooms. So John and I followed Archie, Kit and Jack’s cues and moved the toys and furniture, books and music, upstairs to our unused bonus room and reclaimed the downstairs space. When we did we sorted through the mess, discarding the baby toys and making room for all these big kid accessories we’ve been acquiring over the past few months.

While I went through my books I set aside the ones about babies and toddlers, about how to care for and nurture them, and the books about picking names, both the silly ones and the serious ones, then tossed them all in the consignment shop bins. They’re gone now, too, and letting these books go didn’t hurt an iota of what I suspected it might.

I’ll also tell you that I packed up the books I’d collected about heart defects, about having a child with special needs, about Down syndrome specifically, and the ones about childhood cancer, too, in another box. I want to take these books somewhere special, a place where they’ll be appreciated by another parent the way I appreciated them. I hope these books will be a lifeline for someone else the way they were for me, that they’ll pull another mother through the muck and into a bright place that makes her feel confident enough in herself, in her child, in her community to pass them on again.

Just this week, just through the sorting of things, I was struck by the way our days are grouped together in phases. We are in and out of them, through them and between them, without knowing so more than we acknowledge their existence. One phase ends, another begins, and so many are still ahead of us waiting to be defined by our days.

I was thinking this morning that these phases are like compromises, really. I remembered being younger and how my father would round out a disagreement by telling me, “Someday you’re going to have to learn to compromise.” Never, I’d vow to myself inside my own head. But I was too naive then to know that an adult can comprise without losing herself, too.

I was thinking this morning of phases and compromises, of time and growing children, because just this week Archie’s decided to eat small bites of actual food during mealtimes. I’ll sit beside him and remind him to chew, chew, chew, and then to swallow down to his stomach. He’ll sputter a few times, then ask me to comfort him by agreeing that “Dr. McLear fixed his choke,” a sentence summarizing the artful brainwashing my parents, John and I have performed on Archie since his adenoidectomy this spring. But after we get through the initial protestations and subsequent affirmations, Archie will slowly and deliberately finish his meal in tune with the cheering voices and clapping hands of his family.

“He’s made me as proud as a mother who’s sending her firstborn to Harvard,” I explained to John earlier this week after the kids were asleep and we were watching television together. I said this to my husband, out of the blue, as a thoughtful summarization of our struggle with Archie’s feeding since his first days in the NICU.

First Archie drank just fine from his bottle, then he wouldn’t drink at all. Then he was intubated and breathing, not feeding, became our focus. Weeks later, the day before Archie’s open-heart surgery, one of the intensivists talked to us about how we’d all work together to teach Archie to drink from a bottle during his recovery period, but how we shouldn’t be surprised if Archie was sent home from the hospital with a feeding tube surgically inserted into his stomach.

But then days later, when Archie was first offered a bottle after surgery, he drank it all without dribbling a drop. That ended, though, when Archie wasn’t allowed to drink expressed breast milk anymore, and was instead given Portagen. And so both in the hospital and at then at home we force fed Archie this Portagen and taught him to be anxious about eating, not soothed by it.

I can tell you the same story about Archie’s introduction to pureed food, and the typical foods used by parents to introduce babies to chewing, except I’d have to substitute the phrase open-heart surgery with the word leukemia. But even with those small changes this story’s conflict and resolution would remain the same: Eating makes Archie anxious, and the push-me-pull-you of feeding between he and me, or he and his father, or he and his grandmother, or he and whomever is feeding him is a tug-o-war at best.

But not this week. This week my oldest boy eats, not as he should, but as near to normal as he ever has before. So I celebrate Archie’s biggest achievement by telling his father that it’s as if Archie’s going to Harvard, and only now while writing this do I remember this story.

Each morning and night when I was pregnant with Archie I’d play for him a recorded beat, a noise some psychologist somewhere based on a mother’s heartbeat, through little speakers placed on either side of my belly. The beat would thump, thump, thump, and every few days the thumping would get faster, its frequency more complex, based on that day’s lesson. John would laugh when I’d wear the belt with the speakers around my belly, but I’d scold him playfully by wagging my finger and predicting, “Yeah, but we’ll see who’s laughing when this baby grows up and goes to Harvard someday.”

That exchange between John and I happened only during the days before the ultrasound that turned our world on its ear. After that ultrasound, no one mentioned Harvard again until I said it the other night, likening it to Archie’s progress with eating.

Phases and compromises. Time and growing children. And growing mothers, too. All of us together, older and stronger and wiser, learning as we go.

My parents came over to our house tonight to visit Archie, Kit and Jack. While John and Kit were outside watering the plants, and Archie and Jack were singing silly songs with my mother, together my father and I watched the NBC Nightly News coverage of Tim Russert’s passing.

My dad told me that he met Tim Russert and his son, Luke, once in the airport, that he sat with them both while they waited for their connection, the same plane my father was scheduled to board. All three were headed to Boston, my father for work and Tim Russert and his son to visit Boston College. Tim Russert’s son was in high school then and he was trying to decide where he wanted to go to school.

“I guess that was about four or five years ago then,” my father remarked while watching tonight’s news coverage. “Huh.”

“So you really talked to them then?” I asked my dad.

“Oh, yeah,” he told me. “He was a really nice guy. We shared a good conversation.”

I don’t mind telling you that it makes me feel sad to know we all won’t benefit from one of Tim Russert’s good conversations this Sunday morning.

Watching that video makes me actually want to go out and do my ten-mile run tomorrow morning. And it makes me want to ask you to go with me just so I can show you what this momma can do when she puts her mind to it. I don’t mean to sound egotistical, or anything, but I am being truthful here.

The video also makes me want one of those ball-with-a-handle weight thingies. I’d love to toss one of those around in our backyard while the kids are napping. John, maybe I ought to get one of these ball-with-a-handle thingies instead of signing up for that Pilates class we were talking about the other day? Because the thought of me tossing that thing around? I like it. I like it a lot.

Now, my husband knows me for the competitive freak of nature I am, but I bet the rest of you never guessed I have this side to my personality. Or maybe you did because it’s obvious and I’ve just been lying to myself all these years. Maybe it’s all too obvious when I go out of my way to make things perfect all the time, even though I’m well aware that there is no such thing as perfect, no matter what?

And, hey, John’s siblings and your spouses? Yes, all ten of you. This is why I refuse to engage in games with you people during our family get-togethers. Because, try as I may, I’ll always get all psycho and obsessed with beating you down into the ground. I can’t help it. It’s a character flaw, I know. And if I were to participate in your silly family games and lost? Then I’d have to hide in another room and sulk like a little baby. So see? I’m not trying to be anti-social, I swear. I’m just trying to save a little face.

If I can even save any face at all after writing such a post.

I’ve taken several movie clips in the past few weeks, too, and I hope John will help me get them on the site soon. This isn’t me needling him, or anything. I’m just sayin’.

We were at Falls Park, my mother, the kids and I. We’d just parked the car, walked down the stairs that wrap around High Cotton, and were looking in the windows of the artists’ studios, right there near the water.

I was trying to entice Archie, Kit and Jack to run through the water sprayers, to get up close and take a good look at the train sculpture inside the wall. But the kids seemed timid, like they needed a little more time to warm up to their mother’s crazy ideas for fun before they were willing to go ahead and commit fully and with abandon.

That’s when Jack broke away from us and ran toward the water. “Go see ducks!” he declared as I chased after him. I was afraid he’d trip and fall on the rocks, or into the water. He didn’t fall as I feared, but instead slipped on the bank beside the water, covering the back of his shorts and t-shirt with mud.

I picked him up, turned the two of us around, and started back up the bank, toward the sidewalk. I carried Jack with one arm, he facing forward and dangling between my legs, low to the ground and away from my body. He was muddy after all, and I was trying to avoid getting muddy, too.

I’m sure you know by now that I slipped, too, climbing back up that bank. When I did I fell forward and slammed Jack’s forehead into the concrete with the velocity of my body falling behind him. I cannot describe to you how awful it sounded when Jack’s head hit the cement, or how I winced as I watched his head bounce up from the force of the fall, and then snap forward to hit the sidewalk again.

My mother was standing in front of us then, Jack and me, and for a moment both she and I hesitated to reach forward for Jack, who was lying there face down on the ground. We agreed later, mom and I, that we feared right then, inside that silent second, there would be blood and brains oozing from Jack’s forehead, seeping across the concrete.

But I grabbed for Jack, and my mother pulled him from my arms. I was panicked and terrified, and I knew she was trying to protect Jack from my anxiety. I started yelling about going to the emergency room, and I was wringing my hands and pacing purposelessly. Kit was running around with the palms of her hands against her cheeks, all the while hollering, “Oh no! Jackie Moore’s hurt!” and Archie just sort of shut down, then sat down, and fought me when I pulled him to his feet, dragging him back up the stairs by the restaurant, back to our car.

All the while Jack was moaning, not crying. He never passed out. He never threw up. His eyes never rolled back into his head. He tried many times to touch the golf ball-sized bump on his forehead, and said once or twice, “It hurts! My boo-boo hurts!”

It wasn’t until mom and I managed to get everyone into the car, strapped into their car seats, that I realized I had mud up and down my legs and that my wrist hurt, that I’d pulled something in my neck and in the arm I’d used to carry Jack up the bank by the water. That’s when I called John at work and he agreed to meet us at the hospital.

By the time we got there it was obvious Jack was going to be just fine. His head looked like hell, but he was acting like himself and didn’t have any symptoms that would indicate he’d sustained a concussion. In the emergency room Jack sat for x-rays, which all thankfully came back clean, and the ice pack the nurse gave us helped to keep the bump on Jack’s head from swelling into the size of a softball.

I’m happy to say that Jack is no worse for the ware, but I am shaken up. Completely, right down to the core. And that’s a big thing for this tough cookie. Holy hell, I keep thinking, I almost killed my kid.

So I pick up the house, wipe down the kitchen counters, fold a load of clean towels warm from the dryer, and then go to bed. Go to bed, close my eyes, and sleep in a deep, down dreamless way until one of the twins, their eyes barely opened, picks their way down the darkened hall and then climbs onto our bed, folding their small body between us.

All of this happens silently, seamlessly, and it’s during the dark, quiet moments of these night-wakings that my words find their way to me again, writing long, languid sentences inside my head. And then, in that time of tired silence, I want to come here, write those words here, but I don’t because its night and it will be morning soon and there will be children running down the hall, awake and laughing, who will call to me, “Mommy! Mommy! Wake up and come here now!”

This morning Archie, Kit, Jack and I ran through the sprinkler in our backyard. Yesterday my mother treated us to a matinee at the movie theater. On Sunday John and I packed our little red wagon with beach towels and pool toys, straw cups filled with juice and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, and then marched all three children up the street and around the block to our neighborhood pool. On Saturday we five went to a birthday party, and on Friday I took Archie, Kit and Jack to a picnic at the park to celebrate the end of the school year with Archie’s teachers and classmates.

While we were at the park, during the picnic, I met a couple mothers, their husbands and children, too, whom I’ve never seen before, but who read this blog. Meeting these women was a treat for me as it felt as if they knew me, even though they’ve only met me through my stories, the ones I share here on the computer screen.

We talked about that, these women and I, how sharing our thoughts and experiences with an anonymous audience allows us to see each other in a way we otherwise may not. How all this writing and sharing we do online reveals, at least to me, the commonality of our experiences, the universality of community.

I was reminded of this conversation again Sunday night as John and I watched This American Life on television. This episode we watched was the story of a single life, told by weaving together stories from the lives of people all over the United States, all named John Smith. By the end of the episode, I was teary-eyed and sniffling because it all seemed so profound to me, what this television show was saying, how we all believe we’re so different, but how we aren’t very different at all, not inside our hearts where it counts the most.

Maybe it wasn’t the profundity of the show’s message, though, that affected me so deeply. I think rather that it was a combination of many things, all brought to a culmination Saturday night during a dinner John and I attended as part of the Charity Classic golf tournament.

There, at the President’s party, I sat next to my first boss, who now collaborates with John at work, and across the table from my mother’s friend, whose house I’d just left nearly five years ago when I decided I needed hot, greasy French fries, right then, with vinegar on the side; my first craving associated with a pregnancy, Archie’s pregnancy, that I hadn’t even guessed at yet.

Before our meal was served Saturday night, the master of ceremonies introduced a short video featuring the Children’s Cancer Center, the clinic where I’ve taken Archie for his appointments since he was small, strapped into an infant car seat and attached to tubing tied onto a portable oxygen tank I carried on my back. There on the screen were photos of the treatment rooms our family knows so well, flashing between footage of a woman speaking, a mother who lost her son to cancer. Like John, the boy’s father works for BI-LO, and his mother was saying on this video how special it was to her that the company partnered this year with the hospital system to create an even better Children’s Cancer Center then we’ve known in the past.

Then the master of ceremonies introduced Dr. Stroud, our Dr. Stroud, who was sitting with this mother and her husband, and suddenly I felt it fall down all around me, the knowingness of how we’re all laced together through time, through experience, our days tied onto each other, all of us sliding by sideways.

John and I sought out Dr. Stroud later, after the presentation, and we all hugged and he wanted to know how Archie was. He said he’d looked at Archie’s slides from our last few visits and that Archie’s blood looked great. And then Dr. Stroud introduced us to his wife, whom we’d never met before, and she assured us that she knew who Archie was, without fail.

We met this doctor, John and I, when Archie was only a few days old. Then there was so much time stretched out before us, all those days until now, filled full by stories we couldn’t yet tell. Archie was a baby, we’d never imagined the twins then, and there would be surgeries, and treatments, and therapies, and tears.

Just last month John packed our three cribs in the back of his Jeep and hauled them off to Goodwill. There are bags filled with toys we hope to sell this weekend in our neighborhood garage sale. We’ve traded days spent in the hospital with time outside, at the park, at the pool, at the movies, running through a sprinkler in our backyard. Everything changes everyday. The children are growing, they’re learning, and I’m growing and learning, too. But there is still so much same-ness, those commonalities that tie us to each other down through the years, the ones that make our memories precious pieces of our present.

But still there are many, many things in this big world that aggravate me, but seem to leave the general population entirely nonplussed. Whatever, I say, to that general population. These concerns of mine are real and should be acknowledged, accepted and accounted for as this big world goes about its business every day, all day.

I spent this morning running errands with the twins. We went to our neighborhood supermarket to collect ingredients for the hore’dourves I plan to serve to my guests tomorrow night during a wine tasting I’m hosting for Kerri, Archie’s physical therapist at school who also happens to be a wine steward and salesperson. After we left the store I decided to bring the food home before the twins and I ventured to the mall, too, to pick up a few incidentals I needed for the party. Then Kit, Jack and I picked Archie up at school and we all four made a quick trip to the gourmet grocery store to look for the few items I couldn’t find at the supermarket.

Yes, running errands with small children is difficult, but that’s not the pet peeve I’m here to write about now. (And, really, that’s not even a pet peeve for me, running errands with small children. Rather, it’s a way of life.)

I can almost always find a two-seater cart at the grocery store. And I did this morning while I was shopping with the twins. Those carts work great when I’m alone with two children, or when all five of us are out together and John can push a regular shopping cart carrying our third child.

Our gourmet grocery store has two-seater carts, too, but they also have one or two three-seater carts, which always make my shopping trip deliciously simple should I be fortunate enough to find one available. And I guess that’s the sort of cart I was hoping to use, the three-seater kind, when we went this afternoon, Archie, Kit, Jack and I.

So this is where one of my eight-thousand-two-hundred-twenty-five pet peeves comes in. Why, oh why, does an adult with only one companion child feel the need to use a two-seater cart, or even one of the coveted three-seater carts? Seriously? Why?

I may not know the answer to that question, but I am sure of one thing. That adult who hogged up one of the multiple-seater carts for their single child? I bet she’s never had to navigate a grocery store with three toddlers, two who like to go their own way and their older brother who thinks it’s side-splittingly funny to knock jarred items off the shelf, right onto the concrete floor.

Yes, I’m definitely sure of that.

It’s obvious he feels better today, but still I kept Archie home. I decided one day away from class would be ok, and maybe restorative, too. It’s naptime now, and all three children are upstairs, quiet. I hope they sleep a little, especially Archie.

As I was putting Kit and Jack down for their naps, I could hear Archie pulling down the books on the shelves in his room. That’s what he does; pulls all the books down into a big, messy pile on the floor and then picks them up, stacking the books on the shelves again by himself, naming them as he goes. “Blueberries for Sal, Pinkalicious, Clifford, the Big Red Dog…”

When I got to Archie’s room I helped him pick up the rest of his big, messy pile. As I was putting the last few books on the bottom shelf, Archie reached for my wrist, put his face in front of mine so I’d have to look into his eyes and said, “’Jamas, ’jamas I want to please get ’jamas.”

So I dressed him in a pair of pajamas, cool and clean like his sheets, and helped him climb onto his bed. I kissed his forehead and told him that when he does things like he just did, asking for his pajamas so nicely, that it makes me feel so good about him and helps me to forget about his whiney, temperamental days, and my fears that things will somehow change and be bad all the time.

That’s my note to myself today. That it won’t always be bad. That the good will come back, too, if you can hang on long enough to let it.

One of the television programs for which I’ve always held a deep and abiding love is Sex and the City. Who hasn’t, you ask. Even still, I loved that show something special when I watched it Sunday nights on HBO, and I still do today.

This morning iTunes told me that the Sex and the City movie soundtrack I preordered was available for me to download. So I diligently did, and I’ve been listening to all those new songs on my “Recently Added” list most of the day. Jack’s been doing his best to sing along, but he hasn’t learned the words yet so mostly he’s just lah-lah-lahing and hum-hum-humming and it’s been fun for me listen to him, this little boy seated at my kitchen table playing with Matchbox cars whose singing voice is uniting my past and my present, just like that.

You may have guessed already that I’m looking forward to the movie premiere later this week. The movie opens here this Friday. I’m thinking that after I help John get the kids to bed that night I ought to catch the late show, or maybe even make a go of it Saturday night. I could Fandango tickets so I’d be sure to have a seat, no matter how long the kids manage to draw out our bedtime routine.

It’s funny, you know? I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie at the theater. No wait, I can. My sister-in-law Karen and I took the kids to see Enchanted over New Year’s. But this trip to the theater would be different. It would be a treat, an indulgence. Most movies I see now are on DVD, John and I watching them together Saturday nights after the kids are tucked away in bed. John almost always falls asleep on the couch leaving me awake alone, laughing or crying by myself at the movie on the screen. What would be so different if I sat in the theater doing the same?

Even still, I’d enjoy some company. Anyone want to join me? We’d have a fabulous time, I’m sure. Us and those girls, their cosmos and their shoes, their clothes. Reminding us of that life we used to live before babies, before little boys and little girls, rearranged priorities and that space in time when we never would have imagined we’d one day forgo designer heels for Huggies diapers.

John had to work yesterday so if I wanted to go to our neighborhood’s Memorial Day pool party, I knew I’d have to take the kids myself.

Taking three kids anywhere is difficult. But taking two two-and-a-half-year olds and one four-year old (who usually acts like a third two-year old through no real fault of his own) to a pool is an endeavor reserved for the bravest of heart.

Still, I really wanted to go to the party. Our family only made it to the pool a handful of times last summer. I have to admit that our absence had its repercussions, making me wish I’d done things differently ever since. So I promised myself it’d be different this year. After all, Archie, Kit and Jack are older and more capable now; they listen better and are learning to appreciate boundaries, too. I could do it, I decided. I could learn to take the kids to the pool without John’s help.

Still, I was anxious about it all. So for this summer’s first trip to the pool I enlisted the help of my niece and nephew, Mimi and William. We’d seen them Saturday night, anyway, and they asked if they could come over to our house on Monday since they had the day off from school. I knew they’d be willing to help me, and that they’d probably be excited to do it, too.

So yesterday morning I packed up our red wagon with towels and floaty vests, a cooler filled with drinks and a bag packed full of stuff I worried we may need. I took Archie, Kit and Jack’s clothing off, helped them put on swim diapers, lathered them up with sun block and put their bathing suits on. Archie lost his suit immediately; its waist was too wide for his slender hips. I tried a few tricks to keep the suit put, but none worked so I decided then to let him go in just his swim diaper.

I regretted that decision during our walk up the street to the pool. Archie, who is painfully thin, looked even more so wearing just a diaper and sandals. But he smiled widely at William, walking beside him, as his sandals smacked, smacked, smacked against the concrete, and I could tell Archie was glad to have this time to play with his brother and sister, his cousins.

When we got to the pool our neighbors welcomed us warmly and offered their children’s toys to my kids. It was heartwarming, really, to see how everyone helped me watch Archie, Kit and Jack without me asking them to do it, and without them ever offering aloud to do it, either. Our time at the pool yesterday was really one of those it-takes-a-village moments. I was glad for it, and felt renewed by it, too.

There are one hundred or more reasons why John and I decided to move into this neighborhood. Before we moved here we’d built another home, before Archie, when we lived a different life. It was the sort of home you see in magazines, perfect in every way.

But after Archie was born, we decided that the house was too far away from our baby’s doctors, from the hospital, from the schools we hoped our baby would some day be able to attend. And there weren’t many children in that neighborhood either, at least not many Archie’s age.

I’d quit my job when Archie was born, too. Before Archie’s discharge from MUSC, a doctor, really the head doctor, asked John and I who would give up their career to stay at home with Archie. “Because he won’t make it through the winter if you send him to daycare,” he leveled with us. We knew he was right, John and I, so I handed in my resignation and walked away, without a second thought, from a job I loved and a workplace that loved me.

My salary had paid our mortgage, and a few other bills, too. We knew we could make it without my income, and we did. But the money was tight, and John and I grew to resent the sacrifices we had to make in order to fall within our budget each month. Besides, what was the point of it all when this house, this perfect home, didn’t seem so perfect for us anymore? John and I began to believe as if Archie had delivered us into a new life, a new reality that seemed sharp around the edges, but the sharpness had a clarity to it we’d somehow missed before.

So we put the house on the market and it sold in two days. We moved into my parents’ house and began searching for our new home. We wanted to move downtown, into a charming, old home, but the houses we found within our price range were too small, or too rundown. We looked and looked. We spun our wheels. And we disagreed and fought, too. But in the end we decided that this new dream, the one with an old house situated along side a tree-lined street with cracked sidewalks and front porches within walking distance of our kids’ elementary school, wasn’t going to work either.

But by now John and I had become well equipped at redefining our expectations. So we did and one day we happened upon this new development, one that was being built right behind John’s office. Here it was and we wondered if maybe it’d work for us. We were surprised, too, that it’d been right here under our noses all this time.

So we walked through the model and met the sales agent, and before we knew it we signed a contract on a lot, laid down our earnest money and picked our flooring, our cabinets, our carpet, our appliances. “I hope this isn’t a bad thing,” the sales agent confided. “But I’ll be your neighbor, too. I’m building on the lot right next door to you.”

And it wasn’t a bad thing. In fact it ended up being a really good thing. Robin, the sales agent, and her family make great neighbors. As does everyone else here. I admit I’ve finally figured this out in spite of myself, but I’m happy to make that admission.

For me yesterday turned out to be more than a nice day at the pool. It was an affirmation, really. An indication that we’d done all the right things after all. That these huge decisions we made along the way have shaped this life we’re living, John, Archie, Kit, Jack and me. That this is what we’ve been searching for all along, that new homes thrown up by a national builder can cleverly disguise an old-fashioned type of neighborhood with kids tramping up and down the streets, and parents who look after your kids as if they were their own, with neighbors who know your business, and friends nearby who care.

That it’s been here all this time, right under my nose.

So in an effort to make laundry fun I like to try out different detergents, fabric softeners, and dryer sheets.

I like Snuggle Exhilarations Melon and Lotusflower Lift fabric softener. Wisk smells like John’s dad’s apartment did. Vanilla and Lavender Ultra Downy Simple Pleasures smells like the sheets on the beds in the guest rooms at my parents’ house. And when I want to reward myself with a special treat I buy Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day laundry products. I’ve tried them all, and I think I like the basil scent the best.

But this morning when Kit, Jack and I went to the grocery store we decided to try something different. I bought Ultra Gain Soothing Sensations Lavender Lilac Moment detergent, and Southern Home Brand Supreme Softness Spring Fresh fabric softener and dryer sheets.

While I was folding my first load of clothes, fresh from the dryer, I discovered that this most recent combination of cleaners makes our laundry smell exactly like it was washed in Johnson’s & Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.

And, oh God, does it smell good.

The teachers had already hugged me that morning, after the twins marched into their classroom one last time, this time carrying big, beautiful bouquets of flowers in their arms, one for each teacher. When I helped Kit and Jack hand Amy and Cindy the gift bags we brought for each of them, both teachers embraced me. I could tell by the way they wrapped their arms around me that the hugs meant something special, and I appreciated that closeness that passed between us, the one that only we women can share because we know. We know.

We didn’t hug again later, though, as I left the ice cream party. We shared kind words and sweet sentiments, these teachers and I, but no hugs passed between us again. Kit and Jack hugged them one last time, running into their outstretched arms, the twins burying their faces into the teachers’ necks. And it felt good to watch my twins do this because it said so much about their time spent with these women in that classroom, but no one hugged me.

I think I missed out on another hug from Amy and Cindy because our hug earlier that morning had meant so much. I understand that and am ok with it, too. But I don’t know why the other mothers didn’t reach out to me the way they reached out to one another.

I know I must seem awfully hard-boiled at times. I know, too, that more often than not people’s first impression of me isn’t accurate, and that after people get to know me they usually see that I’m tolerable after all, even likeable, maybe even loveable if they’re willing to give me the room to prove myself.

Maybe I haven’t given these other mothers at Kit and Jack’s school enough time to get to know me, the real me that usually gets buried underneath layers of contradiction? Self-confidence tempered by self-criticism. Social awkwardness overcompensated for by an overwhelming outward-ness. Truth above tact, no matter what. So many complex negations going on inside my head.

Maybe these mothers know each other outside of this preschool class, I wondered. Maybe I could have tried harder to make them my friends, I speculated. Maybe I’m over-thinking everything, misreading it all again, I questioned.

And then there is this secret thought I carry around, buried deep down inside my heart, that I only entertain sometimes. Maybe, I worried, it’s because of Archie?

This thought, the one that it’s Archie who separates me from so many other mothers, has two sides, one I understand and one I don’t. The side of the thought I understand is the one concerning all of Archie’s health issues. It’s odd to know someone who’s been through all we’ve experienced with Archie. Sometimes people don’t know what to say, what not to say. Sometimes I can’t identify with people because what they think is a big deal doesn’t seem like much of a deal at all to me. Sometimes these experiences intimidate people, and put off others. Sometimes, I think, it’s easier for people to keep their distance than to deal with these things that make them feel uncomfortable.

But the side of the thought I don’t understand is the one concerning Archie’s disability. Sometimes I see that Archie’s differences make people uncomfortable. And that’s ok because once upon a time some of the things Archie does probably would have made me feel uncomfortable, too. But what’s not ok is when people can’t push through that uncomfortable feeling, can’t see the loveable little boy behind the ticks, or the tantrums, or the things Archie can’t quite do just yet, and see him simply for a kid who is trying to find his way through the world, who wants to learn and play and dance around like the other kids, a kid who is more alike his peers than he is different.

I worry sometimes deep down inside my heart that when the mothers of the kids in the twins’ class were promising each other that they’d call soon to schedule a play date, that the reason they didn’t include me in their conversation is because they worried that inviting Kit and Jack over to play may mean they’d have to invite Archie, too.

I was thinking all this yesterday in Kit and Jack’s classroom when one mother stopped on her way out the door to put her hand on my back. I was kneeling next to Kit, wiping melted ice cream from her mouth, when this mother reached out to me, briefly rubbing her palm across my shoulders. She told me once months ago that she’s a twin, too. She told me many other times through her actions that she respected me, that she was fond of my children, that she valued Archie and enjoyed interacting with him.

And then yesterday she reached out to me. “We’ll see you soon,” she promised.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I hope so!”

I should have asked her for her phone number. I should have told her I’d like to get together sometime soon, that I wanted my children to play with her son, that it would be nice if we could be friends, too. I should have reached out to her, like the other mothers reached for one another.

But I didn’t. And I’m sorry for that. I hope I do better next time.

I’ve really enjoyed watching Kit and Jack become a part of their classroom community. They’ve both matured a lot, and have learned many new and exciting things, too. And I’ve certainly benefited from my mornings away from all three children. Those mornings afforded me the opportunity to keep appointments, finish projects often impeded by little hands, and pursue interests outside of my mommy job description.

Because Kit, Jack and I have benefited so much from this learning experience, I wanted to do something extra special for Amy and Cindy. So I put together a really great gift for each of them, and wrote them both an identical thank-you note that I taped to the outside of their presents.

Here’s what I said:

Dear Cindy,

Sincerely,
Anne

Tera, Jerod’s mom, posted photos of the party on her blog. Check them out and see if you can spot the kids, John and me!

At any rate, I’m telling you this because a new BI-LO web site went live this afternoon at exactly 3 o’clock. John and his team of software engineers have been working with the BI-LO marketing department and Erwin-Penland, a Greenville advertising company, for several months to launch this site and today is the day all their due diligence reaches fruition.

When John first arrived at BI-LO the supermarket had a sub-par web presence. Last spring John and his team launched a site more befitting BI-LO’s image. A few months ago John’s department rolled out the supermarket’s first in-store kiosk network, a technology that enables shoppers to download recipes, shopping lists, and personalized coupon offers while their in the store, as well as helps shoppers locate specific items in the aisles. And now today they’ve done this.

John’s sacrificed a lot of family time to accomplish these successes at BI-LO. Most nights I leave him working in the family room when I go up to bed. Some nights he’s not even home then because he’s still working, or because he’s come home, eaten dinner, played with the kids, helped me tuck Archie, Kit and Jack into bed, and then has gone back to the office to work some more.

John works weekends, too, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shushed the kids and shooed them into another part of our house so John could take a phone call from a co-worker, contractor or vendor. In fact, just last month John missed a day at the beach with his family so he could stay behind and work with his team to resolve one of those drop-dead project issues that rise to the surface every now and then.

But in real life we don’t talk about how hard John works. Both he and I come from families who are accustomed to hard work and high expectations. We’ve learned to give life our every effort and expect the best from our endeavors. Add to this recipe for success, handed down from one generation to another, a little bit of luck tossed in for good measure and we all usually do come out on top.

In real life I’m guilty of pointing out John’s flaws more often than I am of praising him. I complain about the long hours, and the late-night phone calls, and John’s bad moods at home when things at the office are strained. I don’t like the nights he’s away from home, or the morning routine that I slog through without his extra set of hands when he’s not here.

But I am thankful for the stability his conscientious industriousness provides our family. And I am proud of him and his accomplishments even if I never say so aloud.

So if you live in South Carolina think of our family next time you drive by a BI-LO supermarket. Or better yet, visit the Super BI-LO nearest you and check out the “My BI-LO” kiosk located at the front of the store, near the floral department.

If you live faraway, please just visit the new site and click on a few links for traffic’s sake. It’s true that things like this site are built by teammates and contractors, but behind each teammate and contractor stands a family who did their part to see the project through, too.

If you’d like to see recent photos of the kids (Hi, Aunt Penny!), I have a few links for you to visit. Here’s one photo each of Archie, Kit and Jack at Trey’s birthday party last weekend. And here are several photos of Archie taken by Max’s mom Jennifer during last week’s class field trip to Hollywild Animal Park.

You can also visit my sister-in-law Camille’s photo blog for more shots of my children. From time to time Archie, Kit and Jack make guest appearances in Camille’s photographs. And while you’re there you can visit with my nephews, Hayes and Rhys, as well.

When Amy and Heather, Archie’s home psychical therapist, were here last week Kit and Jack got into Amy’s bag while she, Heather and Archie were upstairs, reading books in the hallway. Inside Amy’s bag Kit discovered the cookie jar, tucked it under her arm, then walked around the house pretending to eat the cookies inside.

Jack, upset that Kit had something he didn’t, tried his best to wrestle the jar from under his sister’s arm. As soon as they began screaming and hair pulling, I intervened; making sure Kit gave Jack some cookies of his own to hold.

By the time Amy and Heather were ready to leave, the twins had managed to misplace the number four cookie. I tried to find it, but Amy had to leave before I could locate the lost plastic pastry. As Amy and Heather walked out the door, Kit promised, “Amy, I find-a your cookie for you, okay?

And she did. The next morning Kit found the missing cookie inside the urn on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. I put it on our countertop, and it’s been sitting there until today when Jack found it. Delighted by his discovery, Jack carried the cookie around the house for the most of the morning, counting, “Four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!” Every time he finished the sequence of numbers he’d put the cookie down, clap his hands, and then cheer for himself, “Hooray!” After he cheered, Jack would pick the cookie up again, point to the numbered side, announce, “Four…” and then begin counting again.

It took me a little while to spot this pattern, the part when Jack pointed to the number and named it aloud, but once I did I asked him, “Do you know what number that is?”

He nodded his head yes.

“Okay, so what number is it?” I asked pointing to the cookie.

“Four,” Jack replied, and then he smiled a knowing sort of the smile, the one he gets when he’s sure he has pleased me.

It’s funny, you know? I count with the kids. And I read books with the kids. And some of those books have numbers in them that we talk about every now and then. But I’ve never intentionally taught the kids what each number looks like.

Right then I would have asked Kit, too, if she recognized the number, but she’d watched me talk to Jack so I was sure she’d answer my question correctly if she truly knew the number, or not.

But when Archie got home from school I made a point of showing him the cookie. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh! Amy’s cookie!” he declared.

“Right,” I confirmed. Then I pointed at the number. “What’s this?”

“It’s a cookie,” Archie answered again.

“Yes, it’s a cookie. But what’s this number?”

“This is a four,” Archie answered as he pointed at the number. Then he turned away from me, busying him self with other things.

For me, this is the part of motherhood that’s so gratifying. I love it when my children surprise me with their accomplishments. I love it how I teach them without ever meaning to do it. I love how they’ve taught me to expect the unexpected. I love how the unexpected is usually good, mostly gratifying, and never, ever mundane.

I tried to paste it here as a button, but was unable to. So you’ll have to visit the link to take a look at my Nike Milestone award certificate.

If you’re interested, Nike also had this to say about my bests:

Personal Records

FARTHEST RUN
13.45mi

FASTEST MILE
8′46″

FASTEST 5K
28′27″

FASTEST 10K
56′27″

Not too shabby, huh?

This new neighbor made a remark about how close in age the kids are, so I told her Archie’s age, and then Kit and Jack’s age. She paused for moment to take a long draw from her cigarette, and then exhaled, breathing her words together as if they were one and the same, “So-then-they’re-twins,-right?”

“They are,” I confirmed.

“Are they identical?” she wanted to know.

Okay. I’ve answered this question many times, and each time I wonder why the person asking doesn’t see Kit, a girl, and Jack, a boy, and just know that there’s no way the two can be identical twins.

So I respond to this new neighbor the same way I’ve responded to many people before her. “Kit’s a girl,” I say. “And Jack’s a boy.” And as I answer I gesture toward each child in turn.

Kit, at that moment, was twirling around the backyard, wearing a pink princess costume dress, plastic high-heeled shoes, and lots and lots of dime-store jewelry. Right then Jack was playing t-ball with a red bat, blue stand and white ball. You couldn’t have picked more stereotypical activities for my girl and boy at that instant if you’d tried.

The neighbor puffed on her cigarette again, and then asked, “Yeah? So?”

“Yeah, well, they can’t be identical if one’s a girl and the other’s a boy.”

“No, they can,” she retorted. I could tell by her tone that she was adamant in her belief, too.

“How?” I wanted to know.

Apparently she has a sister-in-law with boy-girl twins who are identical, this new neighbor explained to me. “They did that DNA test, and everything,” she assured me.

I backed off then, not wanting to begin our relationship, this new neighbor’s and mine, on the wrong foot. But after the kids and I finished playing outside, after we’d picked our outdoor toys up and headed inside, I consulted Google just to make sure I was right as the neighbor seemed so resolute in her insistence. And I was.

Aside from this conversation with my neighbor, there are other questions I’m regularly asked about the twins. For instance, I’m often asked if Kit and Jack are “natural,” or if I took some sort of fertility drug, or endured another type of fertility treatment. From the time I was pregnant perfect strangers were asking me that question. The answer is no, but I wonder why I even need to provide one in the first place, why it’s anyone’s business after all.

Another question often posed to me by strangers and acquaintances alike is whether I plan on having more children. Honestly, Kit and Jack were newborns when I started fielding this question, and I still find myself answering it today. Again, I don’t know why the size of my family is anyone’s business other than John and my own, but still I’m asked this question all the time as if it were a natural part of conversation’s flow. My speculation aside, the answer to this question is also no.

And then there’s this local twins club that I hear about all the time. I’ve been told more times than I can count that I should join the multiples club. I always answer this suggestion the same way, assuring the person with whom I’m speaking that, yes, I’ve heard of the multiples club, but that, no, I haven’t joined. That response always prompts the asker to wonder aloud why I wouldn’t want to join, and I always explain that I don’t really have an interest in such a club.

Now, I’m sure there are benefits to belonging to a multiples club. I don’t dispute that at all. I bet they’d teach me all sorts of interesting twin facts, and maybe even some strategies for coping with discipline issues unique to twins. I hear our local organization has a really wonderful consignment sale twice a year featuring lots of clothing, and accessories, and baby paraphernalia such as strollers, and car seats, and cribs. I’ve been told, too, that the club here where I live supports new twin parents by bringing them meals and pitching in when they can. This is all good stuff, to be sure. But still, the multiples club wasn’t for me.

Sometimes, though, these explanations aren’t enough for the asker. She wants more of an explanation. I may hem and haw a little, and beat around the bush as best I can, but often I’m pushed to reveal the real reason I never wanted anything to do with the multiples club. It’s a long, awkward answer that has to do with Archie’s prenatal diagnosis, and how I wanted to know what it felt like to have a typical pregnancy, and how Archie had leukemia when I was pregnant with the twins, and how that made conversations with new acquaintances, like members of a multiples club, uneasy, and how… well, I could go on and on. As I said, it’s a long and awkward answer that a person either understands completely, or misunderstands entirely.

But that’s me, you know? My life is an open book. Either you’re reading along, enjoying my story, or it makes no sense to you at all. Kind of like my answer to the multiples club question.

If you haven’t read her post yet, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read Emily’s masterful description of a nightmare dream she’s endured, and what she’s learned from it. In it she’s managed to sum up so much of what I’ve been thinking recently about Archie, and how he is more alike his peers than he is different from them, but also how he is so, so, so apart from his peers, but that apartness is neither good nor bad, it simply exists.

I worry sometimes that we parents of children with special needs try so hard to prove how alike and able our child is that we forget to be grateful for our children’s true selves: not who they are in terms of their disability, but who they are as they’re learning to exist in harmony with their diagnosis.

I wrote once that Archie’s diagnosis is so much a part of him and apart from him that naming it aloud sounds like stating the obvious, but also feels somehow unnecessary and needless. What Emily writes in her post “My Own Demons” reminds me of this sentiment, and reminds me again to take this sentiment to heart and make it sing.

Yesterday morning my parents watched Archie, Kit and Jack while John and I went to the Piedmont Plant and Flower Festival at the farmer’s market. We go every year, John and I, to replace the plants that didn’t survive the winter, to fill in the gaps in our garden. We’d hoped to take the kids with us this spring, but since Archie, Kit and Jack have outgrown (or should I say ‘grown to outsmart?’) strollers John and I decided we’d make better use of our time out if we went without the kids.

And we did. Last spring John discovered a vendor specializing in wildflowers native to South Carolina. Nearly all the plants we purchased from this vendor last year did well, so we visited her again yesterday. Today John planted our haul and already the garden looks established and full, those wildflowers mixed in with the roses, this unique concoction set off by our collection of typical nursery fair.

While the kids were napping this afternoon, as John was watering the flowers, I told him that we really need to have a cocktail party some evening soon so we can mill around outside with our guests, sipping lemon drops from these vintage glass cups, listening to Jamie Cullum, and soaking in the scent of the orange blossoms blooming along the fence. You’re all invited, of course, when we have this party I’m planning in my head, if you’re interested. And I really hope you’re interested.

In it we planted English roses, antique roses, floribundas and hybrid teas. We ordered them online, and we put them in the ground bare-root, clustering them together in no particular order. As they grew last summer, we didn’t prune the bushes, but instead left the roses to grow together, their runners intertwining in a mish-mash of color and texture, until we couldn’t tell where one flower ended and another began.

Last week the roses in our backyard started to bloom. One vine of Cecile Brunner, which last summer stretched and shimmed it’s way up and over a portion of our wrought-iron fence, now boasts wide-open heads, hundreds of them, and their fragrance reminds me of rose-scented candles, and sachets, and perfumes, all aromatic in their own right, but not at all as perfectly-pungent as the real thing.

This particular vine, the Cecile Brunner, reminds me of the house we lived in when Archie was born, when the twins were born, and the back porch we had there with the pergola over it, and how that pergola was covered by climbing roses, all Cecile Brunner and Royal Sunset vines. John had planted the roses himself Archie’s first February, burying the roots deep down in the earth so they’d stay insulated from the cold and bloom that coming spring. And then that April John hung a red baby swing from one of the pergola’s beams with huge, stainless-steel hooks, and in it I’d push Archie in the afternoons, when he’d wake from his naps, singing every song I knew as he pushed saliva bubbles out of his mouth with his pink, puffy tongue.

I haven’t seen the pergola at the old house in over two springs now, and we dropped that baby swing off at Goodwill a long time ago. But this weekend John and I spent time in the backyard, this backyard, with Archie, Kit and Jack, playing and planting, weeding and watering. And we all took a little extra time to smell the roses.

I use time-outs frequently. I stand my ground once I’ve said no, or yes, or brokered an ultimatum. I try to be consistent, and for the most part I am, at least as much as a mother of three young children can be. There are even moments during the day that I sense a situation has reached the point of no return so I know to walk away from it, count to ten, claim a little clarity before I confront the children again.

So suddenly it seems as if everyone’s been right all along. All those people who’ve commented that I have my hands full were right, after all. But I don’t want them to be right, all these people whom I see often and know the kids and I well, as well as all the strangers in the grocery store, the doctor offices, the preschool pick-up lines.

That phrase, you’ve got your hands full, makes me feel as if its an excuse that is an invitation for failure, and I don’t like that. I want to appear competent, maybe even successful at what I do every day, how I handle the roll of mother to my three children. It seems to me that I created this mess, this family packed full of these three babies born so close together, so I should be the one to handle it, care for it all.

I say this, but just this morning Kit refused to get dressed, so I told her that she had to, that it would be time to leave soon to take Archie to school, and still Kit remained uncooperative so I held her down, forcing her shirt over her head and pulling the pants up over her kicking legs. And while I was doing this, forcing my daughter’s submission no matter what, I wondered what I was teaching her, this girl of mine. I don’t want Kit to learn that might makes right, because it doesn’t, it shouldn’t. Only a mother whose hands are full would act hypocritically, believing one thing but teaching another.

And even though their defiance frustrates me, inside in a secret part of my heart I am glad for it, too, overjoyed by it, really. I want my children to be freethinkers, to know their own minds and follow their hearts. I want them to defy convention and do right by their dreams, the ones I’ll help them imagine as well as the ones they’ll dream up themselves. I want them to be like I was, once upon a time, before I learned to doubt myself, my abilities and my capabilities.

I was thinking about all this, about how to raise obedient yet thoughtful children, yesterday morning as I was out running while the kids were in school. The trees, and grasses, and flowers along my route are blooming, and their lushness reminded me of times now gone. I passed under a huge oak and thought of the gigantic trees on my college’s campus, all tagged and registered, pedigreed. That made me think of the academic quad, and the last time I was there, for my brother’s commencement ceremony.

Then I remembered Archie’s first spring, and the evening I sat holding him, months old, in front of the television as I watched Richard Rodriguez give Kenyon’s commencement address on CNN. I remember crying as he spoke, my tears wetting the topknot of hair on Archie’s head.

I learned to love Rodriguez at Kenyon, in a political science class. At Limestone I tried to teach my developmental writing students to love him, too. And there I was then, newly graduated myself into a special kind of parenthood I never imagined, listening to Rodriguez and really hearing him, maybe for the first time.

After my run, before I left the house to pick my children up at school, I searched the Internet for that commencement address and I found it. I found it, and I watched it, and I cried again filled now by a new knowingness, granted to me by the passage of time. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve failed my potential, deciding as I did to stay home, to love, look after, dance with and discipline these mischievous babies of mine, day in and day out, no exceptions, but yesterday I was reminded that I am today the woman I was meant to be all along. This is what was intended after all.

If you visit the site you’ll see that Kerri’s friend, a mother who blogs about her children but does not keep a scrapbook or baby book, developed a software program that would enable bloggers like herself “to download all or part of a blog, add scrapbook-esq backgrounds, and then print and bind their blogs into a hard copy, coffee-table style book that can be cherished and passed down from generation to generation as a true family keepsake.”

Add this to my long list of ideas titled, “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?”

But before all that happened, we really did enjoy our time at the playground. Kit ran up the ladder and slid down the slide so many times she made herself dizzy. Jack sat on my lap, his legs wrapped around my waist, as I swung back and forth on the swing, back and forth, higher and higher. Both Kit and Jack laughed and laughed, losing themselves in the weightless-tummy feeling of the swinging and the sliding, and I delighted in their revelry almost long enough to forget how disagreeable they’d been all morning.

And Archie… Oh, my sweet Archie. As I pushed him in the swing he sang, “Playmate, come out and play with me… And bring your dollies three, climb up my apple tree…” He worked his way through this song I taught him, that my mother and father taught me, all the way through to the end, finishing it with great flourish.

He picked the tune himself, and sang it without assistance as I sat there listening to his lilting notes, remembering myself as a little girl swinging in my own backyard and belting out that same song myself. I watched Archie swing, and listened to him sing, and in my head I saw how year flows into year, time tumbles over itself, and all we really have after all is life loping forward on long legs, a child reflecting his parent, she reflecting her parents, and her parents reflecting their own, over and over again without end.

I’m completely smitten with Dan, and his brother Will, and the entire Drinker family, really. A few weekends ago I played Dan’s endorsement of Barack Obama for my family, my parents, too, and even my father enjoyed Dan’s candor regarding the presidential race.

If you visit Dan’s site, please take time to watch as many videos as you’re able. I know I spent an entire Saturday afternoon with Dan and his family, smiling, laughing and wiping tears from my eyes, as I continuously called to John, “Come here! You have to see this one, too!”

So I’m listening to the kids play together, I’m cleaning up the house, and I’m half-heartedly watching Martha cook chicken cutlets on her big, fancy stainless-steel stove when suddenly the kids have stopped chattering, stopped playing and they’re starring at the television.

I stop to watch, too, because Diane Sawyer is talking and the screen is showing the White House, and the Pope, and the President walking with his wife and daughter. It’s kind of neat, really, seeing all the pomp and circumstance, with the parade and the music and all those flags flying in the wind, but what’s neater, and amazing, is how the twins are transfixed, watching it all. It’s as if even two-year-olds get that some things are a big deal, are worthy of note taking no matter your spiritual beliefs or political leanings.

This morning the twins and I stopped at the grocery store after we dropped Archie off at school. A few days ago Kit saw an advertisement in a circular for pull-up diapers with Disney Princesses on them. John helped her rip the ad out of the paper and she’s been carrying it around with her ever since, careful to place it on top of the bookshelf beside her bed while she sleeps. John spent some time striking a deal with Kit, getting her to agree she’d try her best to pee and poop in the potty if we bought the princess diapers for her. So I bought the diapers and she’s wearing them now, and already we’ve made two successful trips to the potty initiated by Kit and even still her diaper is dry. Jack’s joined her, too, wearing a princess diaper himself, and he’s enjoyed success as well. This is good news here in our household.

It’s odd, really, that Kit and her brothers should adore the princesses so much. I remember that Kit was sent home from the NICU with a receiving blanket upon which was printed Snow White, Belle, Cinderella and Aurora. I had no idea who these women on this blanket were until Tiffany, my helper when the twins were born, swaddled Kit in it one morning saying, “Oh, Kit… here’s your princess blanket. Do you see Cinderella, and Snow White?”

“You know their names?” I asked Tiffany, incredulously. I was never much of a girly-girl, never involved in typical little girl, or big girl, things. The fact that this blanket was covered with characters who had specific identities had escaped me.

Tiffany laughed first then replied, “Yes, and you will too someday.”

She was right, that Tiffany. I know the names of these princesses, as does John, as does Kit, as does Jack, as does Archie. Last night after dinner Archie found the bag holding all the princess figurines and set them up in front of himself, between his legs, naming each doll as he placed it on the kitchen floor. And then he began to sing, “Dance, princesses, dance, dance…” belting out more of his made-up song as he moved the dolls around as if they were twirling and whirling around that dance floor he’d created. When he stopped singing he declared, “All done song!” and “Stop dancing, princesses!” then he got the bag and announced, “Time to clean up princesses,” picking up one at a time and putting it back in the bag, bidding farewell to each by name.

To watch Archie carefully clean up these princesses you’d never know he’d just flung a cup of pudding off the table, across the room, hitting the cabinets and spattering vanilla pudding everywhere. For whatever reason Archie’s back to throwing bowls filled with food, cups brimming with milk and juice, and spoons sticky with leftover food. I don’t know why he does it, but every time he does I think I’d like to pick him up and throw him, too.

But I don’t, of course. Instead I correct him, and I try not to yell, and I clean up the mess, and then I clean Archie up, too. And it’s usually around the time I go back again to the spill, trying to jam a corner of a wet dish rag into the crack in the cabinet, between the molding and the door, that I decide this throwing of food is karma doing it’s best to make sure I’ve eaten my just desserts.

When I was in the fifth grade, on the last day of school, I participated in a food fight that completely decimated our elementary school’s cafeteria. Actually, I didn’t just participate in the fight, I kind of organized it, or at least that’s what the principal said I did.

But I didn’t, really. Or maybe I did. It’s hard to tell where these sorts of plans begin, and how they spread, and who may have had a chance to end them before they go too far. I am sure, though, that when the principal came into the cafeteria immediately following the food fight, asking the perpetrators to come forward and identify themselves, that I was the only student who stood up and walked to the front of the room. The principal wanted all students who threw food to turn themselves in, but I was the only one who did. The floor was filled with food, the cafeteria’s painted cement block walls had food and milk spattered across them, too, but I was the only one who came forward.

Maybe this is the reason I didn’t get in very much trouble at school, or home after all. I’d been honest, to a fault, as I’d always been before and have always been ever since. If you know me well you’re smiling as you read this, I’m sure, because you know this to be so.

Yesterday Archie and I were early to pick Kit and Jack up at school. We sat for a while in the car and I watched the clock. We’d arrived really early, Archie and I, so I decided we’d leave, drive around through a few nearby neighborhoods and look at the houses, then come back to claim the twins, take them home.

So on our drive I turned into a neighborhood and slowed the car to look at house with a sale sign stuck in its front yard. It was a beautiful home. It reminded me of our house now and our house when Archie was born, and seemed as if this house could be the end result of these two houses smashed together. I wasn’t talking to Archie, seated in the backseat, and I didn’t even think he was paying attention, assuming instead that he was lost inside his own thoughts, faraway somewhere else contemplating his day.

And then he said, “It’s nice.”

So I turned, looking over my shoulder at Archie instead of the house, and asked him, “Did you just say that house was nice?”

That’s when he looked up at me and answered, “Yeah.”

“I like it, too,” I replied wistfully as I turned our car around, driving out of the neighborhood, onto the road, and then back again to wait for the twins.

When we pulled into the parking lot at the twins’ preschool a second time Archie matter-of-factly announced, “We’re still early.”

And we were. So we got out of the car and shuffle-ball-change stepped our way down the sidewalk to the courtyard outside the building’s entrance where we climbed on the stone benches there and jumped off them to the count of one-two-three, both of us, individually and then together, and I don’t know if people were laughing because they thought we were ridiculous, Archie and I, or because they wanted in on our fun, too.

I’ve collected so many stories over the past few days, but here I am now on Sunday night with time to talk but no energy left with which to type. So I’ll do us both a favor and save the exposition until later, sharing now only the week’s rising and falling actions.

Archie had an echocardiogram first thing Monday morning. It was scheduled as part of his oncology treatment protocol, an annual touch point to determine what effects, if any, the chemotherapy he endured had on his heart. Archie was excited to visit the doctor’s office where “a lady’ll take-a pictures of my heart,” his enthusiasm propelling him through the parking lot, the office corridors, into the exam room.

But as soon as he saw the room’s lights were dimmed, and as soon as he regarded the heavy machinery parked in the corner of that room, behind the exam table, Archie’s excitement waned and his bouncing smile was replaced by a huge, hulking frown.

He tolerated the exam, though, following directions and acting moderately agreeable, although whiney. He even obliged the technician when she asked him to sit up, and then lie down again over a bed pillow she followed in half, dangling his head back over the pillow while his breastbone stuck way up high.

Since the technician wanted measurements of Archie’s heart, from top to bottom, she had to stick her wand under his neck, around his collarbone. This is Archie’s least favorite position and most disliked measurement during an echocardiogram, but still he did as the technician asked. Archie held himself as if he were filled with brave resolve, but the tears falling silently down his cheeks let me know that even four-year-olds aren’t ready to act like big boys all the time.

Bless his heart.

Later in the week Archie had an appointment at the oncology clinic, a routine visit to check his blood counts and liver enzymes. “He looks great!” Dr. Schmidt told me as he smiled warmly. He and I sat facing one another, nearly knee to knee. Archie sat on my lap, between us, and listened intently as we spoke. “His blood is beautiful and his echo read normal.” For Archie, neither of these diagnoses are small things.

Dr. Schmidt reached for Archie then, taking his shoulder in his hand. “It’s so good to see you,” he said once, and then repeated him self again.

Yesterday we went to my nephew Rhys’ Baptism. The deacon who preformed the sacrament asked Hayes, my brother’s oldest son, and my children to help him by holding the Chrism, another consecrated oil, and a towel. Archie wasn’t interested in participating, but Kit and Jack were.

The deacon handed Jack the vessel holding the Chrism, instructing him how to hold it correctly. Jack did as he was told, turning his palm over this way, spreading his fingers out that way. When the deacon instructed Jack to take the lid off the container, I watched Jack’s fingers shake nervously as he tried his very best to do as he was told. While his fingers were shaking, my chest puffed up with pride.

My chest was filled with pride earlier this week, too, when Kit and Jack went to their first dentist appointments. They both behaved beautifully, and the dentist remarked how mature the twins seem to be. “Two-year-olds acting like five-year-olds!” she exclaimed.

As I watched the twins in the chairs, getting their teeth cleaned, cooperating with the hygienists, I couldn’t help but think of John’s father, a dentist himself who thought highly of well-behaved children, and imagine how pleased he would have been with these two, his grandchildren.

As I buckled Kit into her car seat yesterday on our way to Charlotte for the Baptism, my little girl reached for my necklace. As she held the pendant in her hand, turning it this way and that to get a better look, she breathed sweetly, “Oh, Mommy… I like-a your necklace!”

I thanked her, of course, and then she stuck her feet in my face and asked, “Mommy, you like-a my shoes?”

I’d like-a to tell you more now, typing it here, but John is sitting upstairs outside Kit’s room, working on his laptop in the dark, and I’m sure he’s eager to trade places with me.

Patrick, Camille and I saw all kinds of runners, but my favorite participants where the parents and children, mothers and fathers passing their love for running onto their daughters and sons. On my way up the bridge I was passed by a man, a father, who was holding his adolescent daughter’s hand, pulling her up the steep incline behind him.

This man and his girl made me think of my own children, left back at the beach house with their grandparents, my parents, who were selfless enough to spend their morning watching Archie, Kit and Jack. I’d like to run that bridge one day with my children, towing them up with me. But I’d like it better still if one day, years and years from now, they took turns holding my hand, pulling me up behind them.

I’ve only run one race before, a local 5K sponsored by the city’s running club when John and I were newlyweds, before we had children. As a racing novice, I had no idea what to expect at the Bridge Run. After all I am used to running alone along the side of the road, the brim of my hat pulled down around my eyes, my headphones stuffed in my ears.

On Saturday morning I was jittery running up that bridge. The race start stirred in me emotions I never expected. I had a hard time controlling the rush of adrenalin, setting my heart and hands right. But I did and I made it to the top of the bridge, still running, joining the racers who reached the apex with me in a hearty hip-hip-hooray. We were strangers, all of us, but for those few moments we discovered ourselves bound together by the camaraderie of accomplishment.

My brother ran the race in 45 minutes, placing him well within the first 1,000 runners to finish. My sister-in-law, who had a baby only three months ago, finished the race a little while after me. She hasn’t trained much at all, more or less running on guts alone. That’s a noteworthy accomplishment, I’d say. Patrick and Camille are fun companions, but the best part of tagging along with them is that they’ve both run for years and competed previously in many running events, so I learned a lot Saturday morning just by following their examples.

After the bridge, on my way to the finish line, I spotted John, who was standing along King Street, to my right close enough that I could have touched him, ringing a cowbell and yelling my name. That was really nice, but it was nicer still to know John had parked his car downtown somewhere and knew a way back to the Isle of Palms that didn’t involve driving over the bridge, which would be closed both ways for at least a few more hours.

I ran the race in 56 minutes and a few odd seconds, finishing 4,297th. I’m happy with those results, but I know what I need to do next year to have a better run, a better time. As it is now I only get to run two days, maybe three days, a week. I’ll have more time to train next spring as the twins will be at preschool more often during the week, and I’ll know how to better prepare for that climb, which turned out to be so much steeper than I anticipated. I think I’m looking forward to it already.

It is almost five years now since we first heard the words “heart defect,” and then listened as the doctor explained, “This particular defect is very common in babies with Down syndrome. I recommend an amniocentesis to confirm the diagnosis.”

Then he added, “I’m sorry.” And we were, too, John and I.

It seems so odd now, looking back. To be honest, that was a bad time for us, but now the memory of it all feels wistful, bittersweet. That was when we took our first steps into this new life that now feels so familiar, so right. We were frightened, to be sure, but time and distance have softened the jagged edges of that doctor’s words and added a knowingness to my memories. I wish I could go back now to that time, an invisible me from today, and stand beside the woman I was then, whispering in her ear, “Don’t be sorry. You’ll see. It’s going to be so, so good.”

My copy of Jennifer Graf Groneberg’s Road Map to Holland arrived in the mail late yesterday afternoon. I’ve stolen moments here and there to read Jennifer’s words, and I’ve managed to finish the first chapter and begin the second. I’ve cried all sorts of tears while reading, but mostly ones filled with the memories and recognition her words stir inside me.

Yes, you’re right! I’ll think while reading. I remember thinking that same word, feeling that same way. My familiarity with her story makes me think she’s telling each of our stories, unique as they are, all of them rolled together, then tied-up with our common threads.

I can’t wait to finish Jennifer’s book. I think you should read it, too. It doesn’t matter if you have a child with special needs, or not. We mothers are all the same after all.

I’d finished mopping the kitchen, the family room and playroom when I heard someone awake upstairs. It was Jack, I decided, because the footsteps thump, thumped heavy overhead, but fell lighter and quicker than Archie’s distinctive thump-pause, thump-pause gait. Over time I’ve learned that it’s best to give Jack space when he wakes. He’s grumpy in the morning, after naps, so I stand aside, giving him the space he needs to work through it all, and he comes to me when he’s ready. “Just like his mom,” John’s observed. And he’s right.

I pushed the soapy mop across the bathroom floor, into the hallway, and listened as Jack padded down the hall above to Kit’s room. “Kit!” he called. “Wake up!” A few moments later I heard their voices, Kit and Jack’s, floating down the hallway, down the steps, phrases falling in waves as those twins twittered away the way they do in their tiny talk, words tied together in call-and-response tones.

I passed into the foyer then, working my way to the study in the front of the house. Now I could see the upstairs hallway, and I watched as Jack, then Kit, ran toward Archie’s room. “Wake up, Archie!” Kit commanded.

Now I’d finished moping the study, and I was moving again into the foyer. All three of my children were standing at the top of the steps and they smiled at me as I passed beneath them.

I’d dressed Archie, Kit and Jack in pajamas before tucking them into their beds. Kit and Jack had spent the morning outside in our backyard so their clothes were covered in orange, upcountry dirt and melted chocolate, remnants of a snack-sized helping of baking chips I’d found in our pantry, forgotten in a half-full package leftover from a recipe I don’t now recall. Whatever Archie ate for lunch at school had left stains on his pants, so I’d taken them off, too, swapping them out for pajamas that matched Kit and Jack’s.

All three children were standing now at the top of the stairs, smiling down at me and I back up at them. For a moment I thought how much Archie, Kit and Jack, grouped together in pajamas at the top of the stairs, looked like a snapshot I found in a dusty photo album of John and his siblings on a Christmas morning when they were small, peering around each other and waiting upstairs for their parents to tell them to come downstairs, to come see what Santa had brought for them.

“I’m cleaning the floor,” I explained, looking upward at their happy faces. “I’m almost finished, just one more room to go.”

“Downstairs, Momma,” Kit stated, furrowing her brow and pointing down the steps toward me.

“In a minute, Kit,” I responded, working fast to finish the dining room floor, wring out the mop, dump the water, put everything away.

But I wasn’t working fast enough to satisfy my children. All three advanced toward me, shimmying down the steps. Kit and Jack reached the bottom first, leaving Archie behind to sit on the landing halfway down where the stairway branches out in two, one side falling into the foyer and the other descending down to the closet door by the kitchen.

The twins tried climbing the gate at the bottom of the stairs. When that didn’t work, they tried going under it. After that they tried shaking the gate loose from its fixings while bellowing at me, demanding me to, “Open! Open!”

I put the mop up, closed the door to the storage closet, then walked around the downstairs to inspect the floor, ensuring it was dry enough to be safe for tiny feet and unsure steps. That’s when I saw Archie trying to open the gate at the bottom of the stairway in the foyer. He smiled at me, grinning hugely ear-to-ear knowing I’d caught him in the act, and asked, “Open this one, Mom?”

The thing is that gate is often open. For whatever reason, John, Archie’s home therapists and I often forget to latch the gate behind us, but since its hung at an angle that assures it swings shut the gate looks locked even when it isn’t. Archie knows this, I’m sure. And he remembered. “Go ahead and open it, Archie,” I said, nodding encouragingly.

And he did. We listened together as Kit and Jack clamored up the other stairway, and laughed together as they slid down this one. Archie shut the gate behind the twins and followed them into the family room, running as best he could, trying to keep up.

Later this afternoon the kids played together again outside as I stood in the kitchen window, watching as I worked. They were still wearing their pajamas, and I’m sure the neighbors passing by wondered why. Archie was walking laps from one side of the yard to the other, carrying his Backyardigan radio out in front of himself, watching the lights on the toy flash as the cartoon voice sang, “Treasure, where’s-the-treasure…” And I thought, I know where it is. I’ve found it.