Before they knocked the living life out of him…
When you hold your baby in your arms, you dream of a day when they’ll be a bit older and you can do fun activities together. You imagine baking cookies on a rainy afternoon or snuggling in close to watch their first movie. And for me, I couldn’t wait to build a snowman with my children.
For the past few years, we really haven’t had a great snow that allows us to build anything other than a mound of dirt-filled snow that we pretend is full of snow fairies that for some reason want to live in butt-ass freezing temperatures.
But a few days ago, all that changed. And my dream was about to come true.
I should have suspected when it took us forty minutes and three sets of time-outs to get our snow gear on that my Norman Rockwell image might soon be altered.
As I skipped into the yard, holding my children’s hands in mine, I quickly scooped up some snow and started to show them how to roll it into a ball for the base of the snowman.
“I can’t do it.”
“Mine is falling apart.”
“This is too hard.”
“Can I eat it if it doesn’t have yellow on it?”
“My gloves keep falling off.”
“My side is crooked.”
“Boogers keep coming out of my nose.”
“How about I just make snow angels instead?”
Then, I looked around and saw that my two children were now in the backyard having a snowball fight and I’m a 40 year old woman, by myself, building a snowman.
Twenty minutes later, my kids come to the front yard and say, “Wow, Mommy, great job. Can we knock it down now?”
So I put myself in time-out.
I went inside. Made a hot cup of tea that I dreamed of putting bourbon in, and watched them from the window destroy my very first snowman I made as a mother.
And of course, two minutes later, they were yelling for me to make another one.
And I did.
Because the true picture of family, the one that Norman Rockwell never painted, is the picture of children ruining your stuff. THAT’S what real family looks like.