Spring is so close, I can taste it.  Finally!  And as my daughter gets older, leaving her babyhood and heading into full-blown childhood, sharing these little joys has become such a gem in my life.  So today, I wanted to share with you some moments that felt particularly special to me lately, in the hopes that maybe they remind you, in your bleak midwinter state of being, that soon, better times will come.

1 — Blooms

“Look, it’s a patch of crocuses!  Do you know what that means?” I ask my daughter as we peer at the little ring of golden flowers blooming in the yard.

“What?” my three year old asks.

“Spring is coming!” I rejoice.  

“And look!  Daffodils!  Go smell them, tell me how great they are!”

My daughter trots over to the cheerful flowers and bends down, sniffs.  “Oh that’s good!” she agrees.  I see the grin on her face.  It’s like spring is blooming right there in her smile.  All the crocuses and daffodils in the world couldn’t compete with that.  

2 — Bunnies and Bulbs

“Mama?” my daughter asks from the backseat of the car.

“Yes?”

“When will Easter be here?”

“Soon.  Are you excited?”

“YES.  Do you know what we get on Easter?” she asks me, and keeps going, not even waiting for a response.  “CHOCOLATE BUNNIES.”

The joy in her voice is inescapable, the sound of pure anticipation, like a bulb must feel, getting closer to poking out of the dirt and bursting into sunlight.

3 — Mud Puddles and Bells

It rained and rained and rained, as the narrator says in Winnie the Pooh.  We had what felt like a whole month of rain recently, and as someone who doesn’t live in a place where that’s normal, it was depressing and wet and terrible, and I don’t know how y’all Pacific Northwest folks manage!  But that aside, when the sun finally broke through the grey clouds, we were left with trails of mud puddles as far as the eye could see.

And this meant it was time for a mud puddle muck walk.  

And so we donned our rain boots and our thick socks and we jumped.  We jumped so high, so happily, so muddily, and as our boots squelched down and flung mud everywhere, I could feel it: the arrival of spring, the moving forward of the seasons, the end of terrible horrible no-good winter.  My daughter’s laugh rang through the trees like bells, and I couldn’t help but join her.

As we head into the warmer seasons ahead, and as your little ones grow older and start engaging with the world around them, I just have to share this: that it’s such a joy to see them sense those changes too.  To point out the crocuses and smack our lips at the thought of chocolate bunnies waiting to be nibbled upon, to let our rainboots smack into the biggest, deepest, squishiest mud puddle, as the scent of hyacinths winds itself through the trees as they, too, see that spring is almost here.

Thank goodness, too.  We were getting mighty tired of indoor puzzles.