Interest is relative

Parents know their children as the unique creatures they are, beautiful and charming and intelligent to all kinds of dubious extremes. But to suddenly and completely come to acknowledge your children as interesting beings, that's a whole new level of appreciation.

Alex saw a couple of meteors last night in the "shower," which, for us, consisted of three and a half sightings, the half being something that might have been a small meteor but was in all likelihood a small plane. Today, he started a meteor collection from rocks he found in the yard that, according to him, "are not the kind of rocks we have around here, and I rinsed them off in Katherine's water table and they didn't dissolve, so they're not just regular sand rocks, don't you think they're probably pieces of meteor?"

Why, yes. Yes I do. I do because one St. Patrick's Day the nice old man who lived behind us sent his granddaughter and me on a fool's errand looking for four-leaf clovers, and when we couldn't find any we tore one leaf of the three-leaf clovers in half to make a fourth leaf and showed him those, and then suddenly a leprechaun started leaving little surprises - like dollar bills! - around the house and yard that our good luck charms had supposedly conjured.

So yes, Alex, those could be meteors. In fact, if it makes your childhood a tad more interesting, they probably are.

Tomorrow we're going to a water park, and I'm silently dreading it. But he read his requisite number of pages in the library's summer reading program, got his free pass, and we're by-golly going. I will galumph around in a bathing suit all the livelong day and probably get sunburned and dodge screaming kids and let Alex splash me with geysers and ride behind him through claustrophobia-inducing tubes because it's his last week of summer break ever when he's 7 and I want him to have FUN. And I guess there's a chance that I might, too. I kind of like the kid.

Katherine, whom I also like but who is plucking away relentlessly at my last nerve tonight is in bed playing with her toy computer. It's barking repeatedly. It's past 9 p.m. She's 2. She should be asleep. Lately that has not been as easy as it used to be. She stands in her crib bellowing for me at the top of her lungs, then when I go in (as I inevitably do), she demands something, sometimes something weird. Sheep, socks, Mommy's book, mac and cheese, flowers, Alex, my phone, or one of the three songs I have it in my limited range to sing: Rock-a-bye Baby, the Elmo song, and the ABCs. I guess I could conceivably add Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to the repertoire because it's the same tune as the alphabet song, but I only just now considered that.

She's funny, that one. She can be bought with Dora fruit snacks. She hates it when Alex sits next to me. She has four dances: the Princess Dance, arms flung out spinning in circles; the Smarty-Pants Dance, little feet stomping, spinning in circles; the Katherine Dance, wild gesticulations, spinning in circles; and Mickey Mouse's own Hot-Dog Dance, arms flailing, no circles. She puts things down for naps, covering them with a blanket and giving gentle night-night kisses. Not just baby dolls and stuffed animals, but the remote control, her sippy cup, my feet. The first thing she says when we go in to get her out of her crib in the mornings is "I had good nap."

I feel like I have to keep a record of these things, because they change so quickly. It wasn't that long ago that I was bemoaning her slower-than-Alex speech development and marveling over her sleep patterns. It wasn't that long ago that Alex had baby-fine blond hair and toddled through the kitchen in the middle of the night sucking on butter and hiding carrots under his pillow. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of being parents was just that - an idea, albeit a scary and alien one.

And here we are, a second grader and a 2-year-old under our belts and still finding humor in the everyday. They play chess and he gives her pieces to click together so she'll feel like she's playing, too. We cuddle on the couch and make fun of Sprout shows. She whines and whines and then turns on a grin so dazzling, tiny bunny teeth gleaming, that you forget she's been driving you up the wall all day long and scoop her up into a big squishy hug.

I think I'm ready for school to start, but I have found a kind of deep, quiet, sometimes elusive satisfaction in these summer days that I didn't expect. Alex won't always make me heartbreakingly earnest presents of moon rocks and origami hearts. Katherine won't always beg to be picked up and exert her tree-frog embrace when I finally relent. They're fleeting, these times, and precious.

Tomorrow I'll likely be less sappy and more prone to rushing and entertaining small annoyances. That is if I survive the water park unscathed. But tonight I'm just happy for the blessings of my imperfect little family. If only amongst ourselves, we're an interesting bunch.