Anna awoke this morning to a house littered with ‘hidden’ jellybeans, which she gathered with glee. Thankfully we didn’t have to get into the details of how Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are able to enter our house and wander around unnoticed, but monsters and guns will never be able to get inside under any circumstances. Jellybeans were thus the theme of the day: how many could she have, when could she have more, how many did she earn, and so forth. In between the jellybean-eating, Jennifer managed to get on skates for the first time in about seven months, in preparation for rejoining the hockey league.

Tara slept all morning, leaving me to tend Anna, to enjoy some terrific weather in the backyard, and to do some reinforcing work on the swingset. After Jen got home, Tara finally awoke and drank a bottle with little resistance. Then, like the rare, but cyclical aligning of the planets in the sky, all four of us managed to take a bath or shower on the same day.

I must admit that for as well as the day seemed to go, and even though I managed to do about five loads of laundry, the installation of four lag bolts on the swingset is about all the forward progress that was made on a household project; still, there is hope. Next week, I’m hoping that I can go fetch some flowers for the front planter and fix the sprinklers in the backyard in preparation to fill the space left by our failed hibiscus bushes. In my mind, completion of such a project would officially mark the end of the newborn anti-honeymoon.

Speaking of honeymoons, I now have less then two months before the May trifecta of Mother’s Day, Anna’s birthday, and our anniversary. In light of this year, marking ten years of marriage, I now see why professional athletes retire BEFORE being inducted into the hall of fame–who expects them to follow that up? Some of you may know that for the first Mother’s Day after Anna was born, I stayed up nights to construct a scrapbook of Anna’s first year. For this act, I was immediately inducted into the Husband Hall of Fame by several of Jennifer’s friends and acquaintances. But then what? I haven’t come anywhere near topping that for any occasion, nor can I afford to lose the amount of sleep required to try. To top it off, we have some traveling to do in advance of said trifecta, so I am fairly hosed for pulling off an upset of the scrapbook this year.

Nevertheless, today was a good day, and I should reflect on it with fondness rather than focus on impending, unavoidable, looming failure to properly mark the occasion of four years of motherhood, four years of life, and ten years of marriage. Wait… it’s not just four years of motherhood… I have to get my mom something. Aaaagh!