Spring Succeeds.

This afternoon, I sat outside watching Son play with his trucks on the sidewalk. This lost week is almost over, and it has brought with it Spring: perfect temperatures, a gentle breeze that, for once, doesn't chill, and days that are getting longer.

Spring rejuvenates me. I've always been one who has only endured the seasons of extreme out of necessity - the blistering heat and humidity of summer, the hard, bleak cold of winter. Autumn gives me the same feeling as spring, at least till everything starts dying off. Autumn's air has a crispness to it that makes the season feel the most real of the four.

Spring, though, carries in its lightness a certain air of promise that the other seasons can't match. Spring says, "The calendar is your oyster!" (How colorful, and how meaningless, that particular turn of phrase was!)

As I sat outside jotting notes late this afternoon for posting tonight, Son came running up to me with a fearful look on his face. Down the hill from the Bramble Tamble compound, one of our neighbors has some construction going on on his property. The diesel engine of one of the big earthmovers in his yard revved up as it displaced more dirt, which, despite his safety from it thanks to its relative distance, frightened Son. He stood next to me and eventually calmed down, and he waved at the machine before going off to play some more.

There is really no sweeter phrase for a child than "let's play!" Such a world of imagination and possibilities awaits him; he will turn 2 in May. I look greatly forward to him asking me to play with him, to pretend with him, to discover the things that are new to him that I've long taken for granted.

I believe that the warm months will represent an exponential leap forward in his development. (As long as he refrains from constantly hitting his head on the sidewalk, which he managed to do just when we came outside. He has a little scrape on his forehead, but is no worse for the wear.) I expect that by the end of the summer - and I'm getting a little ahead of myself, I know - we'll be able to understand him a little better. The infant and early toddler months have been wonderful, and I deeply cherish the memories they have brought, but it's been difficult to glean things from his recently discovered voice. I want to be able to converse with him - granted, it'd still be a conversation with a 2-year-old, which would regardless be a deeper level of conversation than I've had with people at certain jobs in the past. I want to be able to understand what he wants; I want him to be able to tell me if he's hurting and where it hurts. Sure, baby talk is cute - all the "na-nays" and "meels" are a joy to behold - but I'm looking forward to him being able to enunciate. I think the summer will bring that. I hope, anyway.

Son discovered a 5-gallon bucket near the house that's got about an inch of last week's rainwater and various planting supplies in it. It was all I could do to keep him from drinking from the little plastic flowerpot inside - I believe I might have gone off the deep end in emphasizing that it's "yukky" - so he took to scooping up water with it, pouring it out and shaking it dry. His little arms are a mess; I foresee a bath in his immediate future (with clean water, not yukky water).

As dusk began to settle over the Bramble Tamble compound, the sun's rays didn't quite warm the breeze as they had some 15 minutes earlier. Wife was still asleep inside. Today is our 4th anniversary, and we didn't really get to spend a whole lot of it together thanks to the request from night shift that she spend the wee hours there watching the lines build cabinets and fixing the quality problems that have ensued as of late. One more night of this, I keep reminding myself. I'm sure she has reminded herself of that quite often today also.

Bath time. Son seems at his most playful in the tub. I was assigned to bath duty after one night when Wife was working overtime during her normal shift; I decided to "help out" and give Son a bath. In parenting as well as in the working world, this has often been my dumbest move: "Here, since you've proven yourself more than capable of handling this task, why don't you just take over doing it from now on?" I've never been in a position to say no.

Here's the difference, though. In parenting, I don't complain about it, whereas I've tended to make myself a martyr at those jobs in the past because of my willingness to take on extra work. But being a Great Dad is more important to me than a boatload of Employee of the Month awards. Maybe it's the very least I can do - and it often is - but I'll do it with a smile.

There are too many men who are more than happy to to initiate the process of fathering - I call them "front-end fathers" - but don't really do a whole lot of fathering at its most important time, after the child is born. This seems especially true in my neck of the woods, where the Rules of Men dictate that the responsibilities of parenting fall squarely in the mother's lap. This is probably a leading cause of the juvenile delinquency rampant in my area, and can only have more dire consequences for the child later in life.

I don't have anything against one-parent households - God bless them for making a go of it (as if they had much of a choice) - it's just that I believe the odds of setting a child on the right path in life seem to be better with two parents. Unless, of course, the parents are just complete deadbeats, in which case the ills that the child will face in adolescence and beyond are often insurmountable as far as they're concerned.

I've just come back in from seeing Wife off to work. Maybe someday we'll get what Liz Phair once called a "lotto revival," but that's hardly a plan for the future. We'll just keep doing what we're doing, and work on raising our son correctly, and give our family as good a life as we can with the means we have.

In the meantime, the inexorable march of Spring continues. I found this tonight on the National Weather Service website when checking out the forecast for my area:

A COLD FRONT WILL MOVE ACROSS THE STATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON.
ANY DAYTIME HEATING THAT CAN OCCUR IN ADVANCE OF THIS FRONT WILL
ONLY ADD TO THE STRENGTH OF FORMING STORMS. PRESENT INDICATIONS
SUGGEST THAT A FEW OF THESE STORMS COULD BECOME SEVERE. THE MAIN
THREATS FROM ANY SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WILL BE DAMAGING WINDS AND
LARGE HAIL.

THUNDERSTORMS WILL ONCE AGAIN BE POSSIBLE SUNDAY NIGHT INTO
MONDAY. AT THIS TIME...IT IS NOT KNOWN IF ANY OF THESE STORMS WILL
BE SEVERE.

Ahhhh, Spring.