Almost two years exactly.  Holy smokes, what happened?

So much goodness and growing.  I find myself yearning to hang on to it, savor it, remember it all…and to come back here to write it down so it doesn’t all get lost in the day-to-day craziness of toddler negotiations and baby wrangling and work and renovations and simply trying to keep my family appropriately clothed, fed and rested.

I want to come back here.

I will find the time.  I will.

It’s lupine season.  I’m back in Maine.  We’ve got a field full of them.  I’m in heaven.  Lupines make my heart skip beats.  Seriously.

And then, as if things couldn’t get any better one little poppy plant decided to volunteer itself right in the middle of the field.  I practically turn a cartwheel every time I go outside.  That field makes me so happy its just silly.  I almost can’t stand it.

Mother Nature seems to have totally catapulted herself out of late winter and early spring and brought our lives right along with her. Here are some random updates.  I have no brain power at the moment to tie these events together in a way that is coherent, let alone fluid, witty and insightful

We’ve been at the beach a bunch. Luca loves the beach and believe me, all of that sand really loves him. Kreg is thrilled that there is a “real” beach close by. He learned through a series of disappointments that Mainers use the term “beach” rather loosely…meaning a stretch of flat coastline of any size with rocks smaller that softballs.

We’ve put in a good bit of mileage lately and are out hiking every weekend. Luca has been majorly chillaxin’ in his mei tai (seen here on Kreg’s back). I caught him languidly sucking his pacifier just after he’d emerged from a nap. If his cheeks weren’t so pink and healthy, I’d think he’d just woken up under the Santa Monica pier after a three day bender at someone’s Malibu beach house.

After much cursing and three frogs, I finished the Gooseberry Hat. It is riddled with mistakes and ladders and twisted stitches, but it is sweet and homemade looking in a good way and made of hemp, so naturally its a keeper.  Luca isn’t wearing it much as we’re having a hard time keeping anything on his head these days.  He’s become a little hat puller.

And there’s been lots of time spent lolling around in the backyard and staring at the field of lupines.  We’ve got lots and lots to sit with these days, and what better way to sit than with a bit of wine and cheese and crudité, staring at a field full of your most favorite flowers in the whole wide world?  Last week was one of those that you just want to call off early because each day is filled with more heartache and you’re afraid of what could possibly be next.  It found me saying little prayers everytime the phone rang and lying awake at night on the futon in Luca’s room just to hear the sound of his sleepy breathing.

I keep coming back to this photo of Kreg and Luca, taken a few weeks ago at a certain wedding at Wooden Boat Publications in Brooklin.  I left the wedding tent and walked across a field to find this sweet scene…

…one of those moments that just makes your heart come fairly close to completely bursting.

In Maine it is a different story. Spring is an obscenity, with flowers popping up wherever they please in enormous sprays and giant clumps anywhere they can find room. I almost forgot how beautiful spring is in climates of the wetter variety. Here, flowers are a celebration of a long, hard winter finally come to an end.  Um, amen.

In the Sandias of New Mexico I would take long walks in the spring for the sole purpose of seeking out flowers.  Here, we needn’t go much farther than our own yard, but I think Luca enjoyed his first flower spying mission anyway.  Here are the results.

P.S. I know its been a bit quiet around here.  It’s difficult to sit indoors and type when I have an amazing porch outside the door, the ocean down the street and the whole of Acadia National Park a few short miles away.  Writing has become a rainy day affair.  As an update, Kreg and I are still involved in the rather maddening task of purchasing our first home, Luca has produced two teeth (they aren’t actually whole teeth yet, but little toothlets poking through his gums) and is almost beginning to enjoy carrots and avocados and I am still desperately awaiting the arrival of my acupuncture license and trying to knit Luca a little hat on #4 dpns, which requires almost as much dexterity as wielding those little needles I love.