Snapshots to Preserve for Posterity

Sometimes I have the urge to freeze-frame a moment with the children, preserve it intact, to bring out and gaze upon when they transform into teenagers and might logically be expected to try my patience occasionally...not that that ever happens now of course! It's the ordinary every day moments that usually go by unrecorded, usually not even getting a mention in my blog. Today they get to go on my blog lest I forget.

Food shopping with youngest, who is now interested in the origins of her food. I'm browsing in the meat section for free-range chicken, which occasionally graces our local supermarket.

"What's this?"she enquires.
"It's stewing lamb."
"Where does it come from?"
"From sheep."

"What's this?"
"Beef... from cows."

Determined to get things clear, she announces in a clear, penetrating voice, that includes all the other shoppers:

"So that's a dead sheep and that's a dead cow."

Turning vegetarian never seemed so attractive!

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A rainy winter's day, yet another one (this is an extraordinarily English winter we are having this year), when using the sofa to practise their 'jumps' is enough to keep all three happy for hours. I wanted to hold on to the memory of just that - simple pleasures and the three of them cooperating, taking turns and inventing elaborate rules for their game.

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The children going through our 'oldies' albums, choosing Billy Joel and my 9 year old son informing me that he likes No.s 1 and 4 best..that is My Life and Fashion (the one that starts 'What's the matter with the clothes I'm wearing'), dancing along to it with a grin on his face, whilst I reflect that in less than 3 years he is probably going to be the teenager from the song and forswear Billy Joel, and all his parents' music collection, for at least another 20 years, as hideously uncool.

I remember at eleven, thinking Abba was a cool sound to do Lego to, one year later realising my mistake. It only took another twenty years for Abba to be danced to with a pinch of irony... now I happily wash up to it, any consideration of cool long departed through the window.

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The children getting ready to run down to one of the aunts' houses on a weekend morning, while we are still dozily reading at the breakfast table in dressing-gowns and pyjamas. A spell of blissful quiet ensues and I realise that for the first time ever, the older two have actually helped youngest find shoes, put them on and done up her shoe laces for her, and they've all gone out together... usually there is a frantic screeching as they are ready and waiting outside, inching down the hill, while she isn't even dressed and has no idea where her shoes are and is urgently summoning us to help in case she gets left behind.