Sometimes I Wonder

Sometimes I wonder, as I casually observe, what parts of their childhood my children will remember.

Will they remember sitting at the kitchen table, stirring their banana splits into soup, giggling and enjoying their sugar high as my husband and I shake our heads with the stony faces of grown-ups? Faces which clearly do not get the joke that is shared only between siblings.

I wonder if they will remember washing my car in the cold January sunshine, squirting each other with water and deciding that it was perfectly acceptable to wear shorts in the middle of January because duh mom, the sun is shining and we love to wear our shorts when the sun is out!

Even when it is forty degrees.

I wonder if the boys will remember stripping off their wet clothes and streaking through the house into their respective bathrooms to take hot baths. Or if they'll laugh when they think about the fact that they didn't close the garage door before they took off those wet clothes.

[I hope they don't do this when they're teenagers.]

I wonder if Katie will remember climbing into bed with me when Brett is at work, tucking her feet under my side and patting my cheek all through the night. I wonder if she'll remember all the times I smooth her hair away from her face, kiss her cheek and tell her, "You are the best girl in the world."

I wonder if they will remember their parents and aunts and uncles jamming out to Guitar Hero and think we were totally weird. I wonder if they'll be mad that I made them sit at the "kids table" during some family dinners or if they will ever bore of looking at funny Lego videos on YouTube and then laugh hysterically when one of them gets Rickrolled.

I wonder if remote control cars, Legos, dogs and little sisters will ever not appeal to my boys.

And I wonder if they will always be as tight as they are today, finding their groove with one another and learning what it means to be family.

*Originally posted January, 2009.