“I can not believe it.”

This is Miles latest phrase that without fail makes me smile every single time.  He really enunciates the can not portion, which pretty much puts me over the edge.

He usually can not believe some pretty simple stuff.  He can not believe he is wearing blue, my favorite color.  He can not believe Bubba is a big cat.  He can not believe that truck has a picture of a chicken on it.  He can not believe I made a pom-pom (me either really).  You know he just can not believe it.  

But sometimes he can not believe some pretty rad stuff that I would have otherwise overlooked.

A random sampling-

“I can not believe Spanish Moss is curly.”

“I can not believe we live in the forest.”

“I can not believe this branch has all these mushrooms on it.”

“I can not believe Sawyer is my friend.”

Well, I can not believe I am your mama.  Honestly.  Sometimes, while I am shutting things up for the evening; closing the coop, feeding our cats and letting in our dog, I hear my boys giggling to each other in their room, I see my husband pouring himself a home-brew and I think, is this real?  When I was a little girl, (along with many others I am sure) I fantasized about what it would be like to be a mama one day.  While it is surely much harder and time-consuming than I envisioned, all in all, it is pretty much exactly what I always wanted.  I sip wine on the weekends (ok lets be real, some weekdays too) , I play with my boys in the woods, and I love my husband with all I’ve got.

I can not believe how good it really is.

When I lie in bed next to Miles at night, he often asks me about when I was a little girl.  I can’t help but squint my eyes in delight and put on my famous Popeye grin because having these tales told to me when I was a little girl is now exactly what some of my most treasured memories of childhood are.  There is next to nothing more fantastic than hearing about the old days when your parents were kids.  It seemed like another world.

Tonight, I told my boy about the time his Uncle T pushed my bike off the docks downtown into the deep ocean blue.  He asked all kinds of questions.  Consistently he asked, “Why would he do that”, which I honestly couldn’t come up with a valid answer to.  But even more often, he wanted to know about the bike.

It was some bike too.  I spray painted her orange and silver.  It had a banana seat, which was just retro enough to be wicked cool when I was ten or so.  It had purple streamers and those little plastic, flourescent colored beads that clinked up and down your spokes as you peddled around.

I tried to tell him, I wasn’t really mad about the bike being in the ocean.  While I may have griped quite a bit about it, truth be told it was more fun than not.  When the bike so gloriously splashed in the sparkling bay, I knew I had no time to waste.  I had to run off to sailing, so she was to remain chums with the barnacles for a few hours. When I returned, it was high tide, which made the task all the harder.  A boy named Will happened to be hanging around down town (not an unusual place for a kid in my town to be) and he helped me hoist her out on to dry land.  It was spectacular, like a pirate heaving up a sunken treasure.  I rode it home with the streamers flying behind me.

So, I kissed my Miles forehead one last time, whispered I loved him and crept out his door.  But, as I was leaving he whispered, “I can not believe the streamers flied behind her bike when she went so fast.  I can not believe it.”