Dancing with Daffodils

We recently returned to my hometown of Rochester, New York to visit family.  It is a joy to grocery shop at Wegmans, eat Abbotts custard as I walk along the Charlotte Beach pier and to drive through downtown, pointing out to my kids my two favorite buildings: the sandwich and the clippers.  These are moments from my childhood that I love living over again. I lived in a great neighborhood when I was a kid where my two best friends lived just across the street.  We would play board games or Atari at my house, Super Mario brothers at Laurie’s house and Sonic at Heather’s house.  We’d swim, play gymnastics, ride our bikes to the local grocery mart for candy, walk to school together, build leaf forts, have bouncy ball competitions and race in the snow.   Each May my family would go to the Lilac Festival.  We would take a picnic dinner, walk around the tulips beds first and then head over to the large hill covered in deep purple, light purple an...

A few weeks ago I was sitting outside with my very newborn baby watching my two older children play.  Like many Americans with kids, we have a Cozy Coupe and at one point my children went down our sloped driveway with my three-year-old son driving and my almost five-year-old daughter standing on the back.  I told her that she was being unsafe and warned her that she could easily fall off and get hurt and I asked her to get off.  She chose to ignore me and stayed on the car.  I asked her again and she just said, “No.”  At this point I decided to let it go.  Not ten seconds later, the car tipped over as they were crossing the road (having looked both ways, of course).  My daughter was able to jump off and was not hurt, but my son who had been inside the car was now in the road, stuck underneath the car.   Since I was still holding my newborn, I asked my daughter to go help her brother.  The tipping was a result of her bad choice and I want...