I'm going in for a bit of general anesthetic and groping around my insides tomorrow morning, and it has me feeling slightly freaked out. Felt like crying this morning. Ugh. It occured to me, though, that although it was frightening to think of what I / they would lose, in the event of a calamity or even of a poor prognosis, it has also made me realise once again how very much I have, and how lucky I've been to have had it all.

Just FYI: this operation-thingey is the technical part of why I've been such a ridiculously bad blogger and correspondent over the past couple of months. So if I owe you one (or more), please be patient. But to recfify in part one of said ill-managed correspondences (the other party of which will know who they are) please forgive this rather oblique, but SO heartfelt shout of:

"CONGRATULATIONS!"

and its attendant and many-times-plural "YAY!"-s

So many things have happened over the past number of weeks, but for now, I offer you a diptych entitled They Give Me Strawberries, I Give Them Peppers. Have I ever mentioned how magic these guys are?


The pepper picture is one of Tomi's photographic œuvres. He and Leo are fantastic budding wee artists, to be sure. More about that later, though I will offer a Happy Clown / Sad Clown teaser for now...


Tomi got kind of shafted on this occasion, unfortunately, because he'd heard me scold Leo for drawing on his face (but as you can probably imagine, he'd also heard when I accidentally laughed, despite myself, and he saw when I took the picture). So he was double scolded when he followed the leader. Still, his soft, sad tears and my realising a bit too late why he'd done it, anyway, meant that he got his picture taken and a huggy apology for my mistaken part to play, and we had a good conversation about listening, to boot. Not that he gave 100% to the listening part of that conversation, but, well... As you parents out there know, sometimes it takes alot of pennies before that one finally drops.


And one last diptych before I get back to my drawing board, and then to my operation prep (ugh): a happy one of the previously sad little clown (I can't emphasise it enough: they are such hilarious, such touching little creatures), with his mom in the background, who thought she'd moved out of the picture path; and Jean-Philippe's corner of our "back garden", which has got much closer to what we always imagined this year. So lush! And so much loved by all four of us. But this corner took a long time in coming, and each day, as he looked out to see if things had progressed, Jean-Philippe reminded me (to my great glee, of course) exactly of Toad in The Garden, one of the stories from Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel.