Being Here, Now

It has been a long, dark, cold, and snowy winter. Did I mention that it's been long? There are days when it seems like spring, with its warmth and sunlight and magic, is never going to blow into town. Oh, who am I kidding? Spring is more like not-cold temperatures, not-frozen precipitation, and mud, but right now anything seems better than unending days when it is just too cold to take Bry outside. Steve keeps talking dreamily about that glorious first day of spring - not necessarily the official first day - but the first moment that it feels like life is being breathed back into the chilly recesses of the winter months. When the trees start to bud and the air smells ripe and clean. Until that day comes, our consolation prize has consistently been this place:

The North Pole?

The set of Ghostbusters, after the defeat of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?

Wonderland?

Nope, nope, and nope. It's actually the Eden Prairie mall. More specifically, the trippy play area at the Eden Prairie mall, where families with small, bored children congregate en masse. Steve's cousin sagely calls it "The Petri Dish," which is probably a pretty accurate name given the dozens of germy children literally crawling all over every surface. Steve once followed Bry into a tunnel like the one above and emerged with a thoughtful look on his face. He was trying to determine the exact scent that lingered in the enclosure. After much deliberation he came up with...urine.

It's not much of a prize compared with playing at the park or walking around the lake. But it's better than unending stretches of staying in the house, reading the same books a gazillion times, playing with the same toys over and over, and wearing grooves into the wood floors after tracing the same hallways ad infinitum.

It's been fun too to see how Bry approaches the play structure in different ways on each subsequent trip back to the mall. The first time we brought him, he wasn't yet walking and Steve and I were on high alert, scanning the area constantly to watch for children who would surely trample Bry with their reckless frolicking and playing. But they always managed to avoid him and he was totally oblivious to their frenzied running about. Now, he's still mostly oblivious to the presence of others, even though he's been bumped into many times, usually as he's trying to crawl up the slide while the other kids take the traditional route and let gravity do the work. He can kind of run-walk from one end of the play area to the other, but he typically sticks pretty close to Steve and me. I try to imagine further down the path of this developmental trajectory, but I just can't picture it. Steve and I have mused off and on about what Bry will be like when he's older. Even though there seem to be hundreds of models of 2-, 3-, and 4-year olds racing around the mall, we can't quite translate that to what it will be like for Bry to grow into those ages. Right now I can't imagine a time when a trip to the mall doesn't result in this:

And I'm not sure I want to. Not just yet. Maybe the fact that Steve and I have such difficulties conjuring up images of an older Bry is a subtle reminder that we're here now, in the present, so we better enjoy it while we can. A cliche, perhaps, but true nevertheless.