When you are first grade, you are slowly coming to realize the power of words.  And in first grade no words have more power than swear words.  Isaac, as I have written about before, is 100% obsessed with swear words.  He wants to know what they are, how to spell them, when people say them, and what they mean.  Most of all, though, he wants to know which is the worst.  Other than racial and sexual slurs, we have told him that the "F word" is the worst swear.  I think that is a good consensus pick.  

This morning Isaac had a bit of a temper tantrum and threw some stuff around the house.  I got a bit frustrated and mumbled under my breath.  There was no swearing, but for a swear-obsessed kid anything said in anger without clarity is probably a swear.  When I arrived downstairs he had recounted to Bianca how I almost said the "F word."  She asked and I set the record straight, though Isaac was still disbelieving.  That's when his shadow of a little brother poked his head into the kitchen and yelled with a huge grin on his face "THE F WORD."  Now mind you he did not say "FUCK" but instead the phrase "the F word" as if the phrase itself was the swear.  Bianca and I had to instant turn the other direction so that Isaac and Ethan didn't see us burst into giggles.  

The swear word collector and his assistant Ethan are a laugh riot.

As a parent of two boys the dream is that some day I can leave the room and let them play together and not worry that one boy will kill the other or that the play session won't end in howls of pain or disappointment.  

This Saturday morning, with Mom at the grocery, we played around the house.  At the Lego table there was something like agreement.  Maybe not actual agreement, more like detente.  Then we went upstairs and rolled around on our bed and then Isaac's bed.  It was here that I stepped back and watched.  They played for a good twenty to thirty minutes without howls of pain or despair.  Isaac wasn't exactly babying Ethan, but he wasn't his normal wrecking ball self.  I did tell them that if Ethan said stop and Isaac didn't stop that I would force him to stop, but even with that promise, which Ethan might have taken advantage of, we had only two instances when I had to interfere.  

So slowly Isaac is starting to see Ethan as a playmate and Ethan is no longer wary of his brother's every move.  Today it was wrestling, tomorrow it might be Lego, eventually it would be nice to have them in the backyard while Bianca and I, God forbid, have two minutes of quiet in the house.  I don't wish the noise away, not at all (it will be soon enough that they are teenagers wanting to avoid us), but the perpetual screaming and yelling is, after months, fraying.  

Here's to brothers playing with each other.

December was mild.  January was cold and a bit snowy.  The bulk of our snow came in February this year.  In a period of about 8 days we got about 4-5 feet of snow.  It was tough.  But nothing worse than average.  Then, towards the end of the month, it got unseasonably warm, like nearly 70 degrees.  Isaac and Ethan were outside and Bianca and I were seriously contemplating shorts.  We did yard work, raked leaves, and opened up the "tand box" for the Beeth.  

The the heat lasted for only a few days.  The smells of spring wafted in the window and then the windows had to be closed again.  We got a large dump of snow, probably around 10-12 inches followed by another 5-8 inches in a three day period in March and the snow lingered until this week.  But looking out at the swing set, we were very close to "snow out" in the backyard.  Isaac and Ethan were chomping at the bit.  We had a few cold rainy weekends but nothing that was out of the ordinary.  

Then, this week the weather said we'd get a huge storm as I drove home from work on Friday, it looked like it was coming to pass.  Then I woke up this morning to a hard, wet, crust across everything.  It wasn't a lot, maybe 6 inches, but it was so close to water and ice that my back ached just looking at it.  It seemed clear at this point that there was no chance of an outside weekend this weekend.  April 1st, April Fools was a day for snow.  ugh.

That is the very definition of cabin fever--large April snowstorm.  The boys are literally crawling the walls.