Sudden, freak storms

I often wonder what makes a quiet moment of play suddenly turn. One minute, my kids are quietly playing with Lego. Aidan is building ships for Leo and Leo is finding parts of men and assembling them for Aidan. They seem happy. They're sharing. Suddenly, there are screams and by the time I get to the living room, all of the ships are in pieces and Leo is sitting on his older brother's head, pressing his face into the carpet. I never did get the full story.

And I can't only blame it on brotherly squabbles. Aidan can spend hours, seemingly at peace, working on paper airplanes, then suddenly explode with frustration, crumpling the paper into twisted bits of wreckage and crying. Leo is the same way. It's amazing how some quiet time with stickers can go so drastically wrong.

Neither of the boys is very good with Zen. I used to know a little boy who, even at five, drank chamomile tea and took warm baths when he was stressed. Not my boys. They're little tempests, just waiting to be unleashed on unsuspecting moments of calm.




We had our own storm today. The morning was clear and beautiful but the afternoon brought thunder and lightning and even little pebbles of hail. It rained really hard for close to an hour and we were left with huge lakes in the backyard and a bit more water damage on our dining room ceiling because of the leaky window in Aidan's room. Ah...how I love old houses.





Can you see the bits of hail in our flower pot?

Leo loved it and I'm sure Aidan would have been even more impressed, considering his obsession with extreme weather, but he was at a birthday party this afternoon at the East Hamilton Kiwanis Boys and Girls Club and didn't even notice. Obviously the noise of fifteen eight and nine year old boys playing, almost without supervision, in a gym was at a sufficient decibel to keep them all oblivious.


Here is Leo, enjoying the puddles. Actually, his expression makes him look like he's not enjoying them at all. I promise you he was. We could barely drag him back inside.