on the porch swing

Is everyone in their 30's tired?  With one child, five children?  Are people with no children exhausted, too?  Is it this decade of building life that is just tiring for all?  Or is it more the repeated impossibly-pounding footsteps of a child down the hallway at 5:43 in the morning each day that does it?

I don't know.  What I know is that every day around 1pm, I could easily crawl into my bed and stay there for a few hours, which, unfortunately, is also nap time when I could most do something creative or productive.

Do the creative and productive hit in the next life stage?

Tonight I am sitting on a porch swing while my one year old niece, who is trying to pull an all-nighter, chatters and chomps a cracker, wearing a diaper and blond curls.  We are all spending the night tonight together at my parents' house.

Maybe it is the combination of camp "carnival," of wild face painting that actually made our kids look like different people, of giant plates of pie for dessert, or the pure intoxication of being with each other, but the cousins are w-i-l-d tonight, which is why I am on the porch.

Mosquitoes are biting my bare legs and arms as the woods chirp and buzz with evening.  The crepe myrtle is perfectly still, as are all of the leaves on the trees towering above.  It was another California day -- weather breaking records for DC July with this perfection (or the polar vortex...).

Today Silas busily devoured a Hardy Boys graphic novels.  Eden suddenly looks two years older as she leans over Maeve giggling.  And Maeve spent most of the day, as many days, pushing markers and shoes, sunglasses, keys she shouldn't have, tiny teacups or bears into bags and carrying them over her shoulder.

The sky is shadowed with clouds again, but there is no sign of rain tonight.  The deer poke along the edge of the woods, unhurried.  The chain of the porch swing creaks, and somewhere inside, kids scamper into pajamas and loose sheets for bed.