Spring Fever

As you may have noticed, we've got spring on the brain over here.  We are counting the days and moments and sunsets until warm weather descends and decides it likes it here well enough to stay.  I assure you, from one who has been stricken by spring fever, that it is still pretty far away.  I know.  I checked.

What really got us going was a bouquet of tulips that my mom and sister Amanda brought up with them when they came to visit last week.  (If you haven't seen the photo of it in my 365 project, you should check it out.  I'm pretty pleased with it).  It is pleasant enough to have fresh flowers in the house, but when they start opening and sharing the secrets of their blooms with the world, it's pretty remarkable.  Jax sits at the kitchen table and yells, "They're open, Mama!"  Then he theatrically sniffs them and heaves a sigh of pleasure.  I want to be a little over-the-top myself when it comes to harbingers of spring.  We've been trying to feed birds who have long flown south for the winter and trekking outside in our rainboots and no socks on.  Begging Mother Nature to give us a break.

Of course Mother Nature doesn't give a hoot what we want and will bless us with spring when she's good and ready, so until that day, we will revel in indoor bouquets.

Tonight at dinner Jax asked me to see one of the tulips.  I offered him the small one that he snapped the other day when I took these pictures and he started to investigate it.  What's this, Mama?  What's this?  Wow, I didn't think there was so much to investigate when it came to a single tulip, but suddenly words like "pistil" and "stamen" were coming out of my mouth of their own accord, dredged up the depths of my high school memories, from somewhere in Mr. Scans's biology class.  I'm fairly certain that had Jax been tested on these random science facts he would have gotten a pretty poor grade due to his mother's disinterest in all things science-related, but at least I have good recall of vocabulary words.  And thankfully my teachable moment ended there, as he went off to investigate something equally sciencey and exciting, like the laundry basket and the laws of physics--if I push hard on this side will the other side fly up and smack me in the face?  The answer is yes.

So Spring Fever has brought out the budding scientist in all of us, excuse the pun.

We're just passing time until winter recedes by investigating and learning and being our dorky selves.  Nothing like some spring flowers and sunshine to get my brain fired up; I think I run on solar power.

26 more days until spring!