Josie, Bennett, Ava, Jules If one of the great sorrows of my life is that I never gave birth to children of my own, one of the great joys is that I get to borrow some of the best, every week.
In addition to weekly play dates with my goddaughter and godson and niece and nephew, it's been a joy to reinvent traditions with them. I've written before about our 4th of July Fairy Log, Chinese New Year, and a special Memorial Day bestowal of my father's veteran's flag.
Birthdays follow a fairly standard template, but last year we started a new tradition with horse-crazy Josie. She'd become enamored of Amber's Breyer horse collection, which had been relegated to boxes in the basement for years. At some point we'd decided to bring them up and display them on the bookcases in our front hall.
Soon every visit to our house found Josie clamoring to take the horses down so she could feed them, water them, and enact elaborate scenarios involving migrations, wars, games, and family life. Check out the video below for an equestrian competition in which she apologetically (with British accent) deems the horses' trotting "kind of boring".
It was Amber's idea to begin bequeathing the horses to Josie to take home as her very own. We started with one special stallion with a fancy braided bridle. But when she turned 7 we invited her to choose 7. In the lead-up to her most recent 8th birthday, her anticipation built around which 8 she'd pick. She was guided by one clear principle: she'd realized in the year since she'd turned 7 that these horses came in family units, groupings she'd inadvertently split up when she'd made her first choices. For her 8th birthday she was determined to reunite the separated families.
Josie's collection grows as Amber's dwindles. Next year 9 horses will traverse the mile between our houses and tether her generation to ours, joining her ability to be so magically present to the memory of our now long-ago childhoods on the great wheel of life.
In addition to weekly play dates with my goddaughter and godson and niece and nephew, it's been a joy to reinvent traditions with them. I've written before about our 4th of July Fairy Log, Chinese New Year, and a special Memorial Day bestowal of my father's veteran's flag.
Birthdays follow a fairly standard template, but last year we started a new tradition with horse-crazy Josie. She'd become enamored of Amber's Breyer horse collection, which had been relegated to boxes in the basement for years. At some point we'd decided to bring them up and display them on the bookcases in our front hall.
Soon every visit to our house found Josie clamoring to take the horses down so she could feed them, water them, and enact elaborate scenarios involving migrations, wars, games, and family life. Check out the video below for an equestrian competition in which she apologetically (with British accent) deems the horses' trotting "kind of boring".
It was Amber's idea to begin bequeathing the horses to Josie to take home as her very own. We started with one special stallion with a fancy braided bridle. But when she turned 7 we invited her to choose 7. In the lead-up to her most recent 8th birthday, her anticipation built around which 8 she'd pick. She was guided by one clear principle: she'd realized in the year since she'd turned 7 that these horses came in family units, groupings she'd inadvertently split up when she'd made her first choices. For her 8th birthday she was determined to reunite the separated families.
Josie's collection grows as Amber's dwindles. Next year 9 horses will traverse the mile between our houses and tether her generation to ours, joining her ability to be so magically present to the memory of our now long-ago childhoods on the great wheel of life.
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