Saturday evening, mid-April

We’re arrayed across the couch in our jamma jams - which is what Claire used to call pajamas; we have no idea why, as no one in our family calls them that, but she’s recently graduated to “PJs” and I’m grieving the loss of the uniquely toddler-Claire nomenclature - watching The Wizard of Oz, my father’s favorite movie. We first introduced the kids to this movie on Easter after we’d had my parents over for a roast lunch and it’s already one of Robbie’s favorites, too. Sometimes I catch him muttering “I hear he is a whizz of a wiz if ever a wiz there was” as he putters about the house, just like my dad does.

Claire is curled into Jon, her little hand splayed across his forearm. Her chubby fingers are still dimpled, though the rolls that creased her wrists are long gone and there are remnants of red polish dappled on a few nails. Robbie has just nestled deeper into my side, and I duck my chin to kiss his head. I inhale the scent of charcoal smoke that winds through his hair. We grilled out back tonight, and the smell has lingered. I flatten my hand against Robbie’s chest and feel his heart beating against my palm; it’s faster than mine, an insistent butterfly battering my palm.

Earlier in the evening, the kids had been playing rugby on the grass. They had mostly just been hurling their bodies at each other and, as they descended from the deck after saying hello to our next-door neighbor, Robbie yelled out. “Tackle me, Claire!”

My mother-in-law and I, down below, called in unison, “Not on the stairs!” Same tone, same pitch, same intonation. The cry of mothers across the generations.

Tomorrow we’re going to sign our ketubah, our marriage contract. It’s traditionally part of the wedding ritual, but Jon and I didn’t have a Jewish wedding and decided to celebrate our 10th anniversary by writing one. I’m looking forward to the small ceremony we’ll have though this is the living contract, too: raising our children with the voices of our parents in our ears.