Becky
A year passed the way ordinary years do, once the extraordinary danger has finally receded, marked less by crisis than by the slow accumulation of small, unremarkable milestones I'd once feared we'd never get to have.
Micah started first grade in September, marching into his classroom with a dinosaur backpack he'd chosen specifically because it had a stegosaurus on it, "the strongest one," he'd informed me solemnly during the shopping trip. His cursive ambitions from the summer had evaporated somewhere around October, replaced by an obsession with paleontology so complete that Mason had spent an entire weekend building him a backyard excavation site, burying plastic dinosaur bones in a sandbox and constructing an elaborate "dig site" complete with little flags and a laminated field
