On Tonight's Menu: Spaghetti and Garlic-Cheese Biscuits.

While the water boils and the hamburger cooks, I'm striding around the house like a queen. My annual 2-week active duty tour as an Air Force Reservist is over. I fulfilled my yearly obligation and here I am, back in my fortress where I am surrounded not by typical office furnishings and various patterns of camouflage, but by miniature dirty, rolled up socks and sippy cups whose chewed-up nozzles are oozing milk all over the couch. And the smell! It's glorious. There's a gingerbread candle burning in the living room, the ground beef seasoned with onion powder, and the fresh laundry releasing the fabulous smell of detergent up the stairs...

And there's my son, the 2-year-old. He's being very loud; he'll probably wake up the 8-month-old as he sleeps -fanny in the air, the proper way to slumber comfortably. The 2-year-old has his new Spiderman fishing pole* stuck in the child safety gate. "Mama, look! Loooooook!" he yells to me, grunting as he tries to free it.

I bite my lip in amusement at him. He's a wild sight, running around in his underwear because I didn't bother to clothe him after he de-robed for his nap (he shuns the fanny-in-the-air method for naked sleeping.) His little legs aren't so little anymore. He has one lanky limb propped up against the wall while he wages his battle against the gate. He is so boyish compared to his baby brother, who is still all-new to me, soft and chubby and without skinned elbows.

I poke a fork in the boiling spaghetti and give it a stir. I go over my checklist for the night: I need to finish dinner and share dinner; I need to tidy up the house because the babysitter is coming tomorrow and she MUST NOT know the true state of how our house normally is; I need to print out Christmas cards for the neighbors.

Gabriel flies through a corner of my vision. He's successfully removed the fishing pole and discarded it. Now he's running, for the simple glee of it. I need to teach him how to fold laundry, I joke to myself. I'm startled by the sudden image in my mind of my little boy with even longer legs, tall legs that are the foundation of a young man with the same boyish smile but older eyes. And now the one joking with me is him and we're talking about things more complex than Curious George. And he's drying the dishes as I wash them, sleeves rolled up past the elbows he was always scraping as a toddler...

My dreams have evolved and changed. They're now filled with these sights and smells. I wonder what these tiny men will dream of when they are no longer tangled in my feet while I keep house, when they are no longer blobby shadows on the walls but darken the hallways just as my husband and I do. What a sight it will be! What a thought!

It's Christmastime... As I ponder my babies and contemplate which of my imaginations of them will become realities, I think of another baby a long time ago...

*By the way, in case you were wondering, the pole did not have a hook attached to it :)