Are you there Spring? It's me, JoAnn.

As winter drags on for the seventeenth straight month and my children have all started to resemble the zombies they like to kill in their new favorite video game I swore I would never buy for them (I feel a deep shame when the gamer geek at Game Stop asks if I am aware that "Zombie Gorefest" is rated M and not meant for a six year old) I stare wistfully out the window in search of a Popcorn Bowl moment.  Sledding and skiing are out of the question due to the ice encrusted hill that would surely send someone careening into a tree and subsequently to the ER.  Hmm, that would be vivid memory though.

My ennui has become exacerbated by the photographs a friend recently posted on Facebook. Alain Laboile, documents the Peter Panesque lives of his six children growing up in a French Neverland where children run naked through the countryside befriending tiny fawns and building menacing monsters made of metal.

The photos are equal parts beauty, danger and magic.  I am obsessed.  I am jealous.  I am an inadequate parent.

I have poured over Laboile's photos a hundred times trying to find evidence that these sparsely clothed, ferrel cherubs do things like play Flappy Birds for hours on their iDevices or try to kill the undead on their game system.  No such luck.  They are perfect.

But then I got to thinking, the photos I have of my own cherubs, while generally featuring more clothing and toy firearms, also depict the magic and beauty of childhood with nary a screen in sight.

I can now enjoy Laboile's gorgeous photos and am comforted in my belief that between chasing runaway bikes and frolicking in streams, these French beauties are all vying for high score in Angry Birds.