Bountiful Words, Beautiful World

I ended up with a second post yesterday.  If you didn’t see it, it was here.

Today, what about today? Nothing really happened today.

My life is pretty average and I’m more than happy with that.  I’m not interested in doctoring it up for blogging sake.  I didn’t do anything fancy today.  We hung out, got flu shots, hung out some more, made brownies, and now we are just hanging out.  That’s life.  We just be.

I used to get really upset by days like today.  Words like unproductive, worthless, wasted; they all seemed to apply.  It’s different now.  I’m not sure when I changed, maybe I’m getting old.  Maybe it’s The Kidlet.  Every minute is productive in her world.  She can spend an hour digging in the dirt and that was an hour well spent.  An hour napping? Not an hour wasted, an hour storing up energy to play some serious dress up, paint a bunch of watercolors, build a lego castle and then maybe if there’s time left before lunch, dig in the garden.

Her’s is a different kind of productivity.  It’s not doing for the goal, it’s doing for the doing.  She doesn’t paint because she has a masterpiece in mind, she paints for the pleasure and the results are pure genius.  I’ve learned a lot being her mom; to take a step back and enjoy the process of creating for creativity’s sake.  It’s very freeing to think like a 3-year-old.

What’s more, I no longer worry about chores.  I don’t worry if the laundry sits undone (and not just because The Hubs is so great at getting it done) or that the dishes are piling in the sink.  Instead I choose to linger in the moments of memory making.  I soak up every chance I get to just stare at my child or my husband and lock the way they look, the way they sound, the way every moment feels deep into my brain, storing those treasures away for the future.  I know there will come a time when The Kidlet won’t march around the living room to the Star Wars theme in her Snow White costume, or when The Hubs will look at me and I’ll realize that the young man I married has grown into a (ruggedly) handsome older man and that those years of traipsing off on a whim to see this or that have been replaced with something new and profoundly settled.  These are things I love to watch evolving as our family grows older together.

So, yes, I suppose nothing happened today. At the same time, something did happen.  We made brownies and my daughter stirred the batter while my husband and I did the dinner clean up.  We tried to turn the cat into a frog but none of our spells worked and it was decided we didn’t have enough “sparkly energy”, like the kind the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella is flush with, to cast the cat-to-amphibian transfiguration.  We’ll try again tomorrow.  The Hubs and I were able to smile at someone else’s good fortune, despite our own current economic situation. The Fly Boat got taken out for a spin.

And right now, I’m watching from the den as my two favorite people in the entire world build a Flux Capacitor from two plastic cups and a racquetball.  My life is pretty average, and nothing really happened today.