Parlor Tricks

Parlor Tricks

Toren starts Kindergarten tomorrow.  Today is his last day as a non-school age child.  It doesn't really mean much.  I know he won't morph into an entirely different species in the morning.  Still, it's a reminder that life is fleeting.  There is that old saying, "The days are long, but the years are short."  I feel that today.

Toren eating his favorite lunch today; McDonald's Happy Meal with Chicken Nuggets!!

I wonder if I have taken enough time with Toren.   Did I play enough board games with him?  Did I do enough underdogs on the swing-set, bake enough cookies, read enough books?  I fear I haven't.  When I look at my children I want to freeze them at the ages they are now.  I want a do over.  I want another chance to show my love for them.  I want to do it better.

We don't have the capacity as humans to stop time.  Maybe in eternity, it will be a parlor trick that we can practice and show off for our Father.  But for now, time moves.  It is constant.  It is more constant than me.   So my choice with my children is to love them better now, and love them better tomorrow, because I cannot love them better yesterday.

I am sure Kindergarten will be rife with opportunities for me to be the kind of mom I want to be.  I am sure I will have opportunities with my fourth grader and my teenagers as well.  My sincerest prayer today is that I will not waste any more time.

Cheese and Crackers

I wrote the following about 6 months ago and just found it today.  Still working on the whole contentment thing.  But we did pull Toren out of preschool, so there's that.

I am sitting next to the cutest little four-year-old you could possibly imagine.  We are watching Wallace and Gromit- my boy’s choice. Wallace and Gromit is comprised of some claymation figures- an English man and a dog who is constantly annoyed at the English man.  Wallace and his dog decide they need some more cheese to go with their crackers, so of course they build a clay rocket to the moon because “everyone knows the moon is made of cheese.”  I have watched this show countless times and it is the worst show I have ever seen. But Toren loves it. I’m not sure why.  He can quote every word.

Anyway, I am sitting here watching Wallace and Gromit with sweet, sweaty boy and I feel purely blissful. I wish I could always be so content.

I have not been content this week.

Here is a list of things that had me flustered beyond reason in the last 7 days.

1.              Toren screams every time I drop him off at preschool.  For a month straight.  Every time. My precious child acts like a monster.  The terrible little snotty nosed monster you want to smack at the grocery store when he is screaming at the top of his lungs and hitting his mom.  That’s my kid. Once a day. For a month straight.

2.             My kids fight, all the time.  No really. All the time.

3.              Okay, I guess there really isn’t that much that I was unreasonably anguished over.  There was just an unreasonable amount of anguishing.

“Crackers, Gromit, we forgot the crackers!”  How could they eat the cheese on the moon without crackers?  Do you see how stupid this show is?

I don’t know how to keep this peace that I feel now in my heart when things are not going my way. There are only rare moments that you get to spend watching clay figures speak in English accents while cuddling your boy.  Most of life is a lot more furious than that.  Most of life is fast and inconvenient.  And the moon is never really made of cheese when you need it to be.

So how can I sew contentment into the fabric of every moment?