Children do not always practice calmness, or patience very well; but they can sure teach you patience. Mommy’s and Daddy’s will miss out if we don’t find the patience to really make time with them.
(My Little Woman pointing out a duck to us while at the lake this weekend. She wouldn’t go till we all noticed it and good for her for insisting we stop being so absorbed in our adult plans and take note of life!)
I did something today I haven’t done in a while. I let my girls help me cook. We all put on aprons and my Big Girl cleaned the beans, my Little Woman snapped off the end of the beans and I showed them how to snap them in half into the pot. We then washed the potatoes together and carried them over to the counter, using our aprons as a sack (the girls thought this skill was amazing). At first I kept thinking about how much faster I am at doing it alone, then I drew myself back to the present and took note of their conversation and the moment we where making together.
I’ve pointedly been trying to be in the moment. At lunch time it is just my Little Woman and I. Most days Baby Boy is napping and the older two are at school. I used to rush around while she was eating and get things done during lunch break but lately I have been making myself sit with her and really listening to all her seemingly unconnected stories.
(Note my Big Girls glove! It is her fall gloves that she is getting covered in dirt but she told me she needed ‘flowering gloves like mama wears’ and so that is what this pink set is for now.)
Yesterday I sat on the front step and watched my eldest ‘garden’. She was taking water from the kiddy pool and pouring it randomly on the lawn. “These are yucky areas that need flowers to grow,”she told me. She would take her rake and scratch away at my empty flower bed, very busy, sure she was making the yard much prettier.
I listened as my youngest daughter giggled and squealed with lady bugs on her mitten (yes mitten). She was so nervous about touching them she insisted on wearing a mitten while the bugs played on her hand. My Big Boy thought it was great fun to scare the bugs and watch them pee on him. They must have kept at the bug hunt and gardening for hours and I managed to sit and really watch for a good while.
I am not someone who enjoys fast pace. I truly do think about moments in time a lot and try hard to capture the littlest things about it all. I have become a very impatient mother though. I have become too busy too often. I need to relax more and cook with my girls, chat with my three year old, hunt bugs and garden in an empty flower bed.
Practicing this is medicinal for my mommy soul.
TTFN
“The wind had dropped, and the snow, tired of rushing round in circles trying to catch itself up, now fluttered gently down until it found a place on which to rest, and sometimes the place was Pooh’s nose and sometimes it wasn’t, and in a little while Piglet was wearing a white muffler round his neck and feeling more snowy behind the ears than he had ever felt before.”
Baby Boy is full of chatter today and Little Woman is full of smiles. I barely have to look her way to get one! I have very big plans for my afternoon and those plans are to sit and watch, to sip tea and snuggle, all day!
