June 14, 2006 @ 8:39 am | Filed under: Family,Funny
And here I thought I was just being efficient. I decided to get a jump on dinner so I mixed up a marinade for the chicken. Now I’m listening to an intense and fear-tinged conversation:
Rose: “But we didn’t have lunch!”
Beanie: “I know that.”
Rose: “But Mommy’s making dinner! That means we missed lunch!”
LOL! That almost sounds like something that could really happen here! If we are eating on the fly, one of the kids could be out playing and totally miss a meal! Thanks for sharing a good laugh!
“Exploration,” says John Stilgoe, author of Outside Lies Magic, “is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.”
Yes: it is so, so much fun, and that is why I write these posts all chattery with excitement over this or that connection the kids made today. (Or that I made myself!) I know I get carried away, but that’s the point, isn’t it, that way leading on to way has carried me away?
And yet—and yet—I think we are at once ‘carried away’ and made more fully present in the now, more rooted, by these relationships between ideas about things past and future. The joy of connection makes me want to celebrate this moment, this brief encounter with wild-haired child and broad-trunked tree, bus going by, sign on church wall, Scottish warlord creeping over the tower wall and startling the English soldier’s wife who has just put her babe in arms to sleep by crooning that the Black Douglas won’t get him. Child, laughing, shouting “Dinna ye be sae sure aboot that!” across the courtyard outside the library. How can I not celebrate this freedom?
Every day is complicated, messy, and full of friction. And every day has glorious or cozy moments worth celebrating. I seldom bother to chronicle the friction and the mess because writing time is fleeting and precious—and childhood even more so. I’d rather capture the small joys that I might forget—or take for granted—if I don’t take time to set them down in words.
(Excerpt from this post about Real Life, quoted here because I don't want anyone to be under the impression that things are always perfect around here! Heaven knows we are anything but. Perfect, frictionless, orderly? Nope. Happy? Most of the time!)
Be like the bird
Who, pausing in flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way beneath her,
Yet sings,
Knowing she has wings.
LOL! At least there’s a sort of logic to the way they’re thinking.
Posted on June 14th, 2006 at 8:43 amLOL! That almost sounds like something that could really happen here! If we are eating on the fly, one of the kids could be out playing and totally miss a meal! Thanks for sharing a good laugh!
Posted on June 14th, 2006 at 9:25 amlol
Posted on June 14th, 2006 at 9:30 amMissed lunch! The horror!LOL!
Posted on June 14th, 2006 at 10:52 amI think my dc would be just as perplexed if I ever started dinner before lunchtime. Before 5pm even!
Bless their hearts! Routines reign in their little lives!
Posted on June 14th, 2006 at 11:47 amI’m so consoled that it is just not my house in which this has happened…:-)
Posted on June 14th, 2006 at 12:27 pmLOL that is too cute!
Posted on June 18th, 2006 at 8:16 am