What’s remarkable in your unremarkable life?
Everything.
Really. I mean, look around. Green that gets greener when it rains. The magic of a butterfly. How my children will BEG to go out puddlestomping after a good rainstorm (and sometimes during a good rainstorm). And how sometimes, the don’t-get-dirty freak in me encourages them to make a huge mess for the sake of fun.
Alice likes to stomp on ants. I try telling her that it’s not nice, but she won’t be deterred. And it’s a BIG stomp, too — she lifts her leg WAY up high and brings it crashing down on the bug perpetrator. And then she’s down on all fours, examining the victim at close range. Up again and stomping if it’s not quite dispatched yet. When the bug is stuck on her shoe, she’s confused. Where did it go? More than once I’ve had to scrape the bug off the bottom of her shoe to prove that she defeated it, and she always sets off on a hunt for the next one.
Helen wants me to “teach her some math.” So I wrote a few simple addition problems last night and showed her how to count on her fingers. After three problems, she was bored. But she did pretty well for those first three.
Helen can read certain words, and they appear unexpectedly. We were driving home from church on Sunday and there was a sign out by an apartment complex: “Pool Party Today!” From the back seat, I heard the inquiry, “Why did that sign say ‘party,’ Mommy?” I knew that she knew the words “red” and “cat” and “dog” and all of our names, but I didn’t realize she knew “party.” I wonder how many other words she knows that she’s not telling? Self-conscious kid is probably right on the cusp of knowing how to read; so we’ll just keep reading to her until those final synapses connect and she’s comfortable letting us know that she can do it, too.
One thing that is truly remarkable to me is that I can be so lucky to have traipsed into this life and I haven’t been caught yet. I have always felt so lucky, so blessed, to have the family that I have and to have the home that I have and to have been given the talents that I have been given, that there’s always that niggling fear that someone’s going to realize pretty soon that I got more than my fair share. I don’t know quite how I fell into this happy life, but I’m blessed daily by it. Even on the whining, ranting days (like I had been having the past few weeks).
Remarkable. It is. Even on the mundane days of doing laundry and vacuuming and ignoring all of my other housework.