Every summer, we visit the same beach in the Florida panhandle with a mix of family and friends. The place we stay has a large river canal that feeds into the ocean behind our condo, which our crew always refers to as “the little beach”. It has a small sandy beach next to a long dock, it’s full of hermit crabs and little darting fish, and the traffic of boats or sometimes even barges that blast their long horns for the kids on the shore will pass. The kids became restless playing on the shore, so they began jumping off the dock into the water, and after that lost its novelty, they began to jump off the upper platform of the pontoon boat tied to the pier. They were testing their limits, busting out the flips, and making some waves of their own.

When we started our homeschooling journey all those years ago, I was kind of winging it. And by “kind of winging it”, I mean I had no idea what I was doing.

As we fumbled and explored our way through the first couple of years learning each other and what worked (and even more things that didn’t work), I found myself really sifting what the most important things were. If I only have these handful of years with them, what am I hoping to accomplish? If we can’t do it all (which we we can’t), what things would move us towards our core values? After all, how we spend our minutes is how we live our lives, and if we’re not careful we’ll squirrel them all away on the things that never really mattered anyway.

Watching for the roots and rocks alongside the mountain stream as we went up, we dipped in and out of conversation, taking our time and lots of breaks since the hike in was pretty steep and the air was thinner than we were used to. It was the first time in a long while that we had gotten to spend some one-on-one time together, without a tornado of children or a slew of family around. I love these rare gems with my Dad, because it’s here I get to see more of who he is, who he was, what he thinks about and dreams about. Sometimes as I learn more about him, it seems like he’s lived so many lives in different places and with different people. I’m lucky that I’ve gotten to be one of them.

So I’ve got this middle kid. He loves all animals and dinosaurs and casually busts out obscure facts he’s memorized about them. His favorite song on Spotify is called “1,000 Fart Sounds” (look it up, it’s a thing). He loves baseball, devours every single Calvin and Hobbes book he can find, and asks to ride his bike from the moment he opens his eyes to the minute he lays himself back down. He makes weird faces in every photo ever, he’s great at pressing all the buttons everywhere we go (both literally and figuratively), and he tries to rough and rowdy his baby brother on the reg while simultaneously menacing his older sister whenever possible. He’s SO awesome, but sort of in a hot-mess-express kind of way.

P O S S I B I L I T Y . In our yoga practice the other night, that was our central theme, and it’s funny how just that single word can stir a sense of thrill, of anticipation. I’m learning about myself that I love to dream, to cast a vision and chase after it with people. I’m also learning to prioritize what I chase, even if it means letting some other possibilities go.

We were leaving the city one afternoon, stuck on the interstate on-ramp and slowly crawling forward. There was a woman holding a sign and asking for help on the side of the road, so I handed my five year old son a baggie of snacks and supplies to pass over to her through his window. She smiled at him, graciously accepted the gift, and simply said, “Blessings to you”. There was a whole cluster of people just beyond her that had set up camp under the bridge overpass seeking shelter for the night. It was already pretty chilly, and the sun hadn’t even gone down yet.