The bacon sizzled as the family slowly scampered around getting ready for church. It was a drizzly and grey Sunday morning, where we all slept in since we’d stayed up until midnight to light sparklers and watch the New Year roll in together. Breakfast was finally finished cooking, but apparently nobody around here likes bacon anymore (go figure) and they started complaining about how hungry they were and how there’s nothing to eat. A batch of pancakes got everyone back on track, and all was well in the world again. I had an old Spotify playlist playing on our kitchen speaker with a collection of different worship songs and hymns that we had built up and added to over the years. I was mid-conversation with my middle boy, and he stopped and smiled and pointed at the speaker. “Hey, that was one of our hymns from school - I remember this one.” He then immediately dropped back into whatever he was doing, and the morning moved on. But that moment stuck with me, and I think it’s those simple little things like that I am beginning to store up and treasure. That song we learned was from a LONG time ago, and I was glowing inside knowing that it still caught his ear.

Think about the thing you’re most afraid of. That repeating loop that you carry with you, that pokes at you from it’s darkened corner of your mind, where your fears all lurk and linger. That one that you just glanced over at, but quickly looked away to make sure nobody saw you looking at it? That’s the one. The one you can kind of sort of allude to in a conversation, but never directly name it because it is that crippling, and you’re afraid it just might answer back and step out from its decrepit corner.

Name it. Call it out. Dare it to look back at you.

My littlest boy squealed with delight as he walked past the garden by our front door. “PINK FLOWERS! Look, Mommy! Look!” We walk past these knockout rose bushes almost everyday together, but for whatever reason on this particular day, they caught his eye. The little bush he was admiring was actually drowning in weeds and grass that had jumped the border, and I realized it had become quite smaller than the other ones. “Operation Save the Shrimpy Rose Bush” had officially begun, as I grabbed my gardening gloves and old kitchen trash can I use to collect my scraps and trimmings in, and got to plucking.

We sold our house of ten years last December, and moved five humans and all of their things out the week before Christmas. My in-laws graciously made space for us in their home while we are currently awaiting our new house to be finished, and we’ve been bunking in JoJo’s old bedroom in a real full-circle kind of way. January is typically a month of fresh starts for most people, but for us it felt like we were just trying to get our footing underneath our bodies and back on the ground again. For me personally, it has felt like I’ve been in a holding pattern of sorts for months now, able to move forward in some things but generally feeling stuck in most.

I don’t care how old my kids get, I therefor and hitherto solemnly swear and publicly proclaim that from this point forward and forever more we will always read picture books aloud together.

Ok, maybe that is an ambitious vow, but I DO hope we always keep that deep-seeded love for the classic, snuggled-up, tuck-my-toes-under-the-blanket-next-to-yours kind of book reading. I’ve always had a tender spot for a good story, since it’s one of the most lasting and powerful ways we connect to each other as people, and it helps us to understand things and ideas far greater than us. Over the years, we’ve read our share of books together as a homeschool family, and there have been a few that have stuck with me as real treasures that we will occasionally wander back to and recommend quite often to folks we know (and even to some we don’t).

The kids wanted to work on a drawing video yesterday, and I said they could… as long as they did it together. My bigger kids have seemingly opposite personalities at times, and nothing puts it on display quite like art class. Ollie is a “roll with it” kind of guy. If something goes awry in his creation, he just kinda shrugs and keeps it moving. Tacie, on the other hand, cannot bear the idea of imperfection, and we will hear lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth before finding her in the middle of a whole ream of crumpled-up printer paper. She doesn’t always give herself time to learn slowly, or time to fumble and experiment, before she demands mastery of herself.

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.

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.

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.

He laid on the wet pavement and wrestled with his tire, and as we talked he peppered our conversation with step by step instructions on what to do if I were changing my own flat tire. He said that teaching skills like this was actually kind of therapeutic for him. Funny thing, I actually learn best from watching someone else demonstrate.