It's not Mastercard

Waffles for breakfast
Snuggle time on the couch
Playing one-on-one on the floor with the littlest one while big sister goes to ballet practice
dinner at the overlook cafe
car ride doing the usual architectural tour of PDX
chatting with the husband about the future
playing with the flashlight and light board in the tent with the girls before bed...
all these things are priceless

Communion

"And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."

a closing prayer by Thomas Merton

Outside In

Driving home tonight I looked at my two wonderful daughters in the rearview mirror and got one of those elusive snapshots of them immortalized forever in my brain, me on the outside looking in.

It is a rare moment when I can see my children 'objectively'; at least as much as motherly possible! Usually I am correcting grammar, laughing, telling one to be more quiet, asking the other one to take her thumb out of her mouth and talk to me, blithely unaware that life is happening to me at that very moment.

Seeing them, one, two, looking at me, me seeing them looking at me, as their mother, that was a good moment, a good day.

Lovely

John Waterhouse

Smile Deux

Smile One

Garden Gnomes make me smile.