Passionate Toast

I am passionate about cinnamon toast on a Sunday night in the calloused fingers of my guitar-playing husband or the small, dirty fingers of four sandbox-construction-working children.

I am not passionate about anything that takes me out of that moment around the kitchen table. I don't like thinking about the amount of calories in the cinnamon toast, the films I should be studying in preparation for another semester of teaching, the piano pieces I need to learn before Haddy's book 2 recital, the floors that will need mopped in the morning, the journal entries I need to catch up on, or the new budget we need to review. And yet, these details cannot be neglected.

Success follows passion, or so I've been told. So if I can become passionate about the day-to-day details of mothering, seeing them as necessary brush strokes in the portrait, perhaps there will be some measure of success.

But how can I measure success as a mother, when so much of the outcome is out of my hands? I feed my children a carrot, pinch pennies, take them to practices, clean up after them, read to them, pray with them, tuck them in, nag at them, hold them, teach them, and then, they go on and do things their own way. I can only hope that cinnamon toast on a Sunday night does something good for those passionate little people...

Sound Effects

Spencer and I went on a walk tonight. We saw a mmmmvvvvvvvvvrrrrmmmmm and a tweet tweet. Did you know that tweets fly away fast when you chase them? We were tempted to pick a aaaappp off the tree. Did you know they grow on trees? We said, "hi," to every vrrrmmmm that drove by. Sometimes, the people inside waved back. We stopped to pet a mee mee that was so soft we had to giggle about it. We saw a big ruff and almost lost a shoosh. We were excited to run home to tell Dadda about it. It was all so exciting, we may not be able to sleep tonight.

Why Not?

Why not write in a blog you haven't peeked at in four years? You have things to say. You have people to brag about, ideas to share, pictures to post. People may be wondering where you are living, what you are doing. Your family, spread out across the United States and now in Germany, may want updates.

So...what's the hold up?

Just start where you are. Don't try to go back to the day you abandoned the blogging world. No need to mention details about Isac's first swimming lessons or Haddy's debut as a tightrope walker in her kindergarten play. You couldn't possibly recap every moment; Sophia learning how to skip or Spencer's crazy dances in oversized rainboots are only one in one hundred memories worth mentioning.

Begin this way: Today, we ate pancakes and eggs for dinner. Seth Hochstrasser and Katie Klingler joined our dinner breakfast party after helping my kids distribute dominoes, race tracks, Barbies, swimsuits, towels, dress-up shoes, Polly Pockets, baseballs, and mitts throughout the house. If it weren't for the fact that much of the day was spent preparing to audition for a play, taking the kids to eat lunch at Porter Park and play baseball at Smith Park, I might have the energy to enforce a clean up. I guess there's always tomorrow...

Who knows? Maybe the next time you write, you'll know how to begin. And maybe you'll know how to explain why your children now look like this: