on savoring and sequins (in the bathroom)

What?

You too?

I'm not the only one who drives a letter to the post office so it can go out in today's mail so I can have ten minutes of peace?

[okay, peace is a nebulous concept, hard to put your arms around, but in my book, it's children restrained by the law of seatbelt usage and Matt Maher and Audrey Assad with Hayley on the background vocals belting out Lord, I Need You]

You don't?

So it's just me.  That's okay.

Savor the moments and slow down everyone says, you know, your mom, your grandma, Ann Voskamp's facebook posts, Jesus Calling (I read Jesus Calling and then I can't remember what I read five minutes later, but I'm pretty sure it was slow down and don't hurry).

I savor about one moment per week.

I showed Eli what sunshine patches on the floor were this week.  We sat on the floor in a huge square of sunlight and I made his little hand feel the temperature difference between the sun and the shadow.  It was very sweet to sit there and wiggle our toes together.  I should probably do it more often.

It should be more often.

Like wayyyy more often.

Instead I am annoyed by noise and irritated by the child reading the news over my shoulder while loudly crunching on a carrot stick and impatient with childish arguments.

Stop. Savor.  Yeah.  Sometimes.

I teach - it's a full-time job.  I get done teaching and all of the home stuff is waiting for me, patiently, it hasn't gone anywhere at all.  Some weeks teaching our children is glorious and heady and just such a privilege and other weeks you wonder if everyone is getting the short end of the stick.  We have a life outside all this and sometimes that life is super rewarding and other times it's just plain a ton of work.

I was driving home from AWANA tonight, stopping to check on a house issue that Daniel + tenant were working on, going home to dishes piled and laundry spread on the living room floor.  God. . . I just need a little bit of encouragement.  Please.  Just a little something pouring in.

I put Eli to bed and we read about the 9 little "bunkeys" that were Curious George's previous family- before the Man With The Yellow Hat- the things you learn.  I didn't even know. 

And then the kids were in our bedroom, breathless.  They had hot coffee and my Philip Yancey book that I am almost done with and book marks made from their looper loom. 

Mom, just stay here, please.  Ok? Don't come out.

I know it's  a shameless ploy to stay up a bit later but I'm too tired to care and oh coffee and Yancey sound too good to be true.

A little bit later they're back with careful notes and instructions: go to the pumkins.

I tiptoe down to the coffee table in the living room.  The laundry is gone (probably behind the couch, but who cares) and all the toys and library books are picked up.  The note next to the pumkins says: go to the appels and pumkins.

The dining room table is clean and dinner dishes left in the pre-church scramble are all cleared away.  The only thing on the table is my silver tiered cupcake platter filled with apples and mini pumpkins.  The note next to it reads: go to where your shoes are.

Oh my kitchen is so clean! The dishwasher is running and their faces are beaming.  The shoes are straightened and neat and my last instruction reads: go to the toilet

Um okay.

So my elaborate treasure hunt ends at the clean toilet, with a note on the lid declaring how much fun of a mom I am,  signed by "Jake" and "Cambria". . . . and the best part. . . . a whole scattering of sparkly sequins sprinkled around the toilet. . . for pizazz, I suppose, the hurrah of the treasure hunt.

I want to die laughing.  It's all so funny.  The toilet, the sequins, my request to God for encouragement, my children's happiness, that God answered with my kids. . .

My heart is warmed from the inside out and we sit at the dining room table and eat microwave s'mores and microwaved cookie dough-turned-cookies in the glow of our clean house and our pumkins and appels.

Thanks, God, for my sequined toilet surprise.  You're pretty creative. 

 Yeah, I'm savoring.