this moment...{swelling and shrinking}

I snapped a secret photo. A picture does paint a thousand words.

I had a moment the other day. 

A Whoa This Is All Going Sorta As Planned moment. 

Max and a sweet neighbor friend had been outside, playing and jumping on the trampoline.

Max busted in the back door. (He never just comes in anymore. It's as if he has been expelled by Mother Nature, with a shush of wind and energy, back into the house)

In one long and excited and loud exclamation he was saying this....

"I have to read you this passage! It's insane and so funny and I can't stop laughing and it's this book about a boy and then this guy brings a present over and hold on, let me find this part, you have to hear it. I 'll read it to you.............  

Now that's really all it takes for me. This one thing, this one bit of excitement bursting from my 12 year old son feels like the whole universe nodding yes.

But it gets better. What book, what passage was he so excited by?

He grabs the book from a stack by his bed and Reed sits beside him, and he's thumbing through and searching and he finds it, and starts laughing and reading and laughing and....

I smiled at the full circle of it all.

Unbidden, with tears of laughter, he reads my favorite passage from my favorite book, that he has found and fallen for, all by himself.

Do you know the armadillo scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany?

Let us recommend it to you. 

And then a few hours later.......

We are all sitting around the table eating dinner. Della is talking about her day at school. She is talking about a Show and Tell that drug on way too long. She is talking about a small incident.

What happened, baby? I asked. 

"I yelled out." she said.

What'd you say? We were all curious.

"It wasn't bad, I told her to 'just spit it out'."

Yep.

That's so me. Get to the point, people!

And there you have it. In the space of an afternoon I see the full spectrum of our influence. 

From a literary gold star to heckling a first grader, we are raising these people, best we can, nowhere near perfect, but damn sure unique, and it pays well, with lots of love, and the energy and power they leave in their wake. To get up and do it again....for tomorrow holds another adventure, another mystery, another blessing.

And certainly another laugh.

......

And my dear readers, thank you for reading. For letting me write.

I appreciate you everyday and love our community.

blessings.