I want to be the kind of mama who moves slowly and graciously, who doesn’t rush all over the place, who drifts from one place to the next, sweeping along as though there were nowhere else to be but here.

But I’ve never been good at that. I’ve never been good at lolling or loitering or sauntering or pottering. In some ways, it was easier to do when my kids were small. I look at my writing from that time of my life and I notice how I not only noticed the fine points of my day, but I took the time to write them down: The way my toddler puckered as she smeared on her Hello Kitty lip balm; the way my oldest laughed in great rollicking leaps, like a waterfall; the way my young son’s scalp smelled like the earth itself.

Author and father Piero Ferrucci, on the subject, says, “There is a sense of healthy laziness that I have learned in being with children: Slow down, take it easy, be here, enjoy yourself,” he writes. “You are allowed to have no purpose.”

I spent a decade or so – when my kids were tiny – in as close to a healthy laziness as I’m ever going to see. But now that my kids are growing up and spending more and more time away from me, I find myself grasping for purpose, just as I did before I had kids at all. I remember how I’m happier when I do have a purpose and happier still when I know what that purpose is.

When I don’t have one, I feel unconstructive, floppy and sad. I’m a little bit type A and can quote Abraham Maslow at will: “If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life,” and: “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be.”

I think that’s why things were so liberating back when my kids were home all day and relying on me for everything. I really did feel that I was allowed to have no purpose aside from them. I had a different relationship with time because I had a built-in, overriding sense of purpose by simple default.

There was a deep sense of purpose in just waking up and smiling at them and pouring their milk. There was a deep sense of purpose in sitting at the breakfast table and competitively guessing how many little fruits were in the box of Raisin Bran.

There was a deep sense of purpose in just talking with them and looking at them and worshipping them the way a mom worships her little, little kids. With that sense of purpose comes a deep sense of fulfillment. I could finally take a deep breath and feel like it satisfied something in that way down deep place.

This is one thing I noticed when my youngest child started kindergarten this past year. Suddenly someone else was responsible for each of my kids for a good chunk of the day. Someone else was feeling that sense of purpose and fulfillment and everything else I did paled in comparison to what I used to do all day.

I remember the first few months of school last year, I vacillated between a panicky sense of not getting enough work done before they stepped off the schoolbus and an empty feeling of wastefulness that made my throat cling and grab.

So I’m reflecting on all of this while I’m trying to work from home over summer vacation and my 6-year-old son comes in and he wants to play a game of cards. My first instinct is to say, “I don’t have time,” which is sort of ironic and which gets me to start thinking, “what exactly is time for, then?”

Is it for enjoying, for filling, for deciding what to do with, consciously and deliberately, with reverence and devotion? If it is, then it’s probably for playing Uno with this tan little kid who now sits across from me, holding an Uno deck in his grubby, stubby fingers, which will someday soon be man hands that will be texting his girlfriend or closing his bedroom door in my face.

And then I try to do everything I do in as slow a manner as I can. To tell the truth, it generally drives me crazy to do that for too long, but even for just a minute it helps me to have reverence for the puzzling way time passes and the way our children grow, both gradually and all at once.

It reminds me of a time when I was eating at my favorite fast food joint, which is actually this bright little cafe where they ladle steaming bowls of freshly made soup into paper to-go bowls. It’s like fast food for slow, old souls. As my kids and I were hunched over our bowls, shoveling in spoonfuls of Potato Gouda because we were late for soccer practice, a minister whom I admire very much came in and stood in line.

He did not see us there in the corner and so I know I was observing him in his natural state. I was immediately taken by the slowness that enveloped everything he did, from the way he shuffled forward in the line to the way he put his hand in his pocket to fish out his wallet. It was the way he creased the tall brown bag that held his soup and his bread and his cookie. His pace alone made him appear reverent and devout. He was paying attention. He was letting even the tedious errand of getting take-out become an experience that would surround him like a cloak.

Reflecting on this, I have to ask myself, what am I in such a hurry for? Why are we all rushing so much? Are we rushing because we like it – because we feed on the false drama? Are we rushing so that we can fit in more things or so that we can make more money? Are we rushing to make some form of mark on the world and in the meantime risk missing our own lives?

There are those friends in life (if we make time for them) whose very presence slows us down. Just being with them says, “You can’t get it all done. You are already enough just the way you are, so let us set a pace in this life that we can enjoy.”

In truth, I think that’s what a family is for. At least that’s what I hope my kids will say that their family was for, when they have grown into busy parents and are striving to slow down for themselves.

Written by Momscape founder Susie Michelle Cortright. Follow her on Twitter.

When our tee ball team gets tired, they lose all focus. Some of them can’t muster the energy to stand so they sit smack down on the base. Some of them droop their torsos and let their arms hang long like butter noodles. Some get wild with laughter and have snorting contests. Some cry.

When you think about it, these tiny humans have been in preschool or kindergarten all day and by 6 or 7 in the evening, most of them just want their Capri Sun and cupcake from the Snack Mom and to curl up in the backseat with a blankie.

It was the last inning of the second game in my son’s first t-ball season. The sun was low enough that it made colors look surreal, and it cast a long shadow as one 5-year-old, whom I’ll never forget, loped up to the tee. He had spent the previous inning filling his baseball hat with dirt from center field and, at some point, he had begun to cry, so the red soil in his hat and hair now streaked down his face in pinkish streams.

I didn’t know this particular boy and I don’t recall him making contact with the ball on his previous batting attempts. Judging by his tears, he would have preferred to be somewhere else, but his dad was the coach, so there he was. He scanned the crowd and looked down again when he caught my eye. Something about the look on his wee little boy face made we want to go over and give him a cuddle and let him watch the game with me from the other side of the fence until it was all over.

His dad held out the batting helmet, which he slid on. It knocked his glasses crooked and didn’t quite fit right so it perched on top, and, with his small frame, he looked remarkably like a bobblehead.

He pushed the helmet down as far as could and took the bat from his dad, who was kneeling to give him some last minute instructions. The boy’s attention was focused exclusively on home plate, as he tried to cover it with dirt by kicking with his tiny cleats. That’s when a spectator from our team yelled out, “Heads up, team! This kid’s a real whacker!”

The little boy jerked up his head to find the source of the voice. It was a stranger. A stranger who expected that he would hit this ball hard. A stranger who expected that he would astonish everyone with his mighty swing. A stranger who thought him to be a genuine, bona fide athlete.

This was not a boy who had likely thought of himself in such a way before, and you could see it happen, even from behind: A shift took place. Where once he didn’t believe he could hit the ball, he now all of a sudden did.

Now I wish I could say that he swung that bat and slugged the ball right out of the park. (He didn’t). But he did stand a little taller and suddenly and maybe for the first time, thought of himself as a true ballwhacker indeed.

That man had planted a seed in his mind. And the cool thing is that we have no way of knowing where that seed eventually ended up. All of a sudden, this awkward little kid starts to think of himself as a guy whom the crowd is watching; a guy whom the players on the other team had better be wary of.

Sometimes I think that’s the most important part of parenting: just planting seeds. You are smart. You are calm. You are peaceful. You are a beautiful. You are a risktaker. You can do this. You sure have a gift for music. My, my, what a whacker you are.

The seeds you plant have to be sincere – otherwise it’s manipulation, and the kids can tell and it’s no good. Also, you have to assume that many of the seeds will get washed down the gutter with the next rainstorm. Still, it takes so much of the pressure off to think only about scattering them and not about where they might someday end up.

Life is so messy, after all. There are all kinds of big and wonderful, bright and shiny moments where I am really at my best, but there are also a lot of moments raising kids that maybe I didn’t exactly make a good, conscious decision. I just went along. When I have so much to do, and it all gets overwhelming, I can think of it as just planting a few seeds, which comes naturally to me when my head’s on right, and I can do it right from where I am. If I plant enough, some of them, somewhere, are bound to stick. It is this thought alone that gets me through, some days.

It was during one of those times that we discovered our needs are small – tiny, even. When Ty and I were first married, we rented a teeny tiny run-down house in a teeny tiny run-down town, thirty or so miles from the town where we worked.

On Friday nights, we would walk down a gravel road to the video rental store, and we would pick out our movie of the week, which didn’t quite play right on our hand-me-down VCR. The picture would scroll endlessly, but the dialogue came through so it kept our attention, somehow, until the end. After listening to our movie, we would lie in the teeny tiny loft of our teeny tiny cabin, just inches from the ceiling and from each other, and listen to the pinging sound of the rain on our leaky metal roof.

My memories of those days and of that house are as fond as those that I reflect on from yesterday and from last week.

More than a decade later, we look back on all the phases of our lives – those when we lived simply and those when we were too busy, too ambitious – and we strive to strike the best balance so that we can model it to our kids.

In the meantime, we have worked to redefine abundance for ourselves, and, since then, it has become clear to me that we do ourselves a disservice when we think of prosperity and abundance only in monetary terms.

Not long ago, I read a piece of advice that asked me to identify what abundance looked like, smelled like, felt like, and tasted like. It’s a journaling exercise that can bring a lot of insight. I decided that, though no one will ever make a home décor spray from it, abundance smells like my Labrador after he’s been lying in the sun all day. He knows where to sprawl his limbs to extract the most enjoyment from an afternoon, so the sun can strike him just so. He doesn’t hurry off anywhere unless he’s chasing something just for the thrill of it. And he revels in the joy of work, whether it’s chasing sticks or breaking trail for our Nordic skis.

The times when I have felt the most abundance are those times in the early morning when I enjoy a quiet time to work in a silent home as my family sleeps; when I make the time to venture deep into the forest with my kids in the summertime, simply to sit cross-legged and eat raspberries; when my son grasps my finger with his whole entire hand and takes me for a walk, anywhere at all.

I think we’re best served when abundance is defined as that feeling of abundant goodwill, abundant love, and abundant peace. No rushing but a simple, peaceful procession from one moment of life to another.

No matter what your income, it’s infinitely inspiring to slow down and see if you can recognize true abundance and prosperity, not in six and seven figure incomes, but in the physical, mental, and spiritual experience of having plenty: plenty of time and plenty of peace of mind.

I pray that my kids will take pleasure in the simple life for the rest of their days. I pray that they will continue to appreciate tent camping vacations, home cooked meals with fresh vegetables from a local farm and all of the other small and simple splurges that punctuate our days. I pray that they will understand and enjoy the pleasure of lying in the sun for an afternoon as well as the feeling that comes only with hard work, well done.

Callie had been starting with that little whine that babies adopt to alert mothers and sisters that their new crawling tricks have them wedged behind the furniture. But the whining had stopped–rather suddenly, it seemed in retrospect.

“Thanks, Cassie. You are such a big help,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “How did you manage that?”

“I got her a beer.”

Sure enough, Callie was still wedged behind the table, but now she was happily gumming the cold smooth side of a Newcastle (unopened, fortunately enough.)

Because I hope that Cassie went for the beer in the fridge because she imagined how good it would feel on her teething sister’s sore gums–and not because she deems it some sort of panacea, the whole thing got me laughing (after I took away the beer, of course.) Then it got me thinking about which of my friends would laugh about this story along with me. And which would sort of disapprove.

I guess that groups my mommy friends into two camps: one camp that can overhear me saying to my kids, “Please don’t lick the carpet,” and they don’t say a word (or better yet, they laugh). And the other camp, which thinks that’s pretty gross.

For me, if a toddler gets out of a car, and she has a lollipop stuck to her bottom, I know, instantly, that her mom is a friend. And the opposite is true, too. If you’ve got any number of kids under the age of four and your car doesn’t occasionally stink, you probably make me a little nervous.

In all of our efforts to prove our own Supermom skills, let’s remember that it’s sometimes rather endearing when we’re not. To remember that may be to regain a lot of energy and a lot of time.

I believe in the power of a soulful home. A home that tells a story. A home in which each item is placed therein with a conscious decision regarding its loveliness.

But, in truth, home décor must not be anywhere near the top of my priority list because it’s been five years and I’m still walking across my cherry red checkered carpet, still cooking on my avocado stove, still staring at my speckled ceiling tiles reminiscent of grade school.

Now our home, while a touch outdated, doesn’t lack soul. With two small children (and one on the way), two self-employed adults and their offices, the family dog, and whatever neighborhood animals are visiting, we have enough soul for a home three times this size. And that’s what really bothers some friends and family.

Just about everyone tells us we need more space. They tell us this all the time. Some of them seem very concerned. And so my husband (who makes his living building very large homes for people) has been sitting at his drafting table trying to figure out how best to increase our living space.

He likes to sit in his still, quiet corner of the attic-turned-office after the rest of the house is dark. He likes to draw different designs, and he has come up with some gems. But there’s always a problem. They all require cutting down one of the towering Engelman Spruce on the side of our home.

Now, I know this may sound strange, but with the wildfires ripping through Colorado, it has crossed my mind that if my home and land burned I would miss my trees more than my house. Houses can be rebuilt. Trees like these come from God.

So one night, not so long ago, we were sitting around trying to decide whether the addition would go on the side or around the back. How it would affect the storybook-cottage look of the front of our home. How it would obstruct our views from various windows.

And Ty made the controversial declaration that maybe we shouldn’t do anything at all. Maybe we should keep the soul contained just as it is: as a tight embrace.

I nearly fell over myself with relief as I avowed that, beyond carpet and curtains, I don’t want to change this house at all. Maybe, as our children are young, they’ll enjoy falling asleep to the sound of their parents’ laughter spilling in from the next room. Maybe they’ll enjoy always knowing in an instant who’s home and who’s not.

Maybe they’ll enjoy the Thoughtful Spot they’ll create among the still-standing Engelman Spruce outside. Maybe a small home isn’t a sacrifice. Maybe it’s a blessing.

So there isn’t going to be a second mortgage. Just a simple, soulful home for a family that aspires to be the same.

Creating a simpler life can be surprisingly simple. It starts with questioning those things we’ve taken as truths for so long. That a large home is better than a small home. That more work is better than good work. That more stuff is better than less stuff.

An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain
O, give me my lowly thatched cottage again!
The birds singing gaily that came at my call–
Give me them,–and the peace of mind dearer than all!
–John Howard Payne, “Home Sweet Home,”
from the Opera of Clari, the Maid of Milan

He and I were first dating and had more passion than wisdom, more zeal than experience. We packed the Kahlua and the skis but no dry clothes. Really.

Now, as a mom, I am as cautious as they come. I read about nature-lovers’ run-ins with Hantavirus, Giardia, hypothermia, mountain lions, bears, avalanches, mushrooms, mine shafts, wet rocks, flash floods, altitude sickness, and, the ever-present but hidden hill-dwelling kooks.

But since our daughter was born, we have largely left the backcountry days behind us. Until now. Hiking and backpacking are the things I miss most about my pre-mommy days. So, for Mother’s Day, I decided to open myself up to the best of both worlds by ordering myself the backpack of all baby backpacks. This thing has room for everything—enough pockets and storage space that we could leave for days at a time.

Now, there’s no limit to the number of things I can take along. I start making a list. A prepared backpacker should have:  ponchos, freeze-dried food, blankets, flashlights, two changes of clothes, trail maps, a snake bite kit, jugs of water…

Then I think back to Cassie’s first car-camping trip. It was one year ago. Memorial Day weekend. I was so concerned that our baby, who wasn’t yet six months old, would be too cold sleeping in the tent, so I piled the car with blankets upon blankets, her baby Patagonias, gloves, mittens, hats, the stroller, the Snugli, and nine or ten changes of clothes.

On the second day, I came back from a mini-hike in the woods to see Cassie in a state of bliss. She was sitting on her daddy’s lap in a filthy Onesie. Both of her hands were wrapped squarely around a giant, juicy peach, just a fraction of its circumference nudged between her lips. Her daddy had taken a bite to get her started. She sucked hard to free the juice, which now dripped from her chin. She released the peach just long enough to grin. Then she nestled her mouth against it once again. It was more than an hour before she retired the fruit for another pursuit.

As I remember her sticky face that day, I cross items from my list. On our day hikes this year, we will be fine with a diaper or two, the cell phone, the sunblock, and, of course, a few Oreos.

Whether it’s your backpack or your to-do list that needs paring down, let us savor this season, presented to us now like a summer peach to a child. Enjoy its fullness and its flavor, for it will be out of season in no time.