My morning is going to stretch out before me like a gift. The pure sweet quiet. Just the click of the keys, the dog snoring on the couch.

There is a lone light in the kitchen where I sit with my keyboard, a mug of strong coffee and the quilt that my grandmother made me to wrap up in if I feel a chill.

My kids are safe and warm and sleeping and dreaming in their beds. It’s moments like these when I think why would I ever need anything, anything else.

Truth be told, mornings can be all kinds of things around here. But this is my favorite way to start the day.

It’s unlike anyplace else. It’s not a county-maintained backcountry hut. It’s not a decayed mining cabin. It’s a home: A home where the owner is never present, but the door is always open. And someone is usually there, whether visiting for a moment like us, or staying for a day or two on some kind of exotic life journey, which they are generally willing to tell us all about.

The front of the house is almost entirely glass, smeared with old smoke, which filters the sunlight and makes the view hazy and ethereal. And the view from the living room couch is jawdropping: jagged peaks 14,000 feet high soar skyward on either side, dwarfing the river that roars down the valley below.

People of all ages come to this home, which we have always called Sleepy Hollow, and it’s hard to leave without making a contribution of some kind. One year, we brought a swing to hang near the front door. Just a simple rope and a fingerpainted slab of cedar.

Other visitors’ contributions are poetic in nature. Quotes from Thoreau and Lao Tzu are scribbled in blue and red and green Sharpie all along the interior walls. These are scattered in amid a variety of drawings: sketches of mountains and spruce trees, portraits and caricatures, mushrooms and dancing Grateful Dead bears.

I have photos of each of my three children holding a Crayola marker in their tiny hands and writing in their own way on these walls about their love for this place and this valley.

On each visit, we stay just long enough to note the changes since the time before and to read the entries in the guestbook that is tucked into a shelf by the woodstove.

Since we moved from this area, we have the intention of coming back every summer – and then something happens and we often don’t. But this past weekend, we realized that this was our chance to do it before the snow started to fly, so we shoved a dozen markers in my camera bag and made the half hour or so drive to the trailhead.

When we arrive, it seems everyone remembers the way. We scramble across sheets of rock to the trail, where roots have surged through the earth in great gnarled lumps. The kids see this as a kind of staircase, a red carpet, an invitation to explore deeper into this mysterious woods. This is a forest they don’t know in the same way they know the forest around our home.

We walk, and we walk, and we walk. Soon, the roots have disappeared and there is only hard packed trail and rocks. We are close to tree-line now, so high in elevation that the only trees able to survive in this oxygen-starved place are stick-like, their trunks poking like shards of glass from the rocky ground.

“We must have missed it,” Ty says. “Let’s turn around and everyone look a little harder.”

We missed it? How can you miss a house that you know is just off the trail and that five of you are looking for? Were we too busy talking and walked right past it? Did the spruce and shrubs grow up thick around it, hiding it from view? Did it burn down? I suggest maybe we dreamt it and it never existed at all. My son suggests maybe aliens took it.

So now it’s a mystery. What was once a simple hike has become an adventure of mythic proportions for my little hobbits, and they are starting to skip. After walking awhile, I see a knoll that looks like the one the house used to stand upon, so I tell the rest of the family to find a comfortable spot to wait for a minute. “Mama’s goin’ in.” I say, and I slash and stomp through the brush. At one point I have to get down on all fours to duck under some low branches, and my Labrador leaps around me and licks my face like he’s so glad I’ve finally come to my senses and left those lanky two leggers to join him in a more primal sort of life.

Finally I emerge at the top of the hill, but there’s nothing there but more trees and shrubs and dried grass. There’s no house and no clearing and no empty burned-out foundation, so I half-tumble back down the hill and meet my family down the trail a bit. They are sitting on an outcropping and taking turns sucking water from daddy’s Camelbak.

That’s when my husband sees a tiny break in the trail we hadn’t seen before. He jumps across it, and we follow, matching the length and rhythm of his stride like ducklings. My kids are no strangers to breaking trail, and I watch how they point out the muddy spots to one another and hold the branches as they go so nothing snaps back on the hiker behind. This makes me proud in a mountain mama kind of way.

We duck and jump this way for 10 or so minutes. And that’s when we see it.

Sleepy Hollow. The house is standing there, plain as day, about half a mile from the parking lot where we started. We had overshot it by 7 or 8 times. We all laugh because hiking as a family is much, much easier  than it was on even our last visit. We no longer have to carry a kid on our backs. We no longer have to stop twice for a snack break. What used to be an ordeal would have now been a quick jog from the minivan in the parking lot.

But now we’re here. We start to scramble headlong up the hillside like goats, but it doesn’t take long to realize that something is different.

A black and red sign hangs in the front window. “Private Property. No Trespassing.” From where we stand, we can see the walls inside have been painted a semigloss white. The grass has grown around the property, concealing the once well-worn path. The swing is gone altogether.

We all just stand and stare. Ty says something about how you never know when things are going to change and you just have to enjoy them while you can. My oldest daughter nods and looks at the dirt. My other daughter shares a memory. My son wants to know if we can get our swing back.

I don’t say anything because I am filled all at once with a kind of longing. Raising my kids — out of their infancy and toddlerhood — has been kind of like this. The memories take on the cast of a dream. It’s all so wonderful and yet sometimes so strange and so distant that I can start to question whether I really lived through all those years at all. It just doesn’t seem possible.

And then I realize that I’ll probably be saying the same thing about the place I am right at this very moment in five or so years – and so there’s nothing to do but get on with the business of living this part of their childhood and enjoying it as much as I can before it, too, feels like a dream.

Today, that means a hike in the woods with my family and a hot cup of cocoa with double the marshmallows back home.

Susie Michelle Cortright is the founder of Momscape.
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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.

I’ve heard this many times: The notion that parenting doesn’t ever get any easier – it just changes. And one thing is true: The questions my kids ask now are harder to answer. The problems my kids have now are harder to solve. But I think that we say parenting doesn’t get easier because we want to emphasize that parenting never becomes less important – and that is most certainly true. Good parenting at age 14 is no less important than good parenting at age 1 or age 4 or age 22. But the fact is: Day-to-day life DOES get easier.

My kids are each out of diapers and sleeping through the night. Two of them are in school full time and one enjoys preschool a couple days a week. Yet, their time in infancy is still so fresh in my mind that I haven’t forgotten waking up every two hours to feed the baby, having to work in the middle of the night because I couldn’t cram enough in during the day, the sheer physical exhaustion that came with being pregnant while chasing toddlers. And the restlessness that came with the feeling that I was losing touch with the person that I was even amid the bliss of new motherhood.

I don’t have teenagers yet, so in a few years, I may have to amend this message, but I feel compelled to whisper this fact to every bleary-eyed mom with a double stroller. It DOES get easier.

At some point, you will begin to sleep – ALL night long. Maybe not every night, but you will come off chronic sleep deprivation. You will feel less moody and less tired and more like the woman you remember being. And that will make everything you do seem infinitely easier.

At some point, your kids will begin to buckle their own seatbelts, tie their own shoes, and brush their own teeth. It will be a treat to take them out to dinner, and vacations will be time for relaxing, not just more work for you. At some point, your kids will ask for what they want using complete sentences, and they will, on some level, understand a rational explanation of why it is or is not in their best interest to want such a thing.

At some point, your clothes will look roughly the same at the end of the day as they did at the beginning. At some point, you will actually go for days — weeks, even — without having anything to do with your child’s poop.

At some point, you will regain your professional identity, though it’s sure to be a new and more mature variety. At some point, you will have time to volunteer for causes that are important to you. At some point, you will be able to read an entire book before its due date at the library. At some point, when you clean your house in the morning, it will be clean all the way until the kids get off the school bus in the afternoon. At some point – and this is really strange – but at some point, you will come into your home and it will be quiet.

And when this happens, you will have some remarkable little people (who are a lot like you) to chat with and to laugh with and to share your life with. You will also – and I can say this with certainty – miss all of those things that are making your life not so very easy right now.

I suppose I feel compelled to say all of this because when we can see a light at the end of the tunnel, it makes it easier to settle into our days and to enjoy them, just the way they are. Because life with kids never gets any better than it does when they are small. It doesn’t get any less exciting or any less fulfilling. And it certainly doesn’t get any less important. It just gets…different. May you find light in every single age and every single stage.

It had been one of those rare nights in which everyone had gone to bed at a decent hour and woke up at just the right time. But I felt jangled and all tossed up inside.

My eyelids felt like sandpaper and all I wanted to do was crawl into a corner, draw my knees to my chest, and crack open a thick, meaty book, not emerging again until I had turned the very last page.

But it was Wednesday and my little girls had other plans – as they always do.

“Mommy, Callie is getting bigger.” Cassidy said.

“Yes, she is honey.”

“Mommy, I said ‘Callie is getting bigger.’”

“She sure is, honey.”

“Callie, Callie, Wallie. You are getting bigger,” she sang to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot.”

Normal conversation sounded like shouting, and Cassidy’s everyday make-it-up-as-she-goes-along songs seemed way too loud.

I had exhausted everything in my arsenal. For a living, I write articles to help parents celebrate everyday life with young children, to renew our spirits, to revere the process of parenting. But all those little things I write about that never fail to revitalize my spirit had all, well, failed.

One of these techniques – and one that had always worked in the past – is to wheel the kids through the rural Rocky Mountain valley that surrounds my home. A summer stroll straight uphill always gets my heart pumping, my legs burning, and my mind re-centered on joyful mothering. But not today. My everyday panacea was cut short
by a nasty, from-out-of-nowhere hail storm.

After a mad dash over the river and through the woods back to our little cabin, I tried another favorite method of returning my mind to the place it should be.

I tried to sink into the presence of my girls. To be grateful for their spirit and their presence by simply focusing on being present with them. There’s something about my five-month old that always does it. Callie has reached that magical age at which the only thing she needs on this green and blue rock – beyond the occasional dose of milk – is to look up at you and see a smile.

When she does, her arms and legs start to pinwheel and her face sends forth beams of energy that can only be defined as pure joy. This is no garden-variety grin. What she offers is not so much a smile as it is an “explosion of face.” I challenge anyone to stay in a blue funk after looking at that for 15 minutes. It always works. But not today.

Today it is Cassidy who is eliciting such an expression from her sister. Callie is in her swing while I find some dry clothes. Cassidy has decided the mechanical swing isn’t doing it. She helps to push.

“That’s pushing too hard, honey.” I try to keep the sharpness out of my voice.

The swing bumps the wall behind. “Cassidy, she doesn’t like that!” I say, just as her sister erupts in giggles.

My credibility is shot. So are my nerves.

“Into the car.” I say. “We’re going on an adventure.” This may sound exciting – and it’s meant to – but it’s just code for “We’re leaving the house.” And I hadn’t yet decided where we’d end up.

We pull into the parking lot of Mommy’s “Special Place.” A place they’ve never been before, though they’ve seen me enter it enough times as they continue on to the park with their dad. This is the place reserved for my occasional weekend retreats into those thick, meaty books.

It is one of those rare coffee shops with a man behind the counter who is friendly enough to know your name and tuned in enough to know when you don’t want to chit-chat.

When we get there, he gives Cassidy a huge cup of cherry vanilla Ben and Jerry’s, which melts before she eats it. The spoon leaves a sticky pink trail as it travels from the cup to the table, up to the window, and into her lap, somehow not making it anywhere near her mouth.

I mop the drips with a Kleenex while bouncing Callie, who is a little bored after her sticky-fingered sister finds diversion in a four-year-old who has taken to bouncing up and down the back stairs.

Now I know why I haven’t taken them here before. This is my place (a place I hope I’m still welcome). So we climb back in the car. I start to drive slowly. Maybe they’ll nap. Nope.

I unload them into the house. What now? My husband and relief pitcher won’t be home for hours. That’s when I spot my sink, and I think about the Flylady. At http://www.flylady.net, the Flylady offers a helpful system for getting your home organized and orderly, thus stamping out domestic CHAOS, which is Flylady-speak for “Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome.”

The first chore in Flylady Land is to clean your kitchen sink. The theory is that a shiny sink will give you a sense of accomplishment, even amid your clutter. The Flylady says, “When you get up the next morning, your sink will greet you and a smile will come across your lovely face.”

That’s a pretty tall promise, but what have I got to lose? Out comes the Comet, scouring pad, toothbrush, and rubber gloves.

“I want to help,” Cassidy says, climbing on the counter and grabbing for the sponge. I mutter something about this being a Mommy Job and march her over to watch a self-made tape of her new hero: Dora the Explorer. Callie goes down for some “tummy time.”

Then I scrub that sink until it shines. After 15 minutes, it’s as though the silly thing comes alive and winks at me. And a smile does come across my face.

Maybe it was the 15-minute break afforded by Dora the Explorer. Maybe it was the ability to put both my babies down and focus on a project long enough to see it through to its completion. Maybe it was this part of the world, however small, that I could control with a scouring pad and some hot water. But it had some kind of spillover effect to the rest of my day.

In retrospect, I’m really not sure what possessed me. My sink wasn’t all that dirty and the last thing I wanted to do on a day like this was clean. But, of all things, cleaning my kitchen sink cleared the air in my little cabin that day.

I’ve said many times that finding delight in your role as a mother is dependent on your ability to take care of yourself. It’s about easing yourself down from the curtains you’ve been climbing because no one can do it for you. It’s about pushing yourself to be mindful amid tasks that so easily lend themselves to mindlessness.

And I never thought I’d say it, but there are days when time spent scrubbing your kitchen sink is time spent honoring yourself.

You know you’ve found such a task when you can once again feel yourself settling into that core of joy. The place from which you radiate grace and love and light straight from your soul into the soul of your children, the way mothering was meant to be.

This is a reminder that practicing self-care isn’t about booking a cruise or a day at the spa. It’s about finding the re-centering tool that resonates with you at this very moment, and staying attentive for the cues that point you toward the right one.

Cassidy is five, and she shares a home with two younger siblings whose demands for my eye contact are constant and loud. So I try to orchestrate this one-on-one time with her on a somewhat regular basis. I ask Grandma to watch the other kids so that we can sneak off together, and so she’ll talk to me. I’m always amazed, when I get one of the kids alone, by how very much they have to say.

“I have some running around to do,” I told Cassidy last Saturday. “Do you want to come — just you and me?” I was ready for the usual flurry of words and for the desperateness. “Don’t leave without me. Where are my shoes? Mom, don’t leave without me. Can you help me find my socks? Don’t leave without me.”
But today was different. “What’s Callie going to do?” she asked.

“She’ll stay with Grandma.”

“Do you think Grandma would doctor my baby?” Grandma, a retired school nurse, would most certainly doctor her baby, and she probably wouldn’t be looking at the clock and thinking about the cruddy dishes in the sink while she did it, either, like the dolly’s regular doctor.

And so it was settled. I had to remind myself that this is the same kid who, just six weeks before, was chasing me down the driveway shouting “One More Kiss!” when I left her with daddy one evening to ever-so-subtly bolt for a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and ten minutes of peace and quiet at the 7-11 on the corner. Leaving the kids had always made me feel a little guilty but also very, very central and very, very important.

So I left that day, and Cassidy gave me a peck and a quick wave because Grandma had determined that her favorite baby doll had a rather high fever and was at that moment offering detailed instructions on what she, as a good mummy, could do to help.

I missed Cassidy that day as I ran my errands. I missed feeling the way her hand fits into mine. Everyone says we have the same hands. Long, skinny fingers; bulky knuckles, square nails. Eternally dry. I missed the self-conscious way she holds her mouth between sips of hot cocoa that makes me wonder if she’s not imaging herself to be Cinderella. I missed feeling the way time spent alone with my daughter makes me feel — like the queen, with nothing to do but allow each glorious moment to perch on my tongue for a time, like a communion wafer.

The passage of time is an enigmatic thing when you have small kids. In fact, there are two remarks that parents of young children hear at least daily. They are: “You sure have your hands full,” and “Oh, the time goes so fast.”

I’ve always been fond of meeting that lament with a reminder to those older, wiser parents that the years sometimes seem to go faster than the actual days. But now I’m starting to see. I’m starting to look back on the last five years, and I’m starting to wonder where it went. Wondering if Cassidy will still hold my hand in a year or two as we walk the crowded downtown streets with our hot chocolate. If she’ll still look at me like the queen. If I’ll soon be telling the tired mothers I pass that oh, the time goes so fast.

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when I would actually look forward to the time each week following our trip to the supermarket when I would have all three kids strapped safely in their carseats so that I could take one guilt-free minute to push the cart to its corral, to hear my shoes scratching across the cement, to notice any birds in the sky and whether the air felt cold against my skin. One lone time-out minute from my life with three kids under age 6 when, yes, I had my hands really, really full.

But I shock myself by writing that last line in the past tense. Clearly, I’m having trouble knowing just what I want the time to do. This week, I’ve spent time looking for life’s rewind, fast forward, and still-pause. Sometimes all at once. But, even as I’m lamenting the time that is gone, I’m beginning to learn how to slow time for myself with pure reverence. Reverence for the process, and for the puzzling way time passes and the way our children grow, both gradually and all at once. And then to resignedly watch time slip through my hands with a detachment and a sense of grace that comes from respecting the process; the drifting, the slipping, the rushing of time that is gone. To hold each of those God-given moments and then to release it, ripe for another.

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