When I wake up late, I am greeted by one, two, three, four, and sometimes five children sneaking under the covers with us. When we don’t sneak out of the house for the sunrise, and the children discover us still lying down in our bed, they jump at the chance to cuddle in the early morning with us. We have a quiet moment and then we get ready for our day.
This happened this morning.
We all slowly got up to greet the day and began prepping for a brunch get together at our house. We were going to spend some time with a family we hadn’t seen in awhile, especially since their family had grown from four to five. Due to scheduling and distance, we haven’t been able to connect as much as we would like.
Before they arrived, I wanted to go through a few more bins from our “must tidy” pile. The grey skies felt heavier and my mood began to shift. As I felt the stress rising, forgetting that I didn’t need to go through these bins asap, forgetting the excitement of seeing our old friends, forgetting the early morning cuddles, I began to be consumed with just getting it done. Then my husband found these two measuring spoons as he was decluttering a shelf in the kitchen:
A few years ago, my kids gave me a set of beautiful measuring spoons for Mother’s Day. Within a few weeks, half the set was broken. These lone two spoons survived. I laughed out loud thinking about all of us trying to be delicate with these spoons and within seconds, hearing a shatter and an “oops” one after the other. Some of them felt really guilty until I broke one too and we all shook our heads and laughed. We promptly switched to metal measuring spoons.
In that moment of remembering, I felt grateful for these spoons and what they really were able to measure. They measure a life of fleeting moments of laughter and patience. They measure the weight of family memories I choose to keep as a reminder that there is a time for everything: a time for breakable measuring spoons, a time to tidy, and a time to celebrate life just as it is.
When you are stressed out about an outcome, can you stop and measure what it’s worth?
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42 days of gratitude…for more on this project, read here.
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