It all started at my local grocery store. I was walking aimlessly down an aisle, the soup aisle I believe, when a little girl crashed her child size cart into my knees. I looked up only to see her poor mother at the very end of herself. In addition to the little Evil Kinevil with the tiny shopping cart there was a second tiny little cherub who interrupted her screaming just long enough to check me out. The exhausted mother was trying to balance herself in between inserting the pacifier into the littlest one and reigning in her little race car driver. It was then that I knelt down and looked that little one in the eye and said…. “I think you are the fastest grocery shopper here, I think you should enter grocery shopping Olympics” the sweet little peanut looked so proud. Then I glanced up at her mother, sighed and said “it will all be over before you know it, just savor these days.”
Immediately I thought “Just savor these days? Did I actually just say that?” The woman just returned my smile with the most phony looking grin and nodded “uh huh”. See I knew what she was thinking. I had been given that line a few times. Okay let’s be honest a few hundred times, it was usually after my son dumped the pyramid of canned corn over or when my daughter melted to the floor after getting her dum-dum sucker request denied. I remember standing in the middle of the grocery store thinking, “I just want to shop ALONE!” And now here I am shopping alone.
I know I shouldn't be such a sap. My kids still live at home and still drive me crazy just in new and exciting ways. For example, this morning my daughter was digging through her backpack looking for some lost thing on the bottom of her backpack when she suddenly realizes she forgot to put in her favorite earrings and this was of course about 3 minutes before we had to leave. I told her we would find them this afternoon, but she sobbed, “if you don’t put them in now my ears will close up and its soccer now so I can’t get them re-pierced and then I will never get to have earrings again!!!!” Seriously? The drama of it all. Next thing I knew I was having a mini-debate on how long it takes for earring holes to close up. It would have taken less time to find the silly earrings, put them in and drive her to school and back.
Later I explain my morning drama (the earrings were only the beginning) with a friend over coffee and she looks over at me, sighs with tears in her eyes and says “just wait soon they will be leaving for college and you will be wishing you were still fighting over earrings.” “Really” I was thinking, “you are really gonna play that card?” If she hadn’t look so sad, I would have dumped my latte right over her head.
Sometimes it can be so hard to see the blessing of what you are in and so annoying when others try to point it out to you. I can see the blessing of a little girl in a grocery store because the little hands I have held seem to be growing quicker then I would like. The truth is, time while your in it can sometimes seem to stand still but time when you look back on it whizzes by in far too much of a hurry.
So as hard as it can be sometimes, try, just try, to take a big deep breath and just enjoy the moment you are in.
Remember that thing my littlest one was searching for in her backpack? When I returned home today, I found it. She left it on the stairs for me.
