Sidetracked Fantastic

Surfing blogs is my new goofing off. So, I'm only 10 years behind. My oldest child is nearly 10... could these two timelines be related?



Today I am joining a meme from a blogger at So The Thing Is... who tagged everyone. Since this is only my second tag ever, can I still jump up and down and do the Miss America "you picked me" face? Oh. Sorry.



I was going to write today about this really awesome movement called Free Range Children. But loosing (not losing, silly) my kids on the range will have to wait. Because here are the things that give me a joy rush. So much better than a brownie-with-walnuts-rush:



There is no joy rush like a seed catalog in January. Oh, the possibilities! The photos! The climate maps! The sitting by the fire with imaginary dirt under my fingernails! The thing that makes this a better rush is if all the kids are down for a nap when I crack the sticker on that sucker. Soy ink aroma, a hot cup of hazelnut coffee, garden dreams and solitude!



A new baby's breath on the nape of my neck.



My husband delivering hay to the barn for the horses that the girls and I love and he tolerates. When he does selfless, thoughtful things just to make us happy, and I get to stand at the kitchen window and watch him and his dog running back up from the barn with the evening light streaming through the big-leaf Maples... I know it's cliche, but my heart actually swells a little.





Surprising our girls with ice cream on a school night. The co-op I lived in during college had a wacky, probably not unique, tradition of hitting the ice cream store at two minutes before 11 p.m. closing. That mad dash for the door of Prince Pucklers imprinted on my collegiate heart and now we try to replicate the urgency, the giddiness of an ice cream "run" with our daughters, who are ever so obliging.



Holding Grace during worship at church. The certain way she melts into me as the songs go on. The vivid remembering of being held that way by my Mom and Dad while all the adults praised God.



Madeleine and Sarah running down the hill from our village school. The way they rain or shine fling their backpacks onto the front porch, never stopping, and veer right around the house to the barn. The way their ponytails and braids swing and bounce as they head straight for their horses or their rabbit or the tiny new chicks, anything other than more worksheets and holding still. Conversely, both of the "big girls" can stop my beating heart with a rush of love and joy so immense when I happen upon them completely immersed in C.S. Lewis or Nancy Drew. Curled up with a book and oblivious to any volume of calling for dinner or chores, the girls love to read and that gives me joy because I utterly "get" how awesome it is to be lost in that book. So a lot of things the girls do give me a joy rush. Just last night I caught Maddy reading the dictionary in bed, laughing as she cross-referenced words. The joy rush was unbelievable. Reading the dictionary is genetic? Who knew?



I could go on and on with the joy rush list. How is that a bad thing? Oh, yeah, I have to make breakfast and feed the animals and go to work. But my mental list keeps ticking up new flashes of joy, and that is such a good thing (again, purposely not linking to Martha here. You simply cannot trademark a "good thing." So there).



Counting my joy rush moments is a perfect blog for me today, the third day of my spending freeze. Not one of my joy rush moments has anything to do with commercialism. So even if I whine on days four through 10 (oh, for a drive-through mocha joy rush on day 11!), I hope my joy ticker keeps going.



What are your joy rushes?