The other day Jesse was snuggled up on my bed with my “special blanky” and his monkey. He’d just finished his first half hour of swimming lessons and we were discussing it a bit.
“What was your favorite part?” I asked.
"My favorite part was jumping off the diving board!” He told me. Then a pause and: “And your favorite part was watching me.”
Sometimes little comments like that make me both so grateful that my kids are here, with me, safe and sound and loved; and simultaneously overwhelmingly sad for any kid who isn’t somewhere he is totally loved and wanted. It just seems like every single kid deserves to live in a world where he can go about his little life with absolute certainty that there is someone in his universe who could enjoy nothing more than simply watching him.
And probably also . . . every kid deserves a dad who finds his old welding mask so his kids can all stare at the sun during a solar eclipse.
5 comments:
I love that. I love that our kids can be so certain about how they are the most important and interesting thing in our lives. But yes....sad about the other. I think about it probably much more than is healthy.
Anyway...where's he taking lessons? And did your kids watch the solar eclipse? Didn't one just happen recently?
Oh and by the way...thank you thank you thank you for commenting onGrace and Addie's blogs. It makes them so so super happy! I only invited the sisters and their grandparents to view them and also have them emailed directly so they'll actually see them but I'm not sure still if anybody else is reading all of the silliness or not. But I'm hoping it will encourage their journal writing and they really hope that family in Utah is reading or cares. So....thanks for taking the time to comment. If you weren't their favorite aunt before, I definitely think you are now. :-)
Shoobs, I actually finally have a perfect swimming lesson arrangement -- and have for the past three year. A college girl in our ward comes home from Utah State each summer and does swimming lessons at their house. It is only like three blocks away so I can just drop kids off and not wait with babies trying to crawl into pools and the like. It is nice that my older three kids are all safely swimming. Now I guess it is time to slowly start getting Penny and Jesse there. I wish we could just swim regularly like you guys. That would be the best "lessons". And yes, there was a solar eclips a few Sundays ago and we could look at it with Mike's welding mask. Kind of cool. I think Mike was disappointed it didn't make us go stark raving mad though -- like eclipses did in the old days. Lastly, yes, I hope your cute little girls have gotten all my comments. Sometimes I click on the link, but sometimes I just hit reply to the emailed version. Does that come through?? I like that you email me theres because I only ever check googlereader and forget to check secret blogs.
I had a similar feeling at Tori's fieldtrip. She was so excited to have me there and kept hugging my arm. At lunch time, a couple of little girls had the sparse school lunch bags prepared for those who didn't bring their own. I gave them some of our cookies, and one asked if I'd cooked it in the microwave. I told her that we'd baked them in the oven, and she thought that was really cool. (Later she told the teacher about the whole oven thing.) The other girl said that she once baked cookies in the oven with her grandma. They were both poorly dressed, and I just kept wanting to hug them - and buy them clothes and bake cookies with them. It's a sad world, isn't it?
Oh that story made me want to cry Marn. Yes. Too sad.
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