Keep Your Day

Photo (c) Cider Press Studios, Oct. 2011.

This week marked the beginning of another fun year of meetings with my Moms of Multiples group. We meet once a month - usually we have a speaker come to teach us something. Usually, the speakers are ... OK... just good enough to get out of the house for a night and whisper in the back with your friends.

Not this month. Oh no.

This month Willow Sweeney came to talk to us. I first heard Willow speak at the Minnesota Mothers of Multiples yearly convention in April. She's dynamic. She's engaging. She has a powerful message. I'm beyond happy that our club brought her to our meeting this week. Writing simple sentences about how great she is doesn't really do her any justice. She's great. Trust me.

I've been on a "Willow High" this week, particularly on one point she made: Keep Your Day. In a nutshell, Keep Your Day means that we're all going to die and our days on earth are limited. So why waste a day with negative thinking?

I took this one step further and thought that not only are my days numbered (hopefully, I have a VERY LARGE number of days left, though), but more important, the days when my kids are toddlers are numbered. I mean, the days when they were infants are already gone. Soon they won't be toddlers anymore - they'll be in school, they'll be driving, they'll go to college, soon they'll be married and on their own. Their days as children are numbered.

And here I go again - back to the "my kids are growing up too fast" sob story. But seriously. This will all be gone and over before I know it. In a blink of an eye, they will be grown.

So, I've spent this week "keeping my days" with them. We kept to our regular routine. YMCA, storytime class, ECFE, walks around the block, and so on. But I opened my eyes. I looked around. I hugged and held hands. I kissed and got kissed. I tickled. I played. I sat on the floor and built blocks for an hour. I watched them go up and down the slide. I lay under the trees and watched the clouds. I picked up sticks. I read extra stories. I loved and loved and loved.

It was a great week. I encourage you to Keep Your Days with your kid(s), too. It's worth it.

And, it just so happened that I found this quote above on Pinterest this week.  It fit perfectly with my feelings from this week! Someone else had created a photo with the quote written on it. I wanted to put the picture on this post, so I made my own! I have very elementary skills at photo editing, but I think it turned it out OK.