Enjoying the moment(s)

This time of year, not only are we busy preparing for Christmas, but we are also busy with birthdays.

One of the birthday traditions in our home involves making a birthday sign/banner. While our soon-to-be-birthday-girl was out of the house today (with grandma, visiting great-grandpa), we took hold of our opportunity.

Here's a little of what went on as we tried to tackle this:

Color crayons were everywhere... Audra and Adelia crawled all over and ripped the paper while I scrambled to tape the places they'd ripped and tried to keep one step ahead of them so that they wouldn't color anywhere else...

...Isaac meticulously drew his picture and carefully wrote the letters of Ella's name, in big, block letters- and was happily oblivious to the chaos around him as he did so... I was making suggestions for what Isaias could draw, but then he wanted me to draw everything for him because he's at that age where he cares that it actually looks like what he's intending to draw, so we settled on 8's and balloons... I kept trying to keep the paper smooth for drawing, which was practically a fruitless effort on my part, because Adelia kept shoving crayons beneath the paper and Audra kept sitting on top of the paper, and kicking her legs in all the excitement, thus scrunching the paper up...

...I traced the girls' hands, and Isaias', too...and I picked up crayons and kept taping and told Adelia and Isaias to please not wrestle right now and took the tape away from Adelia and thought about how I used to struggle with these birthday banners being sloppy and the lettering maybe not being perfect and the rips and the coloring right on top of the words someone has written, but my~ how I've grown in that area!... and I thought about how anxious I might have been if I had things TO DO today; how rushed and frazzled and irritable I might have been. But I wasn't, because this was all we had to do, and so I laughed and moved Audra one more time and pulled another crayon from beneath the banner and taped the rips and simply enjoyed the moment. And I thought about how good this was for all of us, just to be together with nothing to do and nowhere to go and no plans but this.