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Perfect Moment Monday: Chinstrap time travel

Perfect Moment Monday is about noticing a perfect moment rather than creating one. Perfect moments can be momentous or ordinary or somewhere in between.

Once a week we engage in mindfulness about something that is right with our world. Everyone is welcome to join. Details on how to participate are at the bottom of this post, complete with bloggy bling.

Please visit the links of the participants at the bottom.

Here’s a perfect moment from my week. I hope you’ll share yours, too.

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This is a moment I plan to savor on my deathbed. I took care to emblazon it on my psyche.

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Each morning since school began, the kids and I strap on our helmets, mount our bicycles and ride ยพ mile to their school. I make sure they’re OK locking up their bikes in the bicycle cage and then I pedal home. At the end of the school day, I zoom back to school, meet them at the cage, and we ride home together. In just two weeks this has become a treasured ritual. We get fresh air, exercise, a joint activity, and time to talk while in motion.

Friday morning, the kids were already on their bikes while I was still putting on my helmet. They buzzed around our circle waiting for me. It was a beautiful sunny morning, temps in the mid 60s. The grass is still green, the heavens a gorgeous azure, the flowers vibrantly colorful, the air so clean you want to inhale the entire sky into your lungs. I paused to notice, really notice, what was going on.

And then a curious thing happened, in the mere time it takes to click a chinstrap.

I marveled that the two teeny-tiny babies that I’d schlepped in infant car seats, that I’d toddled down driveways, that I’d left, crying with separation anxiety, in pre-school classrooms, that these two amazing beings had become such independent, active and generally happy children. In the blink of an eye, a filmstrip covering 9+ years of parenting ran through my mind.

And the phenomenon continued, from the present day forward. I could see Tessa, her legs splayed in the “wheeee” position while she coasted the arc of the circle, sporting braces, then wearing a formal dress and corsage with her right hand on her date’s chest in the classic prom-photo pose. I could see Reed, working on his wheelies, in a gown with a mortarboard atop his head and diploma in hand as he graduates from my alma mater. I see them each in wedding-wear, gazing with devotion into their beloveds’ eyes, then becoming parents themselves, teaching their children, my grandchildren, to ride bikes.

Best of all? I returned to right now. This perfect, delicious, endless moment with my children.

I am so lucky.

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To participate in Perfect Moment Monday:

  1. Between Sunday night and Tuesday night, write up your own Perfect Moment in a blog post, on Twitter, on Facebook, or simply leave a comment below.
  2. Grab the URL of your Perfect Moment.
  3. Use LinkyTools below to enter your blog’s name and the URL of your Perfect Moment
  4. Visit the Perfect Moments of others (from the links below), and let the writers know you were there.

Once you make a Perfect Moment post , you may place this button on your blog.

What Perfect Moment have you recently been aware of? Be sure to visit these moments and share the love, and please come back next week (click to subscribe).


 

24 Responses

  1. I got chills reading this. As we drove home from our cottage yesterday I kept looking back at Min man as he went from song to song for the 3 hour drive. He talks and sings the whole way home. I love looking at him in his car seat. I did the same thing with him. I envisioned him coming home and saying, Mom, I’m getting married. I know it is going to go by so fast. He is already 3 1/2. I am savoring every moment.

  2. It’s hard to believe those two little bundles are getting so big!

    The moment sounds Perfect and your writing is beautiful.

    Thanks for sharing your Perfect Moment!

  3. Seems like we were on the same wavelength, sorta kinda, for this PMM. Wonderful moments to enjoy the here and now rather than the past or future.

    So hard to imagine my “little” brother-in-law becoming a father in a few weeks when it was just yesterday I met the husband’s family and the brother was a cocky teenager.

  4. I need someone to tap on my shoulder a few times a day to say, “Are you watching for those perfect moments?”

    Sometimes I think I let them go unnoticed.

  5. My heart can barely handle the jump to 5 minutes from now — I think it might explode from that scene ๐Ÿ™‚ But it was beautifully captured with words.

  6. Wow – what a beautiful post. When I think of having children, I think about these types of moments and I’m so glad that someone actually raising children is taking time to enjoy ๐Ÿ™‚

  7. Oh Lori, that was so beautiful, my eyes are so full of tears. ๐Ÿ™‚
    Wow…it’s amazing, to be able to see that far back and that far ahead..and smile all the way.

    PERFECT, indeed. ๐Ÿ™‚

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