After a fun (but slightly frantic-paced) weekend, we’ve been enjoying some sloooooow days around here, which consist of lazily folding laundry amidst reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? approximately eight times an afternoon and building towers out of wooden blocks so that Raven can have the pleasure of destroying them soon thereafter.
Then, while she takes luxuriously long two-hour naps, I’ve been reading the books I just checked out from the library and decidedly not doing *too* many super-productive things.
Not all days can be like this.
If this were my everyday life, I would soon go crazy from the monotony and the lack of checked-off to-do lists and the repetitive nature of it all.
And sometimes, when we have a long string of slow days in a row, I do get a bit crazy, and that’s when we make an unplanned trip to the park or the mall or just anywhere that isn’t right here in this two-bedroom apartment we call home. Those are the moments when the baby is cranky for no apparent reason and the sky outside is a fiercely unforgiving blue of cloudless heat, and I don’t think I can look at one more dish or one more spilled box of toys or one more thing I should be doing but don’t feel like doing.
Those are the moments when we must escape the slow days, somehow, in some way.
And therein lies the tricky part–knowing when you’ve had one too many hours of living the slow life and need the kick in the pants that forces you to do something else, whether that’s decluttering an entire closet or seeing if there’s a kid-friendly venue nearby that can allow you all some much-needed newness.
I’ll probably reach that point tomorrow (if not later today), but for now, I revel in the slowness that’s a partially-folded load of clean clothes, a handful of carefully-counted-out Hershey kisses (portion control, see), and a stack of three library books, two of which have that captivating yellow label that reads “New Book.”
Here’s to the slow days, that so often get ignored between more noteworthy weekends and holiday celebrations and day adventures—
Here’s to the days of routine and normalcy and slow living that allow me to drink in those other days and more fully appreciate them for all their worth.
Here’s to the slow days where Raven is down for her first nap at 9:00 and her second at 1:00, with lots of quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) play time in between.
Here’s to the days when the most exciting thing that happens all day is when Matt gets home from work, when Raven can be found running and screaming with joy straight towards him while she grabs onto his shorts and points to the door (since she knows that Daddy always takes her to go see the ducks when he first gets home).
Let the record show in future years, when the pace of my life is most decidedly NOT slow almost ever, that I did, in fact, enjoy them while they lasted.
