Cookies

There is something theraputic about baking cookies. Especially cookies that you know your children will devour, cookies that they stand around the kitchen waiting for the first cookie sheet full to be pulled from the oven.

Those kinds of cookies.

I'm making today be simple. Simple pleasures, simple chores, simple sugar cookies fresh from the oven, sprinkles already baked right in.

It's the simple things that make me happiest. Simply sitting on the couch with my girls watching movies like Aquamarine, Barbie's A Mermaid's Tale.

Folding and hanging laundry can take on a simplicity that makes it easy, less like a chore and more like folding love into the very fabric of our lives.

I need to simplify.

I need to declutter, both literally and figuratively.

I need to yell less and bake more.

I need to exercise more and eat less

I need to scold less and hug more.

I need to step back and figure out which simple things make me happy and do those things more often and stop slogging through the tougher stuff.

Sure, some of the hard stuff has to be done, it just does. It's a part of life. But those things don't have to always take priority. Sometimes, they can be put off in favor of sitting on the deck while Olivia climbs and slides, climbs and slides and Alyssa jumps and swings over and over again.

Taking a few minutes to just be, to breathe and be grateful can do a lot for putting things in perspective. It can help the anger drain, help to make it less a raging fury and turn it into a warming campfire over which we could roast marshmallows.

Each day is a chance to change, a chance to make different choices. And today, good choices have been made. Even the choice NOT to share my lunch with either child today. I know, the shame. Except...they'd just eaten three peaches and a can of soup between them. Sometimes, Mommy needs to eat her lunch all by herself. But just sometimes.

And a shout out to Lauren: Excellent advice on the issue of volume control. We've set it at 30 on the computer. And Alyssa understands (for now) that it shouldn't go above that. The next time I have to remind her of that, I hope to be able to do so calmly, kindly, even as I'm putting a post-it on the computer with the number written with a Sharpie. Thanks for that, Lauren. You're the awesome kind of mom I hope to be when I grow up.