There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy --The Beatles- All You Need Is Love

Tonight, as is the case most nights, I took my 15 month bebe to my bed about a half an hour before all our kids go to bed. I do this as wind down time for her and well, frankly, it's kind of meditative time for me. Tonight we snuggled in and she did the litany of things she does most nights. She sang and garbled as I waited for her to use up the last bits of stored up frenetic bebe energy. Then we went through all of her words a few times, me saying them first and then her repeating them.

Then I sang her a few songs, tonight it was the Beatle's Blackbird and All You Need is Love and California by Joni Mitchell. We had spent a few hours at the beach and she still smelled like salt and sun. I kissed her sweaty little head while she looked at me holding both sides of my head she whispered hi, drawn out like a secret code only we knew. Then she kissed me, first almost ferociously, slamming her face into mine and clapping. Gentle, gentle I told her and then she laid the softest one on me, doing the mmmmmm, for emphasis, something she's only just started doing. I pulled her in closer, and told her it was time to go to sleep. She struggled out of my embrace to grab at the cat who laid near us a few times before she relented and curved into my body, her head resting in my neck, my chin on her head. She lay there, her hand fidgeting at the seam of my sweater until her breathing became heavy and even.

I held her thinking about how serendipitous my life is. How the things I worry about are minutiae, the big picture, the real stuff is this, a sweaty little baby with her wispy filaments of hair tickling my face, my four almost five year old who asked tonight in an excited hush if she could go play in the dark, so you know she could like see the stars and stuff, and my eight year old who tried out several times for advanced band with no pressure or even push from my husband and I(he just started band in October) and he made it today so that he can trudge his trombone with him one more day a week just because that boy loves band.

And my husband who took me to the beach today, and we made up a super secret cool ass handshake just between the two of us(I won't give it away but it includes a simulated explosion!), and we introduced the bebe to the ocean and hubs carried her when her wet diaper weighed about sixteen pounds and her legs and fingers were all gritty with sand and he fished the shells out of her mouth. And when he got some disappointing news on a job he was interested in, I sang him the lyrics of Chumbawumba's I Get Knocked Out, all hammy until he laughed and he told me what I could do to make him feel better(same thing he's always asking for).

All the Buddhist stuff I've read and butted my head against the wall trying to go with the flow and be in the moment, I am finally getting it and I don't purport that a setback won't make me sulk or pout or pull a woe is me or why can't something just be easy but right now I am in this moment and this moment is so much better than anything I could have dreamed for myself.