Reading: The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison

The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoiris an amazing book which I first heard about over at Trains, Tutus and Teatime. It is the second "motherhood" book written by Katrina Kenison and I can't wait to hit the library for Mitten Strings for God. This book describes a tumultuous period in the life of this family - adolescence combined with moving. What I loved most about this book is the sense of perspective this mom was able to provide for me. She waxes nostalgic about the very period of her life that I am currently living - long, tiring days with two young boys. As she describes the family's journey through the adolescence of her boys I found myself thinking seriously for the first time about my own boys and the fact that they will, in fact, grow up one day. I was shocked to consider that I too will pine for these simple days, as difficult as they are for me right now. 

"It's hard for me to believe that all of this has vanished, that those times are truly gone for good. How fresh and green they are, still, in my memory--the intense, constant physical intimacy as well as the countless peanut-butter sandwiches, bedtime stories, earaches and scraped knees, baking soda volcanoes, snowball fights, trips to town for ice-cream cones. Yet I am grateful to have had all of those moments, for they are the ones that have turned out, in the end, to be the most precious recollections of all, through they went unrecorded, unwritten, unremarked on at the time."

Wow. That's me right now. Living and surviving and not even realizing how beautiful these moments are, and how very short.