It feels good to be running again. I don’t run fast or competitively; I run freely and with great thought. I run not to lose weight or get fit but because pushing myself, breathing deeply, hitting the pavement to the beat of a good song makes me happy. It is the collection of the first flakes that ultimately builds to the snowball of a more purposeful life. Returning from a run is often followed by throwing a load of clothes in the washer, rearranging a drawer, following through on a great idea. And so the June challenge carries on. In the words of the great philosopher, Pitbull–what? He wasn’t a philosopher? Oops. My bad. In the words of the great rapper, Pitbull:

Pump, pump, pump it up. Back it up like a Tonka truck.

Inspiring lyrics, eh? Seriously. Beautiful poetry. I kid but that isn’t to say that song didn’t push me through a piercing side cramp on my run last week. I backed it up alright, and Pitbull was there to help. If you’ve made it a point to tackle something new or finish an old project this month, I hope you’re finding your groove, your fuel, your joy in the satisfaction of getting things done.

I am extra sentimental today. And by extra, I mean Steel Magnolias plus Terms of Endearment, with a side of the entire boxed set of Gilmore Girls DVDs. It’s those damn graduation open houses this past weekend. These kids, the ones who were awkward fifth graders when I moved here–well they’re big now. Their braces are off, their relationship with Proactiv has ended, and they are tall and accomplished, off to do something big with their wild and precious lives. I arrive to celebrate them with my willowy four-year-old who still says pasketti for spaghetti and wraps her arms around my leg, burying her face in my skirt when she feels shy. And for a moment, that void of space between now and then is small and fleeting. I watch my friends act out the whole letting-them-go thing as they talk about driving their kids up to college in a few weeks. While they smile and perform the excitement bit of the act, I know they are hiding the sadness part–the teary one that will follow in intermission when they’re driving home with one less passenger.

I know it goes by so quickly.

At the same time, there is something inspiring and hopeful about a graduation. Everyone’s talking about the great potential, the excitement of writing on a blank slate, choosing a path and how fabulous it is to be eighteen with the world in the palm of your hand. Yes, so incredibly true but I can’t help but wonder, why is it that so many people lose that excitement? Because the world is just as much an oyster for a sixty-five-year-old as it is for a young student penciling in personality tests in his advisor’s office.

The moral of the story, I guess, is to live loud…agelessly. Pump it up and back it up like a Tonka truck.

Our Weekend:

We did nothing much. And by nothing much, I mean gaze at our kids and wish we could freeze time for a bit.

High-Flying.

It was hot this weekend, low nineties, but it hardly felt unbearable because the sun kindly brought winds with its heat–winds which begged for kites.

The Mountains.

Last week on a walk, right about the time Lainey was asking me to carry her bike instead of pedaling it and I was ready to rip off the bra with the broken underwire and whip it into the street, Lainey told me she wanted to go see “the mountains.”

“You want to go back to Montana?” I asked, curious as to what suddenly piqued her interest.

“No, our mountains. I’ll show you. C’mon.” She turned and walked more determinedly toward the back of our neighborhood, hoping I would follow but I knew we had no mountains and I was tired. After a bit of a meltdown, we walked back home–at least I did, lugging a bike in one hand and a crying girl in the other. She was distraught her trek to the mountains had ended and frustrated with my inability to understand her description. This weekend, on a walk to a different part of the neighborhood, she smiled as we turned a corner.

“The mountains!” Two grassy hills on an empty lot hugged and hidden between houses.

We rolled on the prickly grass of the hills and ran down their meager slopes with our hands in the air. For a moment, we weren’t standing on an empty lot in a subdivision. We were running in the skinny valley between two impressive bluffs in Naples, Florida. We were in the mountains.

Nella.

She is active and inquisitive. She loves toilet paper.

The “oh” is hardly demonstrated these days, so when we see it, we applaud. We love the “oh.”

She still practices her award-winning pouty face when she wants something she can’t have.

Yup. Girlfriend’s still got it.

But pouts are always quickly replaced with squinty grins that twist my insides and make me proud to be her mama.

Her repertoire of modes for transportation has grown to include a butt scoot, a bear crawl, a real crawl and of course, her favorite speedy slither.

She loves her daddy.

And laughs for her sister.

Their bond is more than I could have ever hoped for and sometimes, I see glimpses of what they will have in the future. It will be different than what I first imagined, but it will be good. There is a magic to what they share that cannot be defined.

(I put a bedtime routine video of the girls together that can be viewed HERE. This song is so beautifully enchanting, and I had to do something with it)

Graduation open houses are still a long way off. But when they come, I want no regrets. I will say I drank up every moment, appreciated every sticky hug, relished in the joy of afternoon puzzles or putting my order in at her pretend cafe.

It will come soon enough. And when the time does come, it will be a lot easier letting them go when I know I made the very best of the time they were mine to keep.

Happy Monday.

P.S. I’m working on building my playlist on Mixpod, so if you enjoy the music, the full playlist will return soon. But look! I did add some fun themed tabs to the blog for easier browsing.

Yesterday, as I guided Lainey back toward our car after her friend’s birthday party, I noticed she was suspiciously clutching a small bulge hidden between her dress and her denim vest. She obviously didn’t want me to see it and, at the onset of my curiosity, she worked harder to conceal it.

Go easy, I thought. Give her the benefit of the doubt. Be cool. She’ll come clean. “Lainey, Babe, Sweetie Pie–what’s that in your vest?” I cheerfully asked, setting the scene for a heartfelt confession.

“It’s nuffing,” she replied, pulling away and tucking it deeper in her grip.

“Does it belong to you? Because we’re getting in our car and going home, and if it’s Presley’s toy it needs to stay at Presley’s house. She’d be so sad if she went to play with one of her toys and it was gone.”

Lainey pulled a cheap happy meal toy from her vest–one I’d definitely never seen before, flashed me a testy look and dug herself a deeper hole. “It’s not Presley’s. It’s mine.”

Dammit. She lied. My kid just Winona Ryder’ed a happy meal toy, and now she’s lying about it. And I’m going to have to whip out one of those award-winning parenting speeches that’s going to seer a lesson deep into her conscience as if this single happy meal toy is the deciding factor on whether or not she has a lifetime of orange jumpsuits and prison Spam sandwiches in her future.

“Lainey, I’m pretty sure you didn’t come to the party with that toy. I’d be so sad if you’re telling me it’s your toy when it’s really Presley’s. And I know how sad you’d be if someone took a toy of yours without asking. Like what if someone took your bike and you didn’t have anything to ride on in the driveway anymore? Do you think we could take that toy back to Presley’s house?”

My girl looked down shamefully, so all I could see was her sweet blond hair pulled back into a thin ponytail. Without offering words or looking up, she held the toy out and waited for me to take it, and we walked hand-in-hand back toward the house while I frantically contemplated on what a good mom would say next.

“How ’bout we just leave the toy on the table here?” I asked her, setting the plastic happy meal toy next to a pile of lemonade cups on the table in the middle of the driveway. No one saw her take it, no one saw her return it, but it was done.

On the way home, she talked about how much Presley was going to love the salon kit we got her and how maybe Presley would clip the pink hair extension clips in her little sister’s hair. I smiled and nodded but inwardly analyzed how I’d just handled the stealing situation. Should I have done more? Should I have made her confess to Presley or created a bigger scene so she’d never forget? It was a big deal to me–I never expected my kid would purposefully steal something and think to hide it from me–at least not when she’s only four, and I thought of all the things I could have said–the perfect scripts the parenting books suggest you robotically rattle off in situations like this. Where were cue cards when I needed them, and if my response to big lesson opportunities like this were off, is my kid going to be the naugty one? The hitter, the thief, the target for parents’ pointing fingers with a “Watch out for that one”?

Obviously, I have a tendency to over analyze, especially when it comes to sculpting my girls’ character. It’s so important to me to raise kind and conscientious children, ones who think about others and make efforts to improve the world around them, and so much of their ability to do this comes from skills and lessons we will teach them. Pressure, to say the least.

Sometimes, we will mess up. We’ll flub up responses, reacting too harshly or not harsh enough. We’ll yell when we should have hugged, lose our cool when we should have sighed and smiled, or retreat behind a shower curtain with a glass of wine praying the kids won’t find us when we should have faced our problems.

I don’t always know the perfect thing to say to my kids when they ask me questions or need a good lesson. Sometimes, off the cuff responses for me sound more like off kilter. Like I once told Lainey she had to sit in a carseat because, otherwise her body would “fling in the air and hit a window” if we got in an accident. Great mom, I know. I regret that one. But I believe our kids will know what’s good and will find their own way to adopting good and kind and conscientious as inherent attributes even if we don’t have the perfect lectures to back it. They will know far more by how we model behaviors than by how we verbally advise them. Besides, I’m not really a scripted kind of girl. If the books said say it this way, I’d revel in the challenge of finding a that way that was different but good. As Jill Churchill said, “there’s no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one.”

We talked last night again about what happened–why it was important that we didn’t take something that didn’t belong to us and how it makes people feel when we do things that are unkind. I asked Lainey to look at me when I spoke, because “I need to see your Oreo eyes so I know you understand Mama.” She looked at me and smiled, opening her eyes so big, her face turned into a silly expression. We both laughed and I watched as she fell back into her pillow and wrapped her arm around Nella, squeezing her tightly and nuzzling her blond head gently into her sister’s.

There will be more lessons, more conversations about making good decisions. Today it’s happy meal toys; tomorrow it’s studying for tests, dealing with mean girls, respecting curfews. While I may never instruct my child in a way that merits applause or goes down in history as the perfect cue card way, I do it as thoughtfully as possible, cutting myself some slack that I’m doing the best job I can.

And every day, there are constant reminders that we’re doing just fine.

Congratulations to the Mamalode subscription winner, Comment #472, Sandra: I love your take on balance. I’ve been one of those “waiting for the other shoe to drop” people, living with too much fear of the unknown impending doom. Thinking of it from a different perspective will help me enjoy the good and balance the…less-good.

Sandra, please send your contact info to kellehamptonblog@comcast.net, and you’ll soon be running to your mailbox for a nice treat.

You can still get your subscription HERE. Nella’s cover and “The Secret Reserves” article is in the ENOUGH issue (you can choose your first issue).

We are enjoying the rest of our holiday weekend and looking forward to cheering our girl on at her ballet recital this afternoon. I can’t decide between bestowing her with a bouquet of flowers at her performance or perhaps something she’d like a little better…a new happy meal toy.

The cutest, most versatile kid duds: Tea Collection Painters Overalls

Have a great holiday!

The new paint hue that’s been rolled onto our office walls is a color recommendation from my sister whose brilliant suggestions of Intimate White, Romance and Buff have already scored in our home.
Pensive Sky, this new one’s called–a pale, dreamy blue-gray combination that is both warm and cool, serious and yet whimsical. I cannot help but smile when I walk into this airy happy hue and think of its really cool name every time.

The sky was indeed pensive this weekend, rendering a rare and most delicious Sunday morning shower that woke us with its rumbling thunder early, while it was still dark, and continued its comfort with torrential rains that lulled us back to sleep. By daylight, sun and rain made some sort of compromise and so it was–we enjoyed that fine middle ground of pleasant but dewy, warm but breezy, and a pale, dreamy blue-gray pensive sky.

Which is what our home seems to be the past several days. Busy, a bit messy, lots to do, coffee table littered with tissues and aspirators, to-do lists half-crossed off…but nothing that would alter the response to the proverbial “How are you?” with anything but a genuine smile and an honest “We’re fine.”

Chaos–the good kind–comes naturally to our home because we subconsciously torment ourselves with giant projects at the most inappropriate times. Like, I swear, every time we have company–the kind of company I want to impress with a clean house, candles, and a bathroom that, for once, smells like lemon and verbena–Brett decides to clean out the refrigerator twenty minutes before guests arrive. This has happened at least four times. I’m lining up wine glasses and fanning cocktail napkins at the same time he’s stacking Rubbermaid full of moldy taco meat and rancid Shepherd’s Pie next to the sink.

I digress.

So there are projects and snotty tissues and lots of things to do before company arrives late this week. There are cunning canines who wait for openings in the front door for their quick escape.

Let me tell you about Sophie. She is a very good dog, but a rebel dwells within. She runs away about twice a month. And when she does, chaos ensues. Neighbors calling that they saw her flash past their bouganvilla bushes, boys chasing her on bikes, Brett taking one side of the neighborhood on scooter and I, the other half in a mini van. We holler her name and shake Milkbone boxes. It’s quite embarrassing. But she runs. Like Marion Jones. And, I swear, every neighborhood dog is rooting her on, their snouts pressed behind living room windows, dreaming they are with her. They cheer her as she runs and runs and runs. Go, Sophie. Run.

Needless to say, this happened this weekend. Her escape. And it added to our chaos.

Pre-sprint warm-up. She doesn’t want to blow a hammy.

But at least the mad sight of us all going crazy to catch her is really, really funny.

*****

The hot glue gun is gettin’ some action with a birthday party coming.

And, like digging out old leftovers seconds before company arrives, how about we throw some house-painting into the mix?

Fingers crossed, by the end of the week, things will be completed, house cleaned and maybe–just maybe–lemon verbena candles flickering.

*****

We had a birthday party this weekend at Gymnastics World. I actually remembered to get a gift the day before the party as opposed to five minutes prior. And we had a card but we forgot it. And there was no tissue paper in our bag. So I did this sorry presentation of “Hey, see that doll in that pink bag over there? Yeah, that’s from your neighbors with the really messy house.”

It wouldn’t be so messy if I wasn’t hot-gluing rootbeer labels all week.

My girls loved Gymnastics World.

And I loved glancing over to check on them on the tumble mat and seeing this completely unscripted moment.

Little Sister belongs at Gymnastics World. Her flexibility is just begging for parallel bars and balance beams.

*****

I could talk more about the chaos. The colds, the mess, the funny things that have gone wrong this week. But I’m over it. I’d rather swoon over the fact that a trip to the grocery store in the rain early Sunday morning to fetch some coffee cream granted us the bonus of coming home with fresh-baked donuts. And up there with Central Park in the fall or family reunions or holding a newborn close to your chest late at night came this perfect moment. A rainy Sunday morning dunking a glazed twist into an “I Heart NY” mug filled to the brim with hot coffee–swirled to milky perfection.

I’d rather remember that after that silly fit of hers came a heart-felt apology and a bout of infectious enthusiasm.

I’d rather focus on the fact that, beyond the temporary distractions in life, there are constant joys.

My dreamy blue-gray world of both warm and cool, serious and whimsical.

Wednesday will be the anniversary of the most blissful moment of my life.
Her Birth Day.

In the meantime, there is a very generous giveaway from a returning sponsor. I’ve told you I wish I could share all the sponsor stories with you as they are often heart-warming. Rachel, the creative designer behind Little Lesiw, is celebrating the finalization of her new son’s adoption today. You may remember Little Lesiw from the Bitty Bloom favors at Nella’s party. Well, she’s back and we are happy to extend our love for her well-crafted accessories. Our new favorites: Baby Snaps, perfect for Nella’s wayward wisps and Lainey’s fine strands that need a tight grip.

Use Code ENJOY25 for 25% off your order (!!), and one lucky commenter will win a $100 gift certificate (includes free shipping) to Little Lesiw.

Oh, but let’s make it interesting. I am curious…in the spirit of twisting positivity out of a pensive sky, I realize my tendency to look for and find the good is something I do well among the many things I don’t do well. I like that–recognizing an ability and becoming confident in it. We all have them, so tell me, what quality in yourself do you most cherish?

One comment will be randomly selected to win $100 of Little Lesiw goods.

Happy Monday.