wisdom from my mother. and a lucky winner.

I got to spend Mother’s Day with this lady.  I think she may be my favorite person in the world.  A living motherhood legend, and somehow I got to be her daughter. It was my best mother’s day yet.  A house full of exuberant, happy, healthy, funny, full of life children, a husband who shares more than half my load and my own dear parents, cheering me on in my motherhood. 

Jeff and Grandfather and the kids made us a yummy and fancy breakfast.  We ate alone for about 3 minutes, breathing in the smell of lilacs before the rest of my gaggle joined us.  They showered me with gifts (that, unbenounced to them, I had ordered for myself).  

 

I wore my Queen pin that I bring out every mother’s day (thanks Megan for sending it so many mother’s day’s ago!).  It’s nice to give everyone a reminder of who’s who on Mother’s day….but looking back, I really should have had my mother wear it.

For Mother’s day I asked my siblings to all send me a list of three things that our mom did for us growing up that made a difference.  We all could have listed hundreds, I’m sure, but I wanted the meat of it.  Selfishly I wanted to know which motherhood acts really stick.  I wanted to know what my kids might remember in 20 years when they’re raising starting their own families.   Here are some that struck me:

• Mom softened some hard situations for me. When I felt friendless as a high school freshman and dreaded that 1/2 hour at lunch when I'd have to wander around trying not to look as lonely and pathetic as I felt, she'd sometimes squeeze in a little lunch date with me. I remember being so very grateful to see her pull up in the big blue van in front of East and happily hop in and we'd go enjoy a quick but oh-so-welcome lunch together. Seems like Wendy's was usually where we'd go. Usually she had little Eli in tow. Meant so much that she found the time to do that for me. And when I got asked to my first big dance once I was 16 by a guy I wasn't at all excited about, she made the situation way better by splurging to buy me the dress of my dreams.
• Mom passed me (and all of us) on her love of art and babies. I remember being so giddy each time she'd bring a new baby home from the hospital. I remember being in awe that she would let me hold them so much and thinking how I would never be able to let someone else hold my own babies so much because I'd want to hold them every single second. And to this day, every time I see a piece of art that intrigues me and speaks to me, I think of Mom. And how she would love it. Maybe she'd even get tears in her eyes about it. I love that she gave me that love.
• Mom exemplifies "we do hard things". She’d say, “If life is a bowl of cherries, then hire a wolf to knock at your door.” As I think of the crazy memories of my childhood I awe about mom's adventurous spirit of doing hard things. Always ready to push the envelope to make something great happen. Exemplifying outrageous bravery in the cause of strengthening our family and our relationship with God and Christ.
• Mom always stood up for me, not matter what.  Whether it was standing up to crappy teachers or standing up to kids who were unkind, she was my biggest supporter and always had my back.
• I loved the times I would get mom all to myself. For example when she would pick me up for an orthodontic appointment and then take me to Eat a Burger across the street (where I'd get all kinds of food stuck in my new rubber band color choice braces). Just being on my own with her made me feel so special. Mom has always had a gift to make us each feel such tremendous individual love for us even when there were so many of us and even when we were all together her love comes though so clear in a group and individualized way. (lots of us mentioned these “ortho dates” as one of our three things that she did that made a difference….amazing how much impact one on one time has!)
• Mom always focused on what was really important. She’d always say, “If a thing is barely worth doing, then barely do it.” I remember lots of times she would pick me up from school and then look in the mirror and say, all exasperated, that she hadn’t brushed her hair yet that day. I guess brushing her hair was one of those barely worth doing things (I remember always thinking that she still looked so great). I love that she taught me that some things are worth letting slide, to pick and choose, and when you choose, choose to put your energies into things that will really make a difference to others.
• Mom taught me to love classical music and art. Although I fought it quite a bit, it was always "my car, my music" a d so we listened to 89.1fm. Mom has such a great appreciation and love for the arts and now one of my favorite things in the world to do is enjoy classical music or art with her.
• I know others have and will say this, but Mom taught me to be an appreciator - of nature, art and music, good food, and anything that people put effort and work into. She is always so grateful and gracious and expressive about lovely or praiseworthy things, even ones she doesn't understand much. I think this is one of the best qualities I have inherited from Mom. She loves the world and all its shades of beauty and really appreciates it when someone creates something wonderful.
• I love that Mom always saw the good in me
• I loved it when mom climbed into bed with me to wake me up instead of wriggling my big toe on my left foot.
• Mom was the greatest example of hard work and doing hard things. She was a no nonsense kind of mom who somehow still had a perfect balance of love and nurturing. She didn’t really stand for us to be wimps, but she still had perfect empathy for us when we were doing things that were really hard.
• Mom is the best cheerleader ever. She completely supports and does all she can to help with anything I set out to do. She doesn't judge or push. She just cheers and praises. I'm so grateful for that.
• I will be forever grateful for the gift she gave me of her love (through pure example) for the Savior. I remember her tears as she bore her testimony in that living room over and over again. I remember knowing that she knew (and still knows) that Christ lives. Not just through her words, but through her never-ending example of Christ-like love.

Reading through these don’t you see some definite themes?   She loved us and supported us and believed in us and cheered us on to no end.  She pushed us to do hard things.  She taught us to love all beauty.  She loved us individually and unconditionally.  She loved Jesus and showed us what it means to strive to love and live as He did. 

Surely my mother wasn’t perfect, I’m sure we all remember times that she pulled our ears out of frustration, didn’t have time to drop everything to listen to our ‘big’ problem or lost her ability to be the eye of the storm, but those little glitches are blown away by the love for us that poured out of her sacrifice.  They are eclipsed completely by the millions of little daily deeds of her motherhood that painted a picture of love and hard work and support and beauty.

This list gives me direction and perspective and it gives me hope.  I am not my mother, don’t think I’ll ever come close, but I was raised by her and I can feel her light shining through me, blessing the next generation. 

I am forever grateful to you mom.  For all the big and little things.  For elevating our souls and helping us all fly.

 

And the lucky winner of a copy of “Choosing Motherhood” is (from my last post):

Cheryl said...

I would LOVE this book, I am trying to teach Flying Lessons while trying not to hover as a helicopter parent!

Cheryl, send your address to saydria at gmail dot com and I’ll get the book in the mail to you.  You’re going to love it.

 

And last, here’s to a career in motherhood, as Lia Collins says,  "What other career could claim as its end-product the elevation of a human soul?"

 

Happy Mother’s Day! (and a give away)

 

Hello blog world.  Happy Mother’s Day. 

I’ve been slightly absent lately because life has been, well, life.  And I’ve been busy mothering, and wifeing and trying to figure out life.  And though I don’t have it figured out yet, It’s been a nice little break.   Now I’m hoping that I’m back.  I need to document all that has been happening in our little life.  It makes me feel sane to some of motherhood, my life’s work, solidified somewhere.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is this picture.

It doesn’t mean a whole lot until you read the amazing essay on motherhood that goes with it (attached below).  So, if you haven’t already read it on one of my sisters’ blogs, read it now, as a little mother’s day present to yourself. 

This image of this mother pouring all of her womanly muscle into teaching this little oblivious soul to fly is what I aspire to do in my mothering.  And although I’m crashing and burning a lot, there are times I’m getting it right and somehow this experience of motherhood is teaching us (myself and my children) to fly. 

The essay comes from this book

which is a collection of writings from a group of strong, deliberate mother’s who write about their experiences choosing motherhood.  I’ve been making my way through it and so far it is fantastic.  It has given me so much to think about.  Click here to find it on Amazon.

Somehow I scored an extra copy to give away on my blog!   So, if you want me to send it off to you, read the essay and then leave a comment.  I’ll pick the winner on Tuesday.

For now, enjoy your day, and if you still need something great to send your own mother, check out this poem that I posted last year. You’re going to love it.

 

Teach These Souls to Fly

by Lia Collings

As I watched the German countryside bump slowly past my train window, I had the unsettling sense that I myself was being watched—and that the watcher was my sister. “What?” I asked, peering over the head of the baby in my lap. My sister hesitated, her pale, freckled cheeks flushing carnation pink. “Well,” she mumbled, now looking everywhere but at me. “So, if you don’t mind my asking,” she began again. As I watched the color spread from her cheeks to her neck, I wondered what question could possibly cause such discomfiture. “Why . . .” she finally blurted, “why would anyone want to be a mom?”

I jerked my head, blinking. If she had leaped across our train car and boxed my ears I would have been less surprised. My sister, a recently returned missionary from the Germany-Munich mission, had been living with me, my husband, and our three little girls in Frankfurt for five weeks. Months before, when I told her we were going to Germany for my husband to take a language immersion course, she had insisted on coming along. She didn’t think much of my ability to navigate three small children through a foreign country on my own. “You will die,” she predicted. So she bought herself a plane-ticket for a two-month pleasure trip with her three darling nieces.

But the trip was not always pleasurable, and the nieces not always darling.

At first I took her question as a thinly-veiled complaint. Sure, the first month of our sojourn hadn’t been totally idyllic. No one liked to live six-people deep in a two-room apartment for a summer. I could think of a better use for the twenty minutes we spent stacking and un-stacking mattresses at the beginning and end of each day. And it was a challenge to keep a tiny European fridge stocked for three adults and three children. But we were in Germany! We had floated on a riverboat past the famous Frankfurt skyline! Dressed the girls in princess dresses and visited the Neuschwanstein castle! Toured downtown Munich and sung with the Glockenspiel! This was exciting motherhood—what did she have to complain about? Hadn’t I been the one with one child strapped to my back, one buckled in my stroller, and one clinging to my leg? Hadn’t I been the one to silence all the tantrums and petty squabbles? Hadn’t I masterminded the clean-up of multiple potty-related incidents in disgusting U-Bahn bathrooms? Hadn’t I . . . .

Ah. I started to see where she was coming from.

“What do you mean?” I asked, tossing my hair over my shoulder and hefting the baby from my lap to the floor. I stayed doubled-over to examine the carpet’s small white-flowered pattern in a ridiculous effort to hide my face from my sister. “Well, my friend Betsy has been staying with her sister and nieces, too, and we just can’t figure out…” Great. Talking over my lousy life with the BFF. “What do you have to look forward to everyday? How do you bear the monotony? Why do you even get up in the morning when no matter what you try to do, you have these kids in the way?!”

I felt my body stiffen and my blood rise. Was that all she had seen for the last five weeks? Through all the museums, the playgrounds, the Gutenberg and Brothers Grimm birthplaces, she had absorbed only my logistical difficulties? Snatching my baby back from the floor, I sat up straight and stared at her a moment. I struggled to gain my composure but failed. I finally shot back with a flustered, defensive answer—a haughty jumble of idealistic platitudes on the order of finding one’s life in losing it for another. She dropped the subject.

I didn’t. I thought about the question for months. Why would anyone want to be a mom? From the outside, especially the up-close-and-personal outside that my sister saw, mothering could appear to be nothing more than fits and fights, dirty noses and dirty everything else—no matter the castles-and-fairy-tales sheen I had put on it. To the casual observer, the way I visited those castles—burdened with children on every square inch of my body—might represent motherhood more generally. Mothers, it would seem, were restrained and restricted, held back and weighed down. And yet, excepting the occasional bad day, I didn’t feel that way at all about my life as a mother.

Many months after my sister asked me this question, I saw the answer. It lay in a painting on the cover of a book my husband brought home from the library. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. “What is that?!” I asked, excitedly taking the book from him. My eyes ran eagerly over the image before searching the jacket for the painting’s title. I let out an involuntary cry of elation when I found it: Teach These Souls to Fly, by William Blake. I flipped back to the painting, captivated by the world of this mother and child.

The beige muscles swelling across the mother’s back inspired my admiration first. A woman with such strength could perform any labor she chose. Yet the curve of her shoulder introduced a steady softening that ended in a touch on the child’s elbow. I saw the same combination of force and persuasion in the look she gave her child. This mother seemed in the same instant both to command and to invite, to compel and to persuade.

I found the odd trajectory of the mother’s flight as intriguing as the paradoxes of her person. She was definitely flying—that was clear by the way her robes hugged her body before swirling away. But her torso twisted back toward her child.

An outsider like my sister might have seen in this mother a picture of how children hamper and restrain. What heights could such a woman not have attained, had she been free to pursue the course she had started?

©Tate, London, 2011.

The question could be asked about most mothers. Watching this one—a woman whose strength convinced me she would fly despite the restraints—brought to mind many real-life examples: the mother who during her teensy student-apartment years resolved to learn all there was to know about house plants, and went on to teach lessons on the subject; the pastry-loving mother who set a goal to bake one hundred pies, met her goal two years later, and became a master pie-maker in the process; the wife of an emergency medicine doctor who determined that her family would “be prepared” and gave regular workshops on the subject. These women flew, but none of them performed a solo air-show. When I heard the urban gardener’s three-year-old explain the repotting procedure for Philodendrons, the pastry chef’s two-year-old critique the flakiness of his pie crust, and the preparedness guru’s four-year-old extol the virtues of powdered milk, I knew that in all these women’s aeronautics, their children, whether they knew it or not, flew, too.

The child in the painting definitely didn’t know. He stared blankly toward me, not his mother. His chubby toddler arms barely reached past his head, and his feet rose behind him like two lazy balloons. While his mother seemed wholly devoted to some noble end, the child appeared merely present. This child flew only because his mother pulled him, but like most children, he seemed oblivious to what his mother did for him.

I saw in this half-conscious little soul a reflection of my own children. Try as I might to expose the girls to classical music, they still preferred Disney Princess Greatest Hits Volume III to Bach’s Mass in B Minor. They still craved preservative-laden chicken nuggets to my garden-fresh ratatouille, even though I had drawn neat little chalkboard diagrams to explain how my cooking was really much more tasty, nutritious, and eco-friendly. And I wasn’t very amused at my daughter’s response when a coworker at my husband’s law firm asked, “If I go to work, and my wife goes to work, and your daddy goes to work, then what does your Mommy do all day?” “Oh,” she shrugged, “she just makes my lunch.” Like the child in the painting, my children had no idea how their mother struggled to keep them aloft.

Perhaps my sister had noticed this in them, too. Why forego the funds and endure the hassle to raise them to new heights when my children would be content on the ground? Why not provide them with a bare-bones version of what they needed and spend the rest of my energies on myself?

Now seated at the dining room table where I could better study the image, I propped my face in both fists and mentally smiled at my sister for asking such questions. As I watched the flight of this mother-child pair, I thought of how my sister—or any outsider—couldn’t know about motherhood until she experienced it herself. I didn’t think that my sister could know that the ignorance I saw in the child’s face could also be innocence. In humility, he let his mother pull him—just as my children let me—proving him everything King Benjamin required: “submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, and willing to submit to all things which [his mother saw] fit to inflict upon him” (Mosiah 3:19). In devoting my days and nights to my children—the sort of individuals the Savior had said made up the kingdom of heaven—I might teach them all that I knew, but they would teach me many, much more important lessons through their childlike nature. We would lift each other. Considering the symbiotic relationship between this mother and child, I found the use of the plural “these” in Blake’s title to be profound: Teach These Souls to Fly.

It would be impossible to convey to my sister all the flying I did as a mother. I could mention that I had taught my daughter to read, but my sister couldn’t know how it made my own soul soar to see the wonder in my daughter’s face when she read her first book. My sister could marvel to hear my three-year-old identify a particular waltz on the radio, but she couldn’t experience the earlier lift of listening to Strauss for hours with that little one. Until she turned back to teach a child she loved to fly, my sister couldn’t know the profound joy I felt to hear my children lovingly and patiently teaching one another.

The interesting thing about this painting was that it wasn’t particularly beautiful or technically impressive. Still, the longer I looked at it, though, the more the mother in me responded to it. As I watched the young child in the painting, I felt with a sense of urgency that he had entered a fallen world and, but for the guiding hand of his mother, he would sink into the blacks and reds toward the bottom of the painting. The protective shield of light and truth his mother provided for him—a safe haven from the world around them—relieved me. I felt a kinship with her efforts to guide her child into the airy blue expanses that this world also extends.

This powerful woman reminded me of Elder M. Russell Ballard’s counsel: “As mothers in Israel, you are your [children’s] first line of defense against the wiles of the world.”[i] I couldn’t provide my children better protection against darkness than to teach their souls to fly above it, to teach them to rise above the middling, the tawdry, the base, and follow me into the beautiful, the exalting, the holy. Satan ensures that the reds and blacks always will be there. In her position as her child’s first defense, the mother must identify the blues and yellows, and she must teach a child how to fly to them. “Teach these souls to fly”--the sacred duty entrusted to mothers, a sacred opportunity afforded to women.

I finally laid down the book with a feeling of reverent awe. “Who wouldn’t want to be a mom?” I wondered. A career in motherhood had its elements of drudgery, but so did any other. What other career could claim as its end-product the elevation of a human soul? Not just the enlightening of a mind or the development of a body, but the improvement of every aspect of a vibrant child of God? I, at least, wanted to be a mother because I believed, with President Harold B. Lee, that the most important work I would ever do would be within the walls of my own home. I chose to be a mother because I wanted to teach souls to fly.

---

[i] M. Russell Ballard, “Mothers and Daughters,” Ensign, May 2010, 20.

Stamping Holy Week into our Hearts

Happy Easter (yesterday).

It was quite a holy week, as in holy cow, that was exhausting.   Exhausting but still lit with glory tucked into little moments as we paused each day to remember the great and glorious Easter miracle.

My mom gave me a book called “Christ Centered Easter” a few years back and I read it the week before Holy Week, along with my sister Saren’s suggestions and my friend Catherine’s ideas and I determined then and there to make the week a real event.  I put everything on my to do list off till next week and tried to focus all of my efforts on making Holy Week a real bright spot in our family tradition.  I wanted to adorn it with tastes and sounds and emotions and experience that would stamp the significance and glory of Easter into their little souls. 

The problem is, once I find a good idea I feel beholden to it, like I have to pull it off, and after reading and thinking I was chalk full of good ideas that I was determined to pull off.  We made an Easter tree and decorated eggs, we re-enacted Palm Sunday and tried to understand what Christ was doing each day of the week prior to his death on Good Friday. We had secret pals and tried to do some secret services for each other. We read parables, watched bible videos, learned new Easter songs, read Easter stories.  We had a Passover Seder/Last Super to help the kids try to understand some of the Jewish tradition that Christ lived and what his final meal might have been like.      We ate fish and honeycomb.

I think I may have bit off just a tiny bit more than we can chew (and definitely more than Jeff wanted to chew) and planned some things that might have worked better (been more spiritually uplifting and less frustrating) if I was doing them with a group of mature adults instead of varying ages of wild Shumway children.   

On Good Friday I was starting to feel a bit defeated, wondering why my children sometimes seem to be getting in the way of me raising them, and wondering if I’d be a better mother if I just sat on the couch and read a novel (to myself).   After all my efforts I wasn’t sure they were really getting it and I feared that perhaps I’d stamped the glory out of it by expecting so much of them, so much focus and reverence and depth.  They are just children, are they too young to get something so profound?  I don’t think so, but was I making it too burdensome with that long Passover Seder and all the scripture based activities that weren’t so terribly exciting?  Probably a bit.  Were they feeling loved as I moved them through all of these newfound Holy Week traditions, because, really that’s the only thing that’s important. 

I was in the middle of some kind of prep for something when Charlie, who had disappeared into the attic for an hour came down and beckoned me to come and see what he had made.  I have to admit, I hesitated, not really too eager to see yet another jet fighter plane when I had so much to accomplish before dinner.  But then he brought me this: And I was floored.  Hallelujah! It was sinking in!  Even though it seemed he was barley listening and constantly moving and giggling, he was indeed internalizing the things we were trying to teach him throughout the week, at least the most important parts.  He had absorbed them and then let them flow out of him in the best way he knows how to let things flow out: LEGO.   I paused and let it all wash over me too.  Something about this LEGO scene hit it home for all of us.  He is not there, the stone is rolled back, He is risen.  Even though we weren't getting everything right, some of it was getting through, and that felt pretty awesome.    I’m still trying to figure out how to modify Holy Week next year.  I am learning every year how traditions grow rather and change and evolved and that’s ok.  That’s good.  It’s a work in progress, and every year is getting smoother.  Next year I want to simplify things a bit, cut a few things out, plan ahead a little more, savor more moments.  I still want to push us all to do the hard stuff, teach, instruct, focus on Christ, but as I plan out the week for my family I hope I’ll hold back the blog and books and pinterest ideas until I’ve had a good long planning session with the Source.  I believe that if I prayerfully plan this Holy Week I can be more in tune with who we are, what we need, how I can move us through our Holy Week observance with a little less frustration and a lot more love. 

Egg dying and scripture reading, Passover Seders and Easter trees are all empty without love. 

Really, truly, LOVE is the only thing that will stamp any of the Easter glory into their little souls. 

San Diego Day #3 – La Jolla

  I fell in love with this wondrous place:  A little beach at low tide just south of La Jolla town center.  We stayed for hours, delighted by all the beauty and curiosities around us.  These little canyons running into the sea were a perfect place to plan and explore, for big and little kids.  The clear water, blue sky, foamy waves.       There was room to run, places to explore, seagulls to feed.  The kids wanted to stay forever.   We stayed so long and had such a great adult kid ratio that I got to spend a little time with each of our children, bathing in the beauty with each of them.  Stopping enough to watch their eyes sparkle.  I don’t do that enough. Em and I counted 11 different colors in that tide pool.  Hazel and I watched this Heron and sang “For the Beauty of the Earth” together as we sat on the rocks.  We talked about the “love which from our birth, over and around us lies.”  She is a deep soul.  She gets it.  She even let me recite to her my favorite “Ode to the Sea.”  I can’t be in a place crashing with waves like that without going through that poem.  The kids spent a big chunk of time tearing these muscles from their resting spots and throwing them to the seagulls.  They claim they all got eaten up.   Kristi was such a trooper toting her four little ones around without Noah there to help so that she could show us the beauty of where she lives.  I loved spending some time with her kids, they are awesome.        I loved looking closely at the amazing sculptures of the sea.    After the tide pools we headed a little further north to La Jolla cove to see all those seals basking in the sun.  The kids were excited about the seals for about 3 minutes until they discovered the sandy wave crashing cove beach and were smitten.  They let those waves chase them silly, filled with delight in their wet bathing suits while I stood fully clothed and freezing.  Oh, to be a kid, filled with more excitement and wonder than sense. I couldn’t get enough of these pictures, their faces are just too full of expression and glee. I didn’t get a picture, but would like to document that Hazel actually went all the way in.  Head under and all.  That girl has warm blood and an adventurous soul.     Noah met us there after his long two days of work.  It was good to see that guy and drive home with him and catch up.  I love my bro. We left all the kids eating dinner with a brave babysitter while we took Noah and Kristi out for Thai and good adult conversation.  We miss having them live just a few little states away from us. 

Another perfect day.

San Diego Days 1 and 2

We’re deep into Easter Week around here, so I figured I better get our February break to San Diego documented before Easter bombards us.  (I still haven’t blogged Thanksgiving….I guess that’s just how I roll around here.  Better late than never?)

Straight from the airport (and that crazy blood boiling plane experience) Kristi took us to the Mormon Battalion visitor center in Old Town San Diego.  It was awesome.  If you haven’t been you should go.  We all learned a lot about this faithful group of saints who did something hard and saw miracles happen.  The tour was interactive and very entertaining to the kids.  And, best of all, at at the end they got to pan for gold.    We at at In-n-Out Burger, played gleefully with cousins, got a grand tour of Noah and Kristi’s and put the kids to bed.  Noah and Kristi and I stayed up late catching up and laughing about all the things I could have said to that woman on the plane. The next day we got up and went to pick up our awesome mini van that K and N’s friends lent us.  Isn’t that just about the nicest thing ever?  Wish I had snapped a picture of that beauty.  We went to pick up Jeff and headed strait for the Point Loma tide pools.  This is where Emmeline declared that she really did feel alive.  It just felt so good to feel that warm sunshine, our skin touching fresh air. The tide pools were bursting with wonders for the kids to catch and touch and explore.  They were also surrounded by hovering park volunteers who were worried about pretty much everything our children were potentially doing (not that they did anything wrong, but boy were those guys on us like hawks.  That part wasn’t so fun, especially when we were dying to feel free.  We finally discovered a less monitored part of the National Park and really felt the glory of freedom after a long winter.  The kids climbed up these rock canyons and discovered little natural slides that they could slide down. 

Peter for some reason wanted to just lay on the earth.  Get right down in it’s face, feel that earth connection.  I didn’t have the heart to stop him.     ON our way out there was a rainbow, the kind that just get brighter and fuller with each moment as the storm rolls in and pushes the sun back into the kind of corner where it shines so uniquely, that rainbow sunshine is one of my favorite things.   After Point Loma we headed to try to find a taco place that Noah recommended called Tacos El Gordo.  We found a few locations on Yelp and chose the one closest to the ocean.  We were sad to find that it wasn’t the real one, and was all boarded up (got to look more closely at those Yelp listings).  But, we were happy to find a gloriously pink sunset and played as silhouettes until the sun lit up the sea from below.    This is the magical part of the day, I remember spending so many hours before having children, drinking in the beauty of this part of the day and longing to one day share it with my children.  And here they are.  So naturally captivated by twilight’s magic.  Peter was quite enamored with this whole being free business.  He loved the sand on his toes (look at them, you can’t even see them through all that sand).  We twirled and ran races and chased waves until we were too cold and then we bid a perfect day good night, wearily walked back to the car, ate to the bitter bottom of the snake bag ( I love coming home from an all day adventure with an empty snack bag) and drove back to Noah and Kristi’s.  Perfect day.  The kind that leaves you with that sun-chapped, happily exhausted, brimming with beauty feeling.  That feeling that you’ve really lived your day.