Sweetness

I sorted and labeled about 500 digital pictures last night, as Corey sat next to me on the couch and schizophrenically flipped between "Grendel" on Sci-Fi and "Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior" on Disney. (Wendy Wu got my vote. I know it's terribly uncool for me to say that, but Disney movies -- even the silly ones made for the tween set -- always make me smile. They are corny but they know they are corny. They celebrate their wacky sappiness. And unlike movies on Sci-Fi, they don't give me nightmares.)

I hadn't gone through my pictures since early March. I don't take many pictures in the spring, so I knew I could put it off for a while and not get buried.

But summer is upon us, and I know the camera will be snapping pictures almost daily for the next few months -- "Oh look! It's the sun! Quick, kids, go stand next to the lake so I can remember this moment!" -- so I figured I'd better wade through the swaths of snapshots already in My Pictures folder before the deluge overtakes me.

As usual, looking through pictures from the last few months made me nostalgic and a little weepy.













I mean, the kids are growing so fast. It's alarming, really. It's true what the sage said: "The days are long, but the years are short." I see that so clearly when I look back at pictures, even pictures that were taken fairly recently, in the grand scheme of time.

But overall, I was struck by the simple joy that is our life right now. The kids are young and happy and they want to be next to us all the time (!!) and hold our hands. We laugh constantly, like it's our family's theme song, and we tease and make jokes and enjoy each other.

Life is good. It's not perfect, it's not necessarily easy. But it's good. It's achingly beautiful, every minute.

I can't drink deeply enough of this sweetness. My heart overflows with gratitude.