just being

I may have lost some of my social graces when we lost Celia.  I say no a lot.
I have developed some opinions about being over-scheduled, about the disease of doing too much.
We stay busy enough, but we don't sign up for stuff we don't really want to spend our time doing.

I hear people play checkers with their schedules, like one of them has to win.
Being busy is not a badge of honor, and exhaustion is not a status symbol.
I want our boys to know who they are without activity as a metric of their worth.

Just this week Tuck built a desk caddy and Tollie made a football field out of Legos.  They read books and played ball with the baby, tinkered on the piano and created blueprints of a very spooky amusement park.  Tucker sketched a pattern for his Halloween costume, captured a praying mantis, and learned about long division.  Tolliver mixed paint to make new colors and put together, through lots of trial and error, a pretty fancy Hot Wheels track.

And I went to a fundraiser.  I almost cried trying to tell a famous Hollywood producer about my girl, the one with red coils springing from her head like cursive, clearly spelling love.
Lots of Batten literature explains that affected children lose their childhood.  We don't want her brothers to lose theirs too.
Her illness gave us a far surer sense of what's worth our time, and often that means we're huddling close, just being.

Join us at The Hills, Worthington for happy hour this week, to benefit BDSRA.
Or don't.  It's your time, and you're always allowed to say no.

Also, I ran across something I wrote several years ago, before a happy hour that benefitted hospice.  Click the link if you have time to read more:
her hair, his heart