Being Present as a Mom {Five Minute Friday}

Five minutes.  No editing. No deleting.  This week's topic?  Present.

Present.  In the Here & Now.

As a stay-at-home mom, there are so many more ways to be anywhere but Here & Now.  I can be in the same room as my kids but on my phone, scrolling through Pinterest, texting a friend, or seeing who has commented on my blog today.

Or I can be Here & Now.

I was Here when my son made a joke today.  Andrew is not even 2 1/2 yet, and he's not all that verbal, but he totally made a joke.

He slipped in an extra word when he was talking about his sister, Isabelle.  He deliberately called her Tinkerbell, just to make us laugh.  We could tell by the look on his face that he was trying to be funny.  "Tinkerbell" and I looked at each other and just burst into laughter.  Long, hard, laughs.

When Daddy came home from work, we had Andrew tell the joke again, and our little ham loved seeing his Daddy laugh too.

I'm so glad I can be Here & Now.

Dinner time is the perfect opportunity for the classic way of escaping: just check out.  Parents have been doing this for ages.  Some days, I find myself doing it too.  I can completely fall into myself and my thoughts on grocery lists and mental to-do lists that the chaos around me disappears.  I don't even notice the baby throwing his peas or my 4 year old painting the dining room table with spaghetti sauce.  It's almost an essential skill of motherhood, this ability to block out the chaos, and it's a great way to save my sanity sometimes.  Other times, it's a great way to only be halfway engaged in the conversation, and the deeper matters are ignored.

Last night, my overly dramatic 4 year old became sad at dinner when she noticed the hydrangea she'd picked was wilting.  But I wasn't checked out this time, and neither was my exhausted husband.

He was there & present enough to connect this dying flower with a Fernando Ortega song that my daughter knows by heart, a song that comes right out of Scripture:

All flesh is like the grass
the grass withers and fades away.
The glory of man like a flower
that withers in the sun and falls.
But the Word of the Lord endures forever.  

Present.

And because we were present, it was another easy conversation about flowers, about God, and about the Gospel.  With a 4 year old.

Thank you, Lord, that I didn't miss that conversation.