This is who I am. I hurry from place to place, loving that my long stride gets me there sooner. Let’s get where we’re going and do what we were doing. Anyone with kids knows this isn’t how it works for them. They walk slowly when you want them to hurry and run around when you want them to sit down.

On this particular day, my daughter was making the trip up the hill with me. I was carrying our clothes, we were both still dripping from our chilly swim and I was hurrying to get there and get a bath started for her and put some clothes on myself.

She said, “Can we pick raspberries?”

Seeming to me a very ridiculous question, I answered with a little too much annoyance in my voice, “What raspberries? Where would we pick raspberries?”

She simply pointed and said “Those! Right there!”

There, right along the driveway, on the same path I’d hiked up and down about 100 times in the previous days, were wild raspberries – thousands of them ripe from the summer rain, begging to be picked. I hadn’t seen them.

I slowed my step to look at them and to see my 5 year old’s eyes full of excitement and anticipation. Would I say yes? Would she be allowed to fill cups with them, eating them along the way?

“Let’s set our things down, change into dry clothes. Then we’ll come back outside and pick some.”

She sprinted inside to put her clothes on.

All through my son’s nap that day, we filled our fingers, hands, cups with delicious from the vine raspberries. Minutes of silence as we picked would go by. Sometimes we’d call out to the other, “Look, there are more over there!” and make our way up the hill, across the path to the other side picking as many as we could.

As I pulled the fruit that day, I remembered back to when I was growing up in suburbia. My best friend lived across the street from me and we spent endless hours together each day – meeting first thing in the morning to walk to the bus stop together, walking home together after school, playing until our parents said it was time for dinner. Jesse was a calm, smart and deliberate girl at the age of 5. She wasn’t impulsive, she cleaned her room, did well at school and practiced the piano. She was all the things I wasn’t.

In those days, I would leave my house in the morning, walk across the street and knock on Jesse’s door and then wait for her to come out so we could make the trek through her yard, across to the neighbor’s yard and cut through their driveway to get to the other side of the neighborhood where our bus would come. In the summer, the raspberries in her back yard were abundant. She’d slow then come to a  stop each morning to pick some. I stood idly by, bored. I just wanted to get there. I wanted to hurry up and wait at the bus stop, for no other reason than the bus stop was my destination. Why linger along the way?

That day with my daughter, all of this came back to me. I realized that for always I have been hurried – by no one but me and for no reason in particular. I thought of how I’d missed out on picking and tasting those berries with my best friend all those years before. I wondered how many other things I’ve missed along the way simply because I am too intent on the destination to see the beauty along the path I’m on.

I sat in that patch of berries with my daughter, grateful to her for showing me now the things I missed when I was 5 and opening my eyes to what else may come along.

The next morning she sat quietly at the kitchen island, groggy and bed-headed.  I made her usual morning smoothie, and she watched bored.  Her eyes lit up when I threw in some of the raspberries we picked the day before. She watched the fruit, yogurt and juice spin together to make a deep dark pink, different than the pale pink she was used to. Stopping and enjoying what’s along the path had changed things for both of us.

There are two cottages. To get a visit of the other one, you can see this post Melissa at The Inspired Room did last year: Come Snoop Around This Cottage on the Lake.

The cottage my kids and I stay in is up the hill from that cottage. My parents bought it when I was little, it was a falling apart mess. For years it sat there neglected until about 6 or 7 years ago when they remodeled it and added on to make it what it is today. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree).  Watch your step as we duck down inside:

Right as you enter, the kitchen is on the left. I shared a whole post about the Cottage Kitchen last summer.

My kids have a play area behind the kitchen island. I’ve shared it before, back when I was really bad at taking pictures Creatively Concealed Under Stairs Play Area.

I also shared the Cottage Bathroom. That link will provide a larger glimpse than the tub, although I admit the tub does steal the show.

Through the kitchen is the living room. You won’t want to linger there long when you see the front porch. This is where I am if I am not in the kitchen eating or in the lake swimming.
I read and write and drink coffee in that (overexposed) green chair. Can you tell? It looks loved doesn’t it?

The bedrooms are small. That’s one thing I love about cottage living. All you need in a bedroom is a place to lay your head and a place to hang your towel.

I hope you enjoyed today’s little tour, getting glimpses of this place I call home in the summer.

• How To Make Things Harder and Do Nothing
• Saying No
• How To Enjoy Your Kids in the Summer
• I love this Northwest Beach Cottage

Enjoy!!

Attempt #1 is today. I have switched themes in hopes that the problem was simply that my last theme didn’t agree with certain browsers. If you have had problems leaving a comment in the past, I would appreciate if you would try to comment now and let me know if it works (I’ll know if your comments appear) or if it doesn’t (you can use my contact form to let me know).

Thank you!! And once I know if it’s the theme or not, I can go about trying to make my blog pretty again.

xoxo
Emily

Here’s hoping you’re having fun and staying cool, too!

Sometimes my kids watch too much tv. Sometimes I spend too much time curled up in a chair reading a book, ignoring dust bunnies and the messes the kids make. Not very glamorous or kodak moment-like.

When the moments do occur, it’s almost always because I make them. It’s not something that just naturally occurs. Sure, from time to time I find my kids snuggling together giggling and enjoying themselves without running around stringing toilet paper through the house or spilling cheerios all over the kitchen. But usually the moments that form lasting memories for all of us are ones that I was purposeful about. The moments that I put myself right into with no distractions, creating an atmosphere for happiness and memory-making.

Some of the favorite moments for my daughter and I stem from one random night that we laid in her bed well before bedtime and spent 2 hours telling silly stories, making up stories in which she’d say one line then I’d say another line and so on until we had the most ridiculous story that had us in fits of giggles. Then tickling and finally she dozed off saying how much she loved our Giggle Time. Now, when she needs a little more attention, a little plugging in to her mom, she just asks me if we can have Giggle Time.

It was hard for me to believe when my kids started getting a little older and able to go out to do things for entertainment that it wasn’t necessary to actually go out and go to places to make moments. I know now that often the times I pay admission somewhere and buy concession stand food that those days slip by and we barely remember anything except how tired our legs were or how hot it was or whatever else there was to whine about all day. Most of our happy family memories and moments happen right at home day in and day out just by being present. By being in the moments together, something as simple as baking cookies can be something they’ll remember more of.

Here on the lake, the days pass by and I know how easy it can be to let the backdrop of lake and forest slink into the background unappreciated and unused. Just because the world around us is gorgeous doesn’t automatically make for gorgeous moments. I have to use them and be purposeful with my actions to make them so. Jump in the lake, swim around with the kids, show them the bugs and frogs and critters, pick raspberries with them. Be with them.

It’s hard for me as a mother to realize that for all I try, my kids may only remember the tiniest glimpses of time from these days. I have to hope they remember more about the laughter and fun than the moments mom was hungry and tired and got too upset to quickly. I hope they remember me laughing with them, playing with them, teaching them how to paddle kayaks before they could say the word kayak properly, jumping off the dock together holding hands. I hope they remember me being there in their moments making them a little bigger, brighter, and more full.

We spent yesterday in the Adirondacks. We made a 2 hour drive that in the 21 years that I lived in NY, I had never made before. Probably because this cottage escape was enough we didn’t need to go there to find a slice of outdoor life. It was beautiful there yesterday and I enjoyed going and now being able to say I’ve been.

We arrived back at the cottage and within minutes the kids wanted to swim. They love the water, that out the door the lake invites them to play for as long as their little bodies can take. I did my daily lap swim with a 30 pound boy on my back. The first form of exercise I’ve ever discovered that is fun. The rain started to fall, redundantly wetting our heads as our limbs moved. I remembered being a kid and loving when the rain would fall because having the lake to jump into made those raindrops irrelevant.

We went  inside and warmed up in our sweats and fleeces, feeling the chill of the night air settling in.  We spent the last moments of the day playing a board game, then taking our yawning selves to our warm beds. We could have done more, gone more, needed more, but instead we just loved what we had, who we were with and where we were.

Finally, tucked into our beds, the evening routine of saying silly things to each other began. Anything to make them giggle and be a little less nervous of the disappearing light. Falling asleep with a lingering grin on my face, I felt that everything right there and then was enough.

So many memories of this place are from when I was a child. I was the one sleeping in, waking up hours after the sun peeked hello. Giving my parents time to sip their coffee on the porch in peace. Now I am the one embracing the quiet of a new day with my coffee and a pen.

My kids are the ones stomping down the stairs with bedhead and sleepy grins. They spend the long days in their swimsuits, afternoons eating popsicles, looking for bugs, and slamming the same screen door I slammed a hundred times a day when I was 5. The loud thud of that old wood screen door is a comfortable and familiar sound of life at the cottage.

The days are so much the same as they were then. My kids are now the ones playing with reckless abandon while I try not to worry and just let them be. I still put on my swimsuit and dive in to splash and play. I will know I’ve started to take myself too seriously when I won’t get my hair wet.

The afternoons slide by, sometimes with naps on the porch other times with paint and swimming, reading books or hiking in the woods. Sometimes we even watch tv. Whatever it is, it’s always good because it’s here. The days are long, the moments fleeting. I’m here with my parents just as I was 28 years ago. They watched me and my brother jump off the same dock all day long. Now they watch me with my own kids. Making the same memories. Savoring the same slice of serenity. So much the same in this place where little ever changes.

I embrace change – the visible progress that remodeling brings. The excitement of a move, a new house, changes in me. But sometimes, at a place like this I am reminded how gorgeous sameness can be.

Added to Tuesdays Unwrapped at Chatting at the Sky

When I saw this idea in a magazine recently, I had to add it to my collection of ideas for showing off my kid’s adorable mugs.

I grabbed some glass jars I had laying around and slid some photos in. Easy peasy and a fun new way to display the far too many pictures we have laying around. I love how easy it is and that it doesn’t involve buying one more picture frame.