This post showed up in my “Facebook memory feed” that I wrote on this day last year. The Sesame Street bus is no longer left in the hallway. Time, it goes so fast…
SESAME STREET BUS
Last night, as I put our 9-year-old twin girls to bed, I was enjoying the fact that bedtime talk is always different from daytime talk. Daytime talk with my 9-year-olds is very animated and excited, but when the lights are dimmed, and everyone is sleepy and calm, my girls seem to share stories with me about their day that they wouldn’t normally tell me in the excitement and busyness of the daytime.
After a really nice chat, I kissed them goodnight, and stepped out into the hallway, where my foot almost hit a little Sesame Street bus filled with little Sesame Street characters. My son had left it there when he was playing earlier that day. I looked at it, and realized that there has been quite some time since my foot almost hit a toy like this. At one time, it was simply routine to be dodging toys like landmines strewn about the hallways. Now, I realized, that dodging game of a time was almost gone.
Time is funny like that, it slips away unnoticed, and then we receive a little reminder to wake up and start paying attention.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the twins and their brother, trailing in age less than 2 years behind his sisters, were a whirlwind of activity. I hardly heated up a bottle before they had efficiently dismantled a room, only to move on to new and better things. I was in a constant state of motion, with a white smudge of milk forever on my shoulder, sticky finger prints forever on the bottom half of our patio door, bottles and toddler utensils forever filling our dry rack by the sink.
But, that forever is no longer, even though it felt that way at the time. Looking down at that little Sesame Street school bus, I realize how fast the feeling of forever can go by. Do not get me wrong, I do not want to go back to that time, but I sure do love thinking back on it, seeing where we were, and where we are now. Remembering all the craziness, the wonderfulness, all the mistakes I made, and the good decisions I made, just doing the best I could one day at a time.
And, that is how life goes, one day at a time, one choice at a time, one memory at a time, seeming like it will go on forever, until one day, you are standing in your pajamas in the hallway, staring at a little Sesame Street bus.
Life is creative, Life is crazy, Life is unpredictable, Life is hard, Life is not always how we want it to go, but Life is also really, really good. We darn better find a way to soak it all in, my friends, because one thing is constant, and that is that Life moves on, and all we have as we move with it are the memories we ourselves made in those moments of seeming foreverness.
Stories of Wil, my son, who has Down syndrome 