My Favorite Day

My Favorite Day

I don’t even remember how it began. “My favorite day” was just one of those adorable, grammatically incorrect sayings a child utters and her parents cannot soon forget.

Since then, I have tried to get my daughters to keep an eye out for their “favorite day,” which is really just a moment during it that made their day special. My two-year-old’s default is playing in the sand box. My five-year-old’s often revolves around looking for fossils in the creek or snail shells in the yard (she found one in my planter this morning).

My favorite day? Well, at this stage of life it often revolves around drinking a smoothie in the sunshine and writing, since the whole nap thing doesn’t often pan out.

Some days, like yesterday–when my sister-in-law and I took our kids to the creek even though the sky was swelling shut with clouds–finding a “favorite day” is effortless. We walked the creek, holding the hands of our littles, as the mist hovered over the water due to the temperature change.

It caused us weary mothers to breathe deep and reawakened the adventure in us as well. And when the rain inevitably came, we grabbed hands and bags and towels and clambered our way up the leaf-strewn hill toward the house. The children ran in their wet bathing suits and the sky cut loose.

I tucked my girls in warm baths and folded laundry with my newborn still strapped to my chest as the rain fell outside. After lunch, we made brownies, and as the kitchen wafted with the scent of warm chocolate, my spirit was filled with such a sense of well-being, I thought: This right here is my favorite day.

But then what about the days when you have to fight for gratitude? Honestly, today’s been one of those. The rain that was so atmospheric yesterday kept my outdoorsy girls pent up in the house. The baby refused to nap without being strapped to someone’s chest, and I had four garbage bags full of children’s clothing to sort, wash, and fold.

Needless to say, I got a little grouchy. By my two-year-old’s nap time, I pointed down the hall and bellow-yelled, “We’re going to read some books!” It was either read books or put everyone in Time Out (myself included).

So all four of us girls cuddled up in one twin bed, and I read the books we’d checked out from the library earlier this week (another “favorite day” of mine). And in the turning of the pages, the voices, the characters coming to life, I could feel our collective heart-rate ease, and our bodies nearly visibly sigh.

This is my favorite day, I thought. Right here.

But now, I am sitting outside as the trees buzz with cicadas, and my five-year-old daughter (in the brown corduroy dress with the pink ribbon she insisted on wearing, although it’s July) is playing in the puddles leftover from the deluge earlier this morning.

She is using one of my measuring cups to scoop the water and pour it into a salad bowl, which she also confiscated from my kitchen. She is a woman on a mission, making her mud soup laced with the mushrooms that have sprouted in the wake of this humid weather, and I sit here on my chair, watching her tangled brown-gold hair and red-dirt hands and think: No, no, this right here is my favorite day.

But the beauty’s in the fact that it’s only 3 o’clock; there is still time for another.

Can gratitude become a daily habit? If so, how are you going to begin?