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With the days finally getting darker earlier, meaning the near-end of “daylight savings time”, cozy times are settling back into our routine. Even though the renovation is not yet done and the bunkbeds are still in the living room, we are wrapping up playtime and work hours more to the clock than to the sun, getting baths and clean jammies on, and snuggling up for story time. For ever how many reasons this ritual gets derailed in the summer (and it always does), I’m ever so grateful for it’s return.

I guess part of this is because I directly feel good or bad as a mother based on a very seemingly superficial thing: if the beds are made each day, the sheets clean, and the jammies fresh…put on bodies with sweet-soap scents still lingering, at a decent hour of twilight, I feel there is a healthy order in our universe. Really, the whole kit and kaboodle can be in serious jeoprody, but if they get washed every night and slip into clean, well made sleep spots, with a story, prayers, and kisses, I can manage quite a bit of daytime mayhem. The worst days are when the beds are rumpled and the dog’s been sleeping on them or worse yet…the kids go to bed in jeans. (shudder).

But as sure as the seasons change, the nighttime ritual returns. No more running barefoot into a way-past-bedtime sunset or watching fireflies. Mom and Dad have cups of hot tea and children get baths and story, and the stars align just as they should.

With the age range of our kids, 2.5-11.5, and the fact that the older kids are doing school with Dad at night, we’ve found a new pocket of opportunity: one-on-one time with the littles, snuggled up in Mom’s bed. Days are busy and everyone around here is always together. But this has become a special treat; a chance to spend a few quiet moments with each child. I have no idea how long it will last….only that the thought joins a little mental catch I have to savor it because our days spent with childhood, before the teenage years are upon us, are surely limited.

And so to the bookshelves where our stacks of picture books have sat waiting all summer long do the little boys return. The pile is migrating to my bedroom, where it accumulates night after night, and I am loathe to take them back down and reshelve them, in an effort to postpone the passing of the memory as long as I can. Tonight we opened Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a book I bought them all for christmas our first year here in Tennessee. It opens, “Once there was a tree….and she loved a little boy.” Within is a tale of time, and childhood, and mothering, and giving until there is no more to give…when, just at the end, a little more is found.

May these days slow down…just a little bit. They are golden.

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