Ginormous Shoes

I'm trying to go with the flow.  Let things be and go with it.  The 3 kiddos, my husband, and my brother, who was visiting from the east coast for Christmas, all got sick.  Yet, Christmas came anyway.  It was good.  Not quite as I had envisioned but we worked with it in our most low-key way.  Literally, we laid on the floor in our pajamas mostly all day.  For days.  

We were happy and together.

My brother, Ben, is 25, a decade younger than me.  Seeing his shoes in our entry way gets me.  I don't know what it is about shoes that makes me thoughtfully sentimental.  His shoes are huge and something about seeing his shoes reminds me how life is moving fast.  My little brother now my big brother.  My son's smallish shoes in contrast to my brother's shoes...I am struck with how that is where my son is headed.  To ginormous shoes.  To becoming a man.  Gone will be the days when he will want to sit on my lap and snuggle when he is sick.  

Sometimes I get distracted with the things I'd envisioned.  Say, the camera working for Christmas.  Though, come to think of it, it was probably a good year for no-Christmas pictures (my husband just took a few with his phone including these two...)

I'll tuck it away in my memory.  The gift of being together.  Stuck at home for mostly a week now.  Watching movies, listening to music, snuggling, drawing.  Doing the really important things.  This is a shift for me because I tend to be motivated by performing, by getting my list done.  But I'm learning I need to let go of the doing and just be.  Be.  I'm hoping I get so good at it that by the end of my life I'll have morphed into a complete laid-back...hippie.  I've got a long way to go.