You don’t have to look far to find special moments.  You know the ones I’m talking about.  The moments where if you blink, you might miss them.  Memories are being made.  Life is happening.  Usually it’s these moments that you forget to capture on video or camera because you’re too busy living in the moment.  Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get a historical record of it that lives beyond your memory.  Either way, it becomes a part of your legacy.

Picture this: it’s about 9:30pm (long past the time when the girls should be in bed) and suddenly a dance party breaks out to Bruno Mars song, Count on Me.  After about 30 minutes of singing and dancing you’ve decided to make that your family theme song and now you can’t get it out of your head days later.

Or what about this: my wife has been leading us in a short yoga exercises in the evenings so on this particular night, my daughters and I are attempting various stretches and breathing exercises for which I am ill-equipped.  Meanwhile the girls love it and I’m beginning to wonder if this will become a new evening cool down tradition.

Yesterday was my sister-in law’s birthday so my wife and the girls decided to undertake an ambitious endeavor: to cook an entire meal and bake a cake together.  By the time the rest of our family had arrived to participate in the meal-making, their were elbow deep in flour, cake batter, icing, you name it.  As the resident historian of our family of course I documented the experience with lots of pictures, but much of what I didn’t capture couldn’t really be captured.  There was the long conversation about life and relationships the adults had over dinner and the playtime the girls had with grandma upstairs.  I guess I should also mention how I burned the hotdogs because I forgot they were still on the grill.  Not necessarily worth celebrating, but I guarantee you with my family, it won’t be long forgotten.

You can usually tell that you’ve had a good time when there’s laughter heard and quite a mess made.  Yesterday we had both in good measure.  I count that as a good thing because we were making memories and celebrating together.  I recently heard a great quote on a podcast about the importance of celebrations and time:

All we have in this world is time. We can make more money, get more things, but we can’t get more time. How do we make time valuable? Through rituals, celebrations and shared experiences. When we celebrate, we take normal time and we turn it into something wonderful. Celebrations make life meaningful. Celebrations make life enriching. We need to consistently and persistently find times to celebrate.

Here’s to finding more reasons to celebrate!

SDW3