I have only a moment before I’m supposed to step onto the treadmill of this day.

But I found myself engrossed in each member of my family as we hurried them into shoes and jackets and car seats, and as I waved them down the road and turned back into the living room, I found I leapt — actually physically leapt — toward the computer to write.  The treadmill can wait.  This moment, pregnant with human beauty and the fullness of falling rain, asks for something else.

It’s been a rough two weeks of no daycare and much family time, so much, in fact, that it has become easier to lose patience and harder to find it again.  There has been a mappable increase in hollering and sarcasm as we’ve worked our way through to today.  But here we are, and the boys are off to daycare.  It feels like total freedom, though I’m entirely booked already, and therefore it feels like heavy relief to finally be able to dig into what needs work.  But these are the images I carry with me into this day:

1. Malachi, at breakfast, carefully feeding me each of his enormous blueberries with his soft, carroty, fumbling fingers.

2. Ezra, after finding his moose rain jack ALL BY HIMSELF, informing me that it has a hood, and insisting I look as he solemnly puts it up to frame his smooth elfin face and glowing hazel almond eyes.

3. Len’s pants and jacket soaked in the downpour as he brings each child in his turn to the car, hurrying against the inevitable drenching but gentle in his haste and hugeness.

It feels strange to be so thrilled at their departure and yet so reluctant to let them go.  Malachi in particular, at this sweet stage of last-babyhood, feels like a precious gift I cannot release; I want to keep him home with me alone, snuggled under the covers, nursing and playing and gazing and singing and watching his world unfold.

It seems, sometimes, this is what it all boils down to, on its best days: the whole world condenses into a mother and a child, a father and an infant, any pair of people who open themselves up to light, to rain, to each other, to adoration.