Some Saturdays are for Playing

We spend a lot of Saturdays working.  Cleaning bathrooms and doing yardwork and putting away piles of folded laundry.  Last Saturday we cleaned the house top to bottom and half of us were quite ill.  Next Saturday we're going to help build a pig pen on my parents' property so we can raise our own bacon :)  I love a productive Saturday!  But today we played.  Nate and I walked a few miles together in the morning.  We played games and did puzzles with the kids while it rained.  We went to the "beer mart" (that's what we call the country store a few miles from our house) and bought one bottle of each variety of bottled soda in stock (black cherry and vanilla cream and root beer and a real sugar Coca Cola) and a bag of potato chips.  Then we ate a lunch picnic on the trampoline and had a soda tasting soiree in the sunshine.  And then we walked out our front door with Caroline in a pack on Nate's back and we explored the hills around our house and the air was so perfectly fresh after all the rain and the clouds were billowy and moody with dark bellies and the sky was the best blue.  And we pointed out every animal we could see and hear.  And we stopped to pet a pony and watch some plucky goats, and Henry touched an electric fence and Nate dared the kids to walk the whole way home with their eyes closed.  And I snapped a few pictures on my phone, but there just aren't enough pixels for nature after a rainstorm.  And the intangible beauty of being with my dearest ones is always unconveyable but so, so precious to me.
 
We've made some adjustments to our life recently -- tried to reestablish some balance that has been amiss for a long time.  It feels good to be living more carefully, spending our time more deliberately.  One of the life habits we're attempting is no errands on Saturdays.  Saturday is really our only day -- and it can get eaten up in errands and zigzagging so easily.  We're trying to be really mindful about how we spend our Saturdays.  Today Nate needed to get some muck boots and wanted to go to Costco.  I had several things I needed to mail and a shirt to return to Old Navy, and it was so tempting to knock a few to-do's off our lists, but we postponed them all.

My laundry room looks like a war zone.  And the back of my van is full of parcels that need to be mailed and returned.  And our toilets are looking like they'd like to be cleaned.  And the suitcase from Nate's business trip hasn't even been unzipped.  But we got today right.