Surprise, surprise

For the past few weeks, I've hosted the same thought in a hundred different settings: Wow, it starts out, this is so simple, so sweet, so good. 

Open windows blowing fresh air over the stale mess of indoors.
Laundry time with Dani, her play-by-play proclamations on each garment, "Matcheene wash warm!"
Grabbing hands to cross the street, four people and a family wide.
Father-son whiffle ball games.
My six year old inventor, "fixing" the clothes line with a stick and a half dozen clothes pins.
And old dog who still shakes her entire hiney when she wags her tail--a tennis ball always to blame.
My now-more-gangly-than-pudgy (not so) littles who still act like lap babies, who beg to stay up for one more inning, then beg to be carried up to bed.
A runner's high, which feels an awful lot like the mother-finally-gets-a-moment-of-peace high, which now that I think about it, is probably why the feeling lasts the full six miles.

Every day, I reach in and every day--be it at the bottom of the hours with the sun long hidden, or the top of the morning as the sun first waves--every day I find a prize. And what's amazing to me now isn't how grand the prize is or how hard I worked to get it, but exactly the opposite. It's how the smallest of moments feel so special, and how it has nothing to do with achievement and everything to do with love.