The Little Things Day 12: Make Them Happen

My son and I have a favorite book to read together. It’s called Little Boy and it’s all about – a little boy. He loves seeing the things the little boy does, the things he loves and the things that make him a little boy adored by his mother. It’s very sweet. As it goes, “Little Boy, so much depends on…” and then fills in the pages with things like dumping sand, splashing in puddles, and my son’s favorite page has a picture of a boy laying upside down on the couch eating animal crackers. He cracks up laughing every single time we get to that page. And when the book is over, we make up our own pages based on the things my little boy loves. “Little Boy, so much depends on racing mommy to bed”, “Little Boy, so much depends on building lego towers”, and on.

He loves this. He laughs the laugh of a child that is uncontrollable and real. As we snuggled into bed earlier tonight and I read him his favorite book, and he laughed and laughed, and we made what could otherwise be just another thing to add to the day – put the kids to bed – I thought about how the little things like laughter and love aren’t things that just happen. We have to make them. You can take a walk along a path and stumble upon beautiful flowers. You can sit outside and enjoy a sunset. Those things will happen and the only chance of experiencing them is to slow down enough and see. But there are other things – the things that make the relationships we have tick – that need to be fostered, created, fed. My son won’t laugh unless someone is making him laugh. He won’t tell stories unless we take the time to listen to them. We need to make time for them, make our hearts open to them by seeing past the what-needs-to-be-dones and instead live in the what-is-now. As the story Little Boy ends…”so much depends on days made of now.”