Stop….in the name of love…

    "Did you wear yourself out?"  I ask, because he looks worn out as he gets off his new bike and trudges over to where I’m hunkered down on the back of the truck, Facebooking or something on the IPad.

    "What’s that mean?"  He skewers his face up like I do when he doesn’t understand something.  I think it’s funny how much he looks like me, how much of a little me I see in him.

    "It means that you worked your little body until it can’t run anymore, Honey, and you’re tuckered out."  I rub my hand over his curls, how I love those curls!, but then wish I hadn’t because he’s all sweaty.

    "Nooooo, not worn out.  I think I’ll just get my milkshake and sit up here with you for a little bit."

    And so we do.  Bubby and I can sit quietly together and think better than any two other people I know.  He picks at some of the hay still in the truck bed and sips on his shake for a bit lost in thought.  Finally he says, "You know, I like your coffee better."

    "Okay, but only a little bit.  You know mommy gets crazy when I give you guys too much coffee."  He knows, but he laughs with me anyway and takes a really big sip.  It must have done the trick because he then hopped off the truck and went back to riding his bike.  We have to practice real hard this week because he’s going to come back this weekend and start trying it with the training wheels off.

    It’s been a hard year for the little guy.  Mommy’s been sick a lot and Noah has been to the doctor a whole lot for his autism – rough times for a family trying to keep things going.  Roo and I help out where we can but for some reason the days have just gotten ahead of us.  The girls have had their trials, my company sold it’s building so I had to move home, the holidays landed upon us and so I was rushing a million miles an hour when I remembered to call to find out what we were doing for his birthday. 

    "Mommy says we’ll have more dollars in January and we can have my birthday then."

    He zooms past me at a pretty good clip and heads back towards the pond where he can get pretty close to the geese and scare the feathers off them with the honker.  That was funny to me, the look on his face when I took him into the store and showed him the bike and it dawned on him that we were really going to get it.  He says, "Lama, do you think I could get a honker (horn) to go on it?"  There I was laughing, in the very same store I was in days before, running around crazy, when his mommy told me that they had to wait on his birthday and I wondered how we all got to moving so fast that it got beyond everyone.  I wasn’t laughing then, you betcha, but I asked her if I could pick him up early from school today and have a birthday day just he and I.  It’s a pretty nice honker too and the geese hate it which makes it only that much nicer to me since they do their own share of honking all day long.  

    I do wonder how much more riding he has in him.  For December, it is warm and just sitting out in the sun makes me realized that it’s shorts weather again in Florida.  Won’t last, but it’s pretty day and it’s our day.  A day that has slowed down to almost a stop while the rest of the world flies by and I see him really concentrating on keeping the bike balanced so he’s not relying too much on the training wheels.  I make a mental not to change into a lighter shirt when I go back inside and then relax back in the truck bed to enjoy our last few moments.  

    "I did it, Lama.  I wore myself out this time."  And he’s right, because that was a worn out looking newly 6 year old if I’ve ever seen one.

    "Well, help me load ‘er up, Bubby,  You can practice some more at home after dinner when your daddy gets off work."  I hand him the bungee cords as I put the bike in the back, knowing that he will use every single one of them whether we need them or not ( we don’t ) because it’s just fun to do that sort of stuff.  We’ll pack up and I’ll drop him off and the day will go back on normal time and I start running fast again because moments wouldn’t be precious if they weren’t ….well, moments.

    Don’t get me wrong, if it were up to me we’d have our lives chalk full of slow times.  But it isn’t up to me and that itsn’t how it works anyway.  Life is going to come by you as fast as it can and it’s your challenge to listen for those times when it is going to stop.  I m afraid that we miss way too many of them for lack of listening.  All the important things that aren’t all that important in the really big picture have a way of sucking us onto the fast time train.  At least, that’s what I was thinking during our think time.  I wondered what Bubby was thinking in his.

    "Okay, son, you be good for mommy today, don’t ride your bike in the house, forget about all the coffee you drank, that will be our secret, and remember…..Lama loves you soooo much."

    "Lama," he whispers, "I lufs you soooo much too.  I lufs you like ….." there goes that squinchy face again, he’s thinking serious now, "…..like you was a new puppy."  

    I never did speed up much the rest of the day.  Go figure.

    Praying for some moments in your lives.

Lama