A Pause And Paws

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Every time I look outside I have to remind myself that we are a little over three weeks from the official start to winter.

I mean, with scenes like this it's easy to forget that little calendar season tidbit:

And as I sit here typing this, I find myself thankful for the little pause before the next storm that is going to hit us, because the forecast is saying we can get up to sixteen inches of snow or so in the next 24 hours.

Not that I am sad, I love the snow, and I am always happy when the kids get a snow day. They are almost grown, so days that we can kick up our heels and crash into each other and various obstacles on sleds is a rare thing indeed.

Whimsical musings aside, I often wonder if people enjoy a pause in things as much as I do. Sometimes it's during the brief stoppings that I realize what I need to do, or quit doing, or that I haven't enjoyed the art of being enough. Being an adult has the capacity to suck all the fantastical imagination spark out of your soul, and when I find myself in a pause I catch a glimpse of that fun person that I am when not burdened with all life's detritus.

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The paws also help.

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Right now we have five kittens in the house. That's not counting the various older farm cats that waltz in the pet door for a snooze by the wood stove and few scratchies. The kittens though, they offer no end of amusement and quite honestly foster a lot of the pauses in my life here lately.

Like, I have to pause in whatever task I am attempting and grab the spray bottle full of lavender hydrosol so that I can douse the destructive heathens. You see, we set up the Christmas tree on Sunday and it has been a bit of a hullaballoo in my living room lately with us trying to train the cattens so as to avert a bit of tree carnage.

I can't say that particular bit of pausing hasn't made me laugh on occasion. Especially when Munchkin got into the tree and ping ponged about like he caught his tail on fire in a light socket as we lit him up with hydrosol for committing his agregious offense against the gods of holiday decor.

Paws antics aside, tonight is going to be a bit of a special pause, today is my son's sixteenth birthday. And it's fitting that it's on the eve of a massive snowstorm, because he came into the world on the eve of a massive snowstorm sixteen years ago.

So tonight when we pause as a family and celebrate his birth, talking story between mouthfuls of peanut butter cup cake, I will undoubtedly pause for a second and reflect on how awesome my life has been up until this point. There's been pain and joy, pleasure and drudgery, and most of all, tiny moments of pause where I am reminded of just how much of a gift all of this is.

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And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's nowhere near as reflective as the author except on sunny days in the literal sense of the word iPhone.

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