PERFECT DAY

I love perfect days.  I had one on Sunday.  A warm afternoon in May topping off the thermometer at a nice round 80, no chores waiting to be checked off my list, no errands to run, nothing to snag the bliss and joy that are woven together so intricately to create a perfect day.

As you might imagine from the exciting news in last Friday's post, my family has been on a lovey-dovey "baby high" lately.  Handsome A-Rod has won over the hearts of this little family, and we celebrated his birth by getting together this weekend.  Sol and I hitched a ride with Eloise, Aunt Liz, and Uncle G, and we braved the concrete trails, the five of us in a mid-size SUV, across the state to meet our long-awaited nephew (Eastward Ho! A-Rod ahoy!).

Obviously he was one-thousand times more adorable in person than in his photos.  And obviously we were all immediately smitten.
for realzies, wouldn't you be too? -->>

Lucky for us out-of-towners, A-Rod's parents live in a beautiful house out in the country, enveloped only by fields and trees, set back in an area where the noisy city is distant and forgotten.  A house with a generous yard where I could unfurl my 15-month-old walking ball of sunshine.  I could sprawl out with her on the cool grass under the vast sky, breathing in the crisp, clean air and basking in the rays of a warm sunshine that seemed almost too big for the vast sky where it was hung.  I could watch her explore every-single-last-inch of nature, the grass and the leaves and the sticks and the stones, to the soundtrack of happy chatter and intermittent chuckles from our family across the yard.  I could sit back and watch in amazement as my daughter toddled over to her cousin Ellie and the two of them played and laughed together.  Bliss.  Love.  Perfect.

What a wonderful world we have, Sol and I, and what a loving family we're blessed with.  We spent the weekend with all our dearest ones, with Gramma CC and Papa K, both of whose proverbial cups are overflowing on a daily basis.

To see my parents with their grandchildren is to see love in its most vibrant form.  I swear you can nearly hear their hearts bursting as Sol giggles on Papa K's lap, as Eloise bats her outrageously long eyelashes at anyone within a 5-foot radius (those eyelashes will melt your soul)... it's incomprehensible, almost humbling.  Sort of a full-circle, other-wordly, "this is life" moment, when you experience a love like that which exists in my family.  And that love was tangible, alive and well, as we celebrated this past weekend.  We celebrated love and life; life at all ages, from 3 days to 93 years.  New life and seasoned life, the budding and the weathered, the spry and the placid.  My family, connected by blood and bound in love,  my family created the world's most perfect day.