Living in the moment

I've often heard the benefits of living in the moment, but I'm not sure living NOW is all that. We watched Amazing Race last night and saw a surge of emotions. One couple started out loving and ended up yelling at each other, other couple did their best to be supportive ("honey, I love you, but if you don't hurry up..."), and others were just all over the board. I thought about that this morning as Elliot and I started our day together. We get up and I'm thrilled to start a new day with him, knowing that Eric is working and I'm not going anywhere, so it's just me and Elliot ALL DAY! Yeah! We start breakfast and he eats really good with his spoon, except the part when I was refilling his juice cup and didn't realize he was spooning milk from his bowl into his hair. Kinda frustrating but kinda cute. We move on. Getting him dressed was a bit of a struggle as he's quickly learning his ability to not do what I ask him to. This is very frustrating and getting him dressed takes twice as long, and by the time we are done, I don't really want to go for a walk anymore. So just before 9am I've felt joy, love, frustration, and more. If I had lived in the moment, then the times of frustration could have been a lot worse - right? But since I allow (yeah, like I do it on purpose) my day to mix and emotions to overlap, the frustrations were always preceded or proceeded with happier thoughts.

Perhaps I'm looking at the whole "now" thing wrong. But either way, I'm sure glad I have loving thoughts before and after anger, or Elliot might end up like this kid:

A long time coming

I created this blogs years ago and have only today decided to actually start blogging. Eric and I have started attending The Stirring, and they have a whole community of bloggers. So in efforts to connect myself more, I'm going to give it a go.....

Today we danced. Today was the first day that Elliot went potty in his toilet - twice even! After getting him to calm down and sit there for a while, we sang "Twinkle twinkle little star" to distract him from the task at hand. Around "like a diamond" he stopped paying attention to my funny little song and realize he was peeing! I'm sure the music coming from his potty chair helped draw his attention back to the point of this whole charade as well. When he was done and we'd cleaned everything up, he picked two jelly beans and we danced in celebration of his success. It was great.

I've now decided that the next time I succeed at a new task, I'm going to recruit those who are near to join with me in a dance of celebration. I think it is only fitting.