Four years ago, I had one of those rare transcendent moments. I remember the experience so vividly.
We were several months into our intern year of Brian's residency. He was gone almost around the clock, and I was feeling the full force of the first trimester of pregnancy. I was also desperately missing my Hershey friends, and I had several huge committments pressing on me.
One particular Sunday morning, I woke up early to get myself ready for church before waking the girls. (Oh, how simple "just two kids" seems now! But it certainly wasn't simple then.) I was feeling rather forlorn and sorry for myself, mulling over "another Sunday alone at church," and wanting to crawl back in bed and not wake up until life got a bit more manageable.
As I made breakfast, I did something I never do. Ever. I turned on the little radio in my kitchen. For once, it actually worked. I scanned through the stations and coincidentally ran across the Music and the Spoken Word broadcast from Salt Lake City. This world-famous weekly broadcast is, well, one I had heard of but never listened to. And this particular broadcast was a rerun of a famous broadcast given in 1955.
I started to listen to the words. And suddenly, I was crying--right there in the middle of the kitchen, holding the box of sugar-filled cereal and staring out the window at the darkness of early morning. The voice of the speaker was so soothing, so wise; the words he spoke went straight to my heart and mind.
It sounds overly dramatic to say that the broadcast, called "To Enjoy the Journey," changed my life, but in many ways, it did. At that moment of time, I knew that the words I was hearing were just for me, and me alone. Later that afternoon, I went online and managed to find a transcript of the broadcast, which I printed and hung on my fridge for years. It has left a powerful and permanent imprint on my mother heart.
This afternoon I found myself once again thinking about enjoying my journey as I watched my children in action.
It was only five minutes, and this is what I drank in:
There was a delightful baby boy laughing in his exersaucer.
There was a tender baby girl, covered in spit up, whose tongue never retracts and whose hair is the stuff of legend.
There was a first-grader who was wild with delight at the opportunity to cut the strawberries for dinner.
There was a toddler who guzzled his strawberry milk and then said, "Cheers!" as he finished.
And there was a lovely daughter playing with her baby brother--freed from his exersaucer at last.
It was only five minutes, and Mom with her camera, putting dinner preparation on hold to capture the moment. But in that five minutes, I reflected that life can't really get much better.
As Richard L. Evans said in his broadcast, "When our children are young and very dependent upon us, sometimes perhaps we think what we would do if we were more free from responsibility. And then the time comes when we are free from that kind of responsibility, and in looking back we find that it was one of the sweetest, most precious parts of life."
It is one of the sweetest parts of life. I hope, while I'm living it, that I don't forget it.
Emma decided to follow in her father's footsteps.
We carved some pumpkins last Saturday. (Correction: Brian and Emma carved pumpkins while Clara and Nathan watched and Mom cleaned pumpkin seeds.)
And...we actually made and decorated sugar cookies. Wonder of wonders. It only took me a week of planning to manage it! 
Still to come...Nathan debuts as Sandy the Dog, with Clara presenting as Sandy's owner, the one-and-only Annie.
