We started the farm and a lot of things changed. I got busy. Busier than I’d been with trying to learn how to homeschool and raise toddlers and keep the house clean and dinner on the table.

I took the job and a lot of things changed. I got busy. Busier than I’d been with keeping our homeschool flowing and teaching everyone how to write and how to do math and reading them good books and tending the house and the farm.

We moved to a bigger farm and a lot of things changed. I got busy. Busier than I’d been with keeping everyone in their projects and in their skill set and in their studies and their interests, and keeping my job one that was relevant and thriving and that served those I served well, while keeping a good level eye on my boundaries and balancing all I had to give.

They moved to their next season and a lot of things changed. I got busy. Busier than I’d been with keeping everyone’s schedule and balancing weeks with Daddy on-shift versus Daddy off-shift to them having their own work schedules and college class times and homework; to everyone coming and going and lambs being born while we all watched the sheep-shed camera throughout the day from all our various places.

It’s the next season and a lot of things have changed. I’ve gotten busy. Busier than I was when I was the face they saw every morning, the voice that read to them at every breakfast, the chauffeur that drove them to every event.

They are grown. And our season has changed. It’s been gradual and it’s been abrupt.

My baby graduates out of our little homeschool in just a mere matter of weeks, and in my bones, I feel like it was literally just a month ago that I was teaching him how to read and count change and do the chores and sit quietly when it was time to listen.

In the flurry of raising them, of teaching them, I didn’t know how fast it would all go. I was growing up with them; I know that now.

I wish I would have laughed more.

I wish I would have taken more things in stride and not been so serious when it came to the things I didn’t know it was okay to not be serious about.

And I wish I would have been more serious about the things I now know I should have been more serious about.

I wish I would have laughed more.

But we danced in the kitchen.

A lot.

To the point where, when we sold the only house they’d ever known, —on that last night before we moved the last of our things, ratchet-strapping down Mama and Daddy’s mattress to the bed of the pickup and driving it the quarter-mile up the road to the newly built place on the newly purchased land that would offer them more elbow room for their animals and us a homestead to leave them one day—that eldest daughter, my little mirror since she was born, she grabbed my hand after we’d finished our little goodbye pizza party there in our little kitchen tiled with counter tops my husband and I had installed ourselves, almost divorcing after that weekend do-it-yourself-clearance-sale project—she said, “You owe me a dance.”

And we danced there in that tiny little kitchen, cramped and filling up the space, and while my sweet girl and I spun awkwardly around, I thought of all the times I’d carried her on my chest, wrapped tight in the blue Snuggli buckled around me, her newborn hair poking up between my breasts, me patting her behind, tucked so securely there on my belly as the little countertop Bose stereo I’d bought my husband for Christmas the year before played out No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems by Kenny Chesney, that song that played nonstop the summer she was born, and that is still, to this day, our song.

I’d danced with all of my newborns in that kitchen. Three of them in the same navy blue Snugli, the last in the chocolate brown Mobi Wrap I wish we’d have discovered when we first started having babies. So comfortable and no buckles to contend with. That last born made me realize how much more natural things could be.

We baked a lot of bread together in that kitchen, and made a lot of cookies together in that kitchen, and did a lot of dishes together in that kitchen, and isn’t that sometimes the dancing of life?

How many experiments had we’d done in that kitchen? How many dishes had fallen out of awkward-child hands and broken on the ceramic tiles, the pieces to be swept up together in that kitchen, lessons learned on how fragile things can be, but how mistakes happen in that kitchen? How many dance parties and pancake Thursdays and pots of coffee made in that kitchen? How many sinks of dishes hand rinsed by small children with little legs standing on stools and conversations as the plates dripped dry in the dishrack?

We danced in the kitchen that last night, her and I, and then, after we moved up the road into this new kitchen, they got their mama a sign for over the sink that reads In this kitchen we dance.

And in this new kitchen, this kitchen that has become THE kitchen, we’ve baked a lot of bread together, and made cookies together, and have done dishes together, and have prepared so many family feasts and parties together. We’ve clasped hands and prayed together, and mixed up endless bottles for farm animals together, and I’ve yelled at muddy boots left by farm kids that worked hard together, and now they cook together and prepare together and my husband even saved a life there in that kitchen where I make him dance with me sometimes after he’s had a long week of twelve-hour shifts in the oilfield and I kiss his ear so he’ll feel young again and not so tired.

I laugh a lot more now than I did back then, because isn’t all of this all dancing, too?

This season when everyone is moving and going and flying with wings that somehow—in that way God gives—us Mamas helped grow?

I hope they know I was happy. That they made me laugh. Then, and even more so, now.

It sometimes takes a while. To realize that being busy isn’t all there is to life. That being busy doesn’t have to be stressful. It doesn’t have to be serious.

That the being busy in the life of raising kids and raising critters and growing them both…that it is fun. That it is the beauty of life and what we are here to do and that it will go fast.

So very fast.

I hope they know that getting through the day wasn’t my job.

I hope they know that getting them equipped to get through THEIR life was my mission.

I hope they know that dancing in the kitchen meant more to me than I ever said out loud.

It wasn’t the busy, every day things that drove me.

It was the way they are when they are together.

It was their laughter.

And now, now that their busy days of growing are done, I resolve to embrace this season with even more determination. To remember my place in their lives. To remember what really matters.

I resolve to dance in the kitchen.

I resolve to laugh even more.

~

Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” -Psalm 126:2