As I’ve been thinking about nurturing and making magical moments in my home, I see some of the wonderful things that women around the internet are doing, and I’m incredibly inspired, and almost as incredibly overwhelmed. Start of the school year parties, poetry for each child, hand stamped fabric family projects; I can’t figure out when I’d have the time to even think of the ideas, let alone put in the effort to make them come to pass. OK, so that’s not strictly true. I can think of when I’d have the time to do all of that, but not how to do all of it AND clean my house.

So where does that leave me?

With a green straw.

Let me explain.

Z,  (my 3 year old), has a sippy cup with a straw that slides out of the top. It’s been lost for the last week or so, (I strongly suspect it’s in the church bag, but keep forgetting to look) and the other day she asked for it at lunchtime. I told her that I couldn’t find it, and offered her another cup, which she took, albeit a little sadly.

In a flash of inspiration I remembered the box of straws that I knew existed somewhere in the house. They weren’t anywhere I expected them to be- I finally found them with the art supplies in Z’s closet (the organization of my house is the subject of another post entirely)- but find them I did, and I pulled one out quickly and went back out to where Z was eating, and told her to close her eyes.

She opened them to this.

Oh the rapture.  Her cup of milk was no longer just milk,

it was a treat,

an experience,

a beverage.

She used the straw all day.

It didn’t take tons of planning or preparation, just a moment of squelching the part of me that just wanted to hand her the cup and be done with it, and a couple of minutes to search out a straw. And the payoff? Magic.

And you know what?

We discovered yesterday that the only thing better than a green straw is

a blue straw.

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