I keep waiting for something important or big to blog about, but the reality is, our life happens in small moments and those small moments are our life.

There are so many cute and funny things that Harry does on a daily basis and I command myself: “Remember.”

One of the phrases most often spoken around here lately is “mommy open that?” His toy ottoman or a box or a toy.

We don’t use cute nicknames for stuff, but Harry’s given his items nicknames anyway. For some reason he calls his blanket a “mink.” I always call it “blanket,” and yet he always calls it mink.

He has also fallen into this pattern of calling things old or new. I think it started when he’d reach for a water that was left over from the night before. I’d say “no no that’s old water,” and it stuck. Now he calls a dirty blanket an “old mink” or a random pacifier he finds on the ground or on the counter as an “old boppy.” It’s pretty adorable.

Last night he stood at the mudroom door, a pink construction heart held tenderly in his toddler hands.

The dogs stood guard in front of him, tails wagging; their honed hearing had alerted us that the garage door had gone up.

Aaron walked in and proudly, so proudly, Harry handed him his little gift. “Daddy, daddy, daddy,” he said. I saw it come across Aaron’s face, the surprise and love, as he accepted his Valentine.

When you’re at home with a 2 year old and a 2 month old, days run together. Our mornings go quickly, and the afternoons stretch out endlessly as the clock to bedtime ticks down.

But some days I manage to do something right.

After Harry’s nap yesterday we sat at the kitchen table and I cut hearts out of scrapbook paper; my heart-cutting skills rusty. I wrote notes and he scribbled, passing the colored pencil back and forth between his left and right hand. 26 months old, and I still can’t say with confidence that he’s a lefty. (But I have my suspicions.)

I’ll never forget the sight of him, standing there waiting for his daddy to walk through the door. “Daddy home!” is Harry’s favorite time of day.

At 11 weeks old, Posey is starting to look more like an infant, less like a newborn. It’s felt like a long winter, but it has gone inexplicably fast. That’s always the way.

Tonight she slept on me in the wrap, and Aaron and I drank hot chocolate, mine out of a mustache mug purchased at Target for $4. Sometimes you just need a little whimsy.

This is life. Little moments that become the memories we tuck away and savor in our mind’s eye. Babies carried in wraps. Toddlerese. Hot chocolate and fireplaces on February evenings. Construction paper Valentines. Soon-to-be memories meant to be reveled in now. I’m trying.

My friend Sarah suggested we take a photo every day this month of something or someone we love.

I thought it was a great challenge. Join us?

From our family to yours.

About a year or so ago, I had to quit Pinterest.

Now I didn’t say goodbye cruel Internet and delete my account or anything, but there was certainly a point reached where I just had to Step Away.

Maybe it was the hundred and first pin of a very thin model in full make up doing the perfect push up (I have a blanket unfollow rule on any board titled “thinspiration”) or the twenty-first “no sew” pin that did in fact require more sewing skill than I have (which is none), but there was a tipping point and I had tumbled down down down on the side of: this site is making me feel terrible about myself and my life.

I wasn’t crafty enough, thin enough. My house was too messy and not decorated well enough. I mean my mantle was causing me angst. MY MANTLE. I can’t cook, and who has the time to organize a gift wrap closet or make hot chocolate from scratch when there’s Starbucks for that?

So I said: no more.

About that same time my friends Jill and Tina sent me this fantastic post by AnyMommy, who wrote that the point of the site is to inspire. And if it’s making you feel bad about your life? Change how you use it, or be done with it.

I nodded my head vigorously with every word, but I even still I was kind of meh on the whole thing. I did discover a wreath to make last fall and pinned some items for Harry’s first birthday party, but other than I didn’t use it much.

Until about two weeks ago, when after a conversation about churches using Pinterest reinvigorated my thoughts about the site, and I dipped my toe back in.

And now I’m swimming in the deep end.

The key, as AnyMommy stated all the way back in 2011, is to actually do the things you pin.

And so I have, and it’s actually fun. Shocking, I know.

In just the last week I have been “pinspired” to do the following ….

Wrap a letter in yarn for the nursery:

(Starting on a second for Harry’s big boy room too.)

Find a cheap old frame at Goodwill & paint it to frame some of Harry’s daycare art:

Clean microfiber:

I found some bar stools at Goodwill this weekend (only $4.99 each!), and cleaned them with a technique I found on Pinterest. Genius.

They looked fairly clean when I brought them home, but the sponge on the right proves that they weren’t!

I’m also using it to keep track of prints I want to get for Harry’s new room (works better for me than the favorites feature on Etsy), blog posts I want to be able to quickly access again, and as a treasure trove of scripture to look at again and again.

A great idea for using Pinterest that I discovered via Jessica Turner is to create a Completed Pins board. Since I’m actually now acting on the ideas I pin, it’s a great way to track what I’ve translated from a virtual file folder to the real world, plus give feedback and review how it went.

How do you use Pinterest? Do you do the things you pin?

Since I took down many of my earlier archives, here is a repost of what I wrote on Sept. 11, 2001. I was 25 years old.

—

(It’s 1 p.m. EST. The ticker runs across my t.v. repeating the terror. Dan, Tom and Peter interview, hypothesize and wonder. I wonder. I pray. I hope you do too.)

(Only the workout center at my office has televisions, so after listening to CBS on the radio, connected to someone’s little Mac speakers, we made our way over there. After standing on a treadmill, overtaken by chills and fighting back tears, I grabbed paper off the gym printer. I sat down and wrote. Like a cub reporter I took notes. Names, quotes, information.

We watched Rick Leventhal of FOX News stop soot-covered cops and frightened New Yorkers as the dust from the first tower billowed down the street. When the second tower fell, Rick was gone – consumed in raging debris. FOX News went on.)

9:45 EST

We crowded into the gym, perched on treadmills and stationary bikes, as the World Trade Center Tower 1 crumbled to the ground. A man named Angel told the reporter that the sky turned dark like snow.

Another man, Matthew Garth, told the world that he was in the restroom when the ceiling collapsed. “I just had to call my wife.”

An executive type man reports that he saw people jumping out of the WTC.

The smoke pervades Manhattan, creeping around the buildings, down the avenues and into the subway stairwells. Only one tower stands. The skyline forever tattooed by terrorism.

The pentagon. The military safehouse destroyed. A construction worker, or perhaps a cabbie, his car masked by dust, named Artie said “My heart’s in my mouth. There’s no words. A bomb coming out of the goddamn sky.”

A car bomb just exploded outside the State Department.

What about the second plane? Where did the second plane come from?

“Back it up!” they scream. The camera turns sideways as its operator runs away from the falling sky. “There it goes!” he yells. And they’re gone. The towers are gone. The gasps invade my ears and tears finally come.

The Statue of Liberty peers across the harbor at the empty skyline, where the two towers once stood. The landscape forever, forever changed. In a moment.

They’re saying it’s the Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine. How do you hijack a plane inside the United States? How does that happen? How does it get from Boston to New York City and quickly overtaken, without alert, without a word?

The volcano of destruction spews ash of betrayal.

10:40 a.m. EST

They’re already recapping the morning’s events. But this can’t be over. The West Coast is just now waking up. Now there’s a plane crash just south of Pittsburgh. Now everyone is hypothesizing.

I think the entire company is in the gym now. Tearstained faces covered with fear for family and friends; lovers and loved ones who live in NYC and DC. What about Chicago and Los Angeles? This can’t be over, can it? The military command center is still operational.

You feel so safe here. I board planes all the time without a moment’s thought. This morning, wives dropped off their husbands; mothers crept into children’s bedrooms and kissed them good-bye. Then they all climbed onto Flight 11, bound for LA, with nary a thought. Suddenly the world’s greatest disaster was unleashed.

Manhattan’s blackness is pervasive.

In slow motion they play the second 737 slamming into the tower. I can’t even begin to think what images flashed in the minds of the passengers when they saw their imminent death reflected in the glass of the tower.

And as they keep replaying the explosion, they speak of Pearl Harbor. They speak of a day that will live in infamy. But unlike December 7, 1941 the entire country has been able to watch this day unfold horror by horror.

Today the sky will be empty.

By 11:04 the gym had emptied. The CEO called us down to the fire pit and sent us home. “Be with your friends and family,” he said. They closed all our stores.

Like ants our cars snaked out of the campus. I went home, turned on the news, hugged Montego and waited for Miranda and Mo. At least here, surrounded by them, I’m safe.