Choices

This post is a few days old. Sometimes they need to linger before hitting that "publish" button.

As I washed a big pile of dishes tonight, I thought about choices. We usually give the 'big' choices the credit as we move through life -- marriage, jobs, children, home. We have had a lot of those in the past year, and some still staring us down. They can be exhausting, overwhelming, consuming.

Tonight I was thinking, maybe it is actually the little choices that really set us on course, that set the tone for our life much more than those big ones. Today I think I made more right choices than wrong. Like...

• going for a walk with the kids this morning instead of sitting in the house.

• going to story time at Barnes and Noble and reading more books with Cooper, even though I said just one more.

• making a real dinner for just me and the kids, which is something I rarely do when Erik travels.

• calmly cleaning up the mess when Cooper spilled his milk all over his dinner instead of freaking out and yelling and huffing and puffing about it, like I do too often.

• letting the kids stay up late to go see some live music at the library.

Maybe, if we just pay close attention to the little choices, if we move through the day mindfully, those big choices will all fall into place naturally.

And now I'm off to my last good decision of the day:

• eating the rest of the apple pie.