After I wrote The Thing About Dreams last week, I went through every Sweet Pickles book on the shelf looking for that slip of paper I remembered from that day in our old living room. I am very visual. I could see it in my mind. I could see the paper hitting the dark wood floors of the house where my daughter was young. I knew in my heart that the paper had fallen out of a Sweet Pickles book…but I couldn’t find it. Instead I took this picture of the inside cover of one of the books and used that for the image in my post:
Today is my first day back from the Type-A Parent Conference, my favorite blogging conference of the year because it is the weekend that feeds my soul, inspires me to write, recharges my completely overworked mom batteries. The last speaker of the weekend was Rene Syler from Good Enough Mother, and one of the things she said that I loved most and tweeted out (and clung to in my heart while she continued to speak) was this…
“I will not fail…unless I quit.”
I came home ready to work. I also came home to the one full week of the summer with no childcare.
So today we slept in, we snuggled in bed watching the Disney Channel in our jammies, we all worked together to make lunch, we killed some bad guys on Super Mario Bros., and then we took turns playing the piano, first my son, then my daughter, then me. I cannot remember the last time I played the piano. It’s been several weeks. At least.
And I wanted to sing. I dug deep down and found some old Broadway show books, pulling out the Secret Garden so that I could sing “If I Had a Fine White Horse” to my daughter who had joined me on the piano bench. I do a horrible British accent, but she loves it anyway. I do a horrible job of singing the notes on the page, but she claps at the end regardless.
I opened the book. It opened to a page with a paper stuck inside. It opened to the song “Hold On,” which is meant to be played urgently and which starts,
What you’ve got to do is finish what you have begun. I don’t know just how, but it’s not over ’till you’ve won.
And the paper stuck inside?
“I will not fail….unless I quit.”