a Thanksgiving vignette

kind of a tradition now

I woke up this morning, like I do every day, to the sounds of my children dumping out their toy bins over the baby monitor.

Salem always gets up first, and it’s thump thump thump down the bunk bed stairs (he likes to hop from step to step). Then it’s a pit stop at Abraham’s crib to see if he’s awake yet (he usually is) and they plot together about how to spend their morning.

I rarely hear bickering at this time of day. Something about the quietness of the morning encourages peaceful collaboration. Or maybe they just know I won’t be there right away to help resolve their conflicts.

Often while the boys are clattering around with pots and pans in their toy kitchen, or pouring a cascade of matchbox cars onto their rug, their sister Lydia (still in the process of waking up) yells at them to be quiet. They don’t listen to her any more than they listen to me. Soon she’s up alongside them, helping Abe change out of his PJs and ransacking her own dresser drawer for just the right out-of-season shorts and tshirt combo.

I check in on them every few minutes on the video monitor, mostly to ensure there are no Diaper Situations and that they aren’t unleashing any pent-up rage on their poor defenseless book collection (a habit that was the bane of peaceful mornings in the Coté home fairly regularly until Abe came along). I love watching them this way, in their unfiltered selves.

My oldest’s Thanksgiving craft from yesterday. Who knew he was thankful for jars of pickles?

This morning my husband went downstairs to monitor the kids’ room so that I could have a slow start. I got up with the the ever-smiling baby (a fellow morning person) and put him on the floor to explore while I made the bed. He’s learning to crawl now and the world is his oyster—the cats his to chase, the fancy knobs on my dresser his to spin. Sometimes he surprises himself by rolling over suddenly, or scoots into a corner and can’t back up, but Caspian’s an optimist. Obstacles inspire him.

I’m sitting now in my cozy blue armchair, legs up on my ottoman, thinking about how this week last year was when we discovered the bedbugs in our house. The armchair was pink then, a 1950s relic from my in-laws’ garage. It fit perfectly between the bookshelves on the wall in my bedroom. The shelves were, in fact, built around it, so as you can imagine it felt almost wrong to replace the chair. But the blue one belongs here now.

Isn’t is strange how everything changes? And somehow it doesn’t change at all. I walked here from all the past Novembers, collecting moments like beads on a keychain, and so many days I cursed the immovability of things—only to find them all new again the next morning.

It’s Thanksgiving again, somehow. May the comfort of home stabilize us today. May our hands be full of abundance, may we receive new sight and may we live, really live, each moment before it passes.