30 Things in 30 Days: Thing #9—The Inaugural Summer Snowcone

Note the color-changing spoon. It goes from turquoise to purple. Pretty awesome.

Winter melted, spring sprang, and summer is now upon us (temperature-wise, at least). Even though our schoolwork is submitted, David and I have still spent our days grading the last of the student essays, so our time for doing Awesome Things is pretty rushed still. So David came up with the awesome idea of getting the first snowcones of the summer, and I added that it would be even more awesome if we ate them on a blanket in the park—our old park, next to our old apartment complex, by our big old pond.

Awesome Things apparently do not require doing my hair or wearing makeup. But they do require purple Kangaroos sneakers, usually.

Much to David's disgust, I ordered the Wedding-Cake-flavored snowcone with ice cream at the bottom (I love the flavors of snowcone that aren't supposed to taste cold and icy, like blueberry muffin, sugar cookie, and apple pie. I'm the same way with Jellybellys—my favorite are the flavors that aren't supposed to be round and chewy, like popcorn and German chocolate), and David, much to my puckered lips, ordered the SweetTart-flavored snowcone, all ice. Hollie sucked on her binkie.

Eating snowcones in the park might not be the most awesome thing in the world, but it sure felt awesome after a day of grading papers. Though I probably shouldn't get too sentimental about our 30 Things in 30 Days until at least Day 25, I've been impressed at how suddenly meaningful every day has become. It has been fun to make awesomeness a daily priority, no matter how busy we are. I'm always waiting for David to say, "Maybe we should skip today—you have a lot of work to do," but I know better than that, anyway. One of Dave's mottoes is to do one fun thing everyday, and it is hard to go back on one's motto. In any case, this 30 Day experiment has resulted in really helping me to identify the awesome moments in my life as they happen (rather than in nostalgic retrospect).

One of the many thoughtful faces of Little Miss Hollie.

An old friend of mine lost her baby girl this week, a little baby that had had some health complications since birth. Another old friend of mine has a teenage son who has struggled with cancer for over a year, and looks to be nearing the end of a long struggle and an all-too-brief life. A stranger whose blog I read almost by accident writes of losing an 18-month-old baby girl in a ditch filled with water outside her home. After I read each account, I went to David crying, and he held me. We would pray for our own family, trying to compute our own unaccountable blessedness compared to our equally (if not more so) righteous, equally smart, equally capable, kind, and lovely friends whose trials seem so overwhelmingly more tragic, bitter, and aching than our petty problems. It is hard for me not to feel consistently on the brink of some tragedy that will even the scores (even though I know that life and God does not work this way).

In the end, I know that there is little I can do to prevent any and all possible tragedies from reaching my own little family—there is no guaranteed fairy dust I can sprinkle on my David and my Baby Hollie to keep them safe from all harm, forever and ever. But I also know that living my life in fear for the worst is no way to live.

But recognizing one awesome thing that I get to do with my family every day is a pretty good way to start finding that best way to live. Even though I can't predict the future (nor do I want to), I am finding myself really loving the present. Snowcones in the park with my handsome (clean-shaven!) husband and my darling, hilarious sneak of a little girl is very, very awesome, and I'm so very, very happy to be able to document this first day of summer here.