Just a Perfect Day

Yesterday was a good day—no work, lots of productive and pleasant family time. Nora and I made waffles for breakfast; Mason and I built Lego spacecraft for various planetary missions, which we then enacted; and all of us, mid-afternoon, played Monopoly Junior (Maddie and Mason tied with $44 each, thereby evading a fight about winning, losing, and the cold indifference of the universe).

It was a rainy Monday, lots of slush and puddles outside, and inside I was recovering from a stomach bug that had knocked me down most of the weekend. Everyone, in fact, was happily low-key and happily indoors—until four o’clock, when Nora had her ballet lesson. I was feeling well enough to take her, and for the first time watched her practice with her teacher the moves she performs at home. Again: the warm sense that my daughter teleported here from another life, that she’s reacquainting herself with old habits.

Back at home, Nicole had prepared an activity with circulars I’d fetched from the supermarket. We’ve been intermittently studying health and digestion these last few months, and now the children would make their own food pyramids. Maddie drew pictures and labeled them; the youngest two (we still call them, sometimes, “the babies,” to which they should, any day, object) snipped pictures of food out of the circulars, glued them to color-coded sheets of paper, which they glued again to form the pyramid shapes.

It was a useful activity, especially when trying to get them to visualize how many pieces of chocolate one should reasonably expect in a day.

After a dinner culled proportionally from the food groups, we flopped down in the living room, and the children watched Puff the Magic Dragon and Nicole wrote emails and I read a chapter of a book I’d studied and admired a long time ago, and the passages held up to the memory I had of them, and I was for once not disappointed in my younger self.

I bother to sketch this day because, if I could, I’d relive it right now. It’s not every day you feel each member of your family has been, if possible, the best version of his or her self, and that you’ve risen to the occasion, and even the weather aligns itself neatly to your household’s shared mood.

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It was an exceptionally good day.

I need to remember this for when I have a perfect day. Write it down. Hopefully I haven’t already had a perfect day and just forgotten about it.

This is really beside the point, but how many pieces of chocolate did you all determine were an appropriate daily ration?

In principle, Nora agrees that four or five small ramekins of chocolate chips is too much. In principle, she agrees that one is adequate. She can point to the top of the pyramid and explain, haltingly, why it’s smaller than the other sections. Regardless, she continues to ask for four or five or six or seven ramekins of chocolate a day.