Sunday dinners at grandma’s house. Hot summer afternoons jumping in the pool. Countless Family Days, amazing dinners, and crazy afternoons filled with adventure and fun.
Camping, spiders, marshmallows and stars that always seem brighter far away from home. My mother, making gourmet food around the campfire.
Nights cuddled up in the family room with loved ones, hot buttered popcorn, a warm fire and a good movie.
All of the kids (and grand-kids) coming home for a home-cooked meal and hours of conversation and laughter lingering around the dining room table.
Playing games and cards and laughing until we cry.
Traveling and vacations and seeing the world together. Long walks and holding hands. “Meaning of Life” conversations, deep into the night.
Playgrounds, pools and amusement parks.
Swings.
Fireworks. Picnics.
Snowed in… with a crackling fire and homemade chili.
Planting seeds, gardens and fresh awesome tomatoes that we wait all year for.
Sitting around the firepit. Sitting in the Jacuzzi. Sitting around the grill.
Playing with the dogs.
Golden Memories. Magic Moments. The Happiness Scrapbook of our Minds.
The little bits of day-to-day living that make up who we are, what we stand for, and why we spend all the rest of the time working so hard.
What’s it all about anyway?
Sometimes I think we forget. We get caught up in work for work’s sake, or the dangling carrot at the end of a goal that we can’t remember why we have in the first place.
It’s a good idea to take a moment every now and then and celebrate the WHY and the WHO and the WHAT in our lives that we are doing it all for.
In the end, we won’t want to remember the long labored hours, the frustrating challenges and sleepless nights of our careers. We will want to recall the victories. The moments that we succeeded, felt on top of the world and made it to the next mark.
We will want to remember the celebrations of life, family, friends, events and laughter.
Always the laughter… and the love.
Are you creating memories? Are you stopping long enough to celebrate, play, and enjoy your special moments? Do you take time to appreciate the daily little celebrations we have every day?
Don’t let them pass you by, this is what it is all about in the end.
Building memories, one by one.
Joy says
A favorite summer memory is playing the game Trading with my girlfriends. We’d run home to go through junk drawers, and gather items to trade in a shoebox, some wrapped in tissue, some plain. Then we’d meet at the picnic table in the backyard to offer our items for trade, one at a time, taking turns, saying yes or turning down a friend’s offer.
Wendi Kelly says
Joy!
How fun that sounds! We used to play trade with our Halloween candy. Not sure how much of it we ever ate, in fact, I remember our mom having a rule that all Halloween candy was to be thrown out by Easter. We kept ours in shoe boxes and traded it like Monopoly properties..
Deb Dorchak says
One of my favorite summer memories is getting up really early in the morning (not fun) and making the long trek out to Jones Beach on Long Island (very fun).
As a little kid, Dad would carry me out into the waves and we’d bob on them for hours. And when we weren’t in the water, we were building squishy sand castles with the wet sand Dad dripped through his hands. The castles looked like melted candles.
Mom always brought sandwiches, but my brother and I preferred the hotdogs from the vendor. Not that they weren’t good sandwiches, it’s just a snappy hotdog always trumps bologna and cheese on Wonder Bread every time.