my life, in buses and ducks

This is the best way I can describe this chapter of life: I am at a bus stop. It's raining lightly; the wind is chilling. Tilly is in her pushchair, grinning up at me and kicking off her wellies. By the time I get one back on, she's kicked off the other. Penny is strapped to my chest, heavy, like a lifejacket, just starting to moan. And the buses are coming. One after another, bumper-to-bumper, the buses round the corner and rumble past us, spraying up a little murky rain-water each time. I try to wave one down, but then there's a boot to pick up. I try again, but then Penny's dropped a sock. Instead of a destinition, each bus has a date -- January 16th, January 17th, January 18th, all disappear down the road in a blur.

It took us three days to get to the duck pond. We started getting ready on a Wednesday, and the ducks finally fought and quacked for their bread and old biscuits on Friday. The simple acts of breaking bread and shooing away the naughty mallards had never felt so momentous. Well worth the preparation.

This is the first time since university I've had a curriculum. I picked five books, each simply because I wanted to read it for itself, but have found that together they make an incredible reading list for "Finding Joy in Each Moment 101". Lewis, Niequist, Oliver, Kalman. Again, I feel that this is the year of the word, and am rediscovering how much meaning can be found in that perfect metaphor, or can be applied to my own life from an account of someone else's.