a few nights ago, henry’s dino blankie fell out of his bed.

this is obviously devastating when you are three, need it to sleep, and refuse to put your head on the side with the railing. so at some point in the middle of the night, i stumbled into his room to fix it. half asleep, i tucked him back in, shuffled back to bed, and immediately knew something was wrong.

our pup lucy was shaking.

seriously shaking. shallow breathing. the kind of thing your body notices before your brain catches up. and once you notice something like that, there’s no un-noticing it.

so, at an hour when nobody should be awake, we started googling. we started counting breaths. we started checking gum color. we started panicking.

we brought her to the vet the next morning and, thankfully, the most likely answer seems to be pneumonia. she’s on antibiotics. she’s responding well. we are hopeful.

but there was a stretch of time when all we knew was “something that shouldn’t be in her lung is growing quickly in her lung.” and because we’ve lived through losing a young dog to a freak “we rarely see this” kind of situation before, our brains skipped right past the horses and headed straight for zebras.

so now we wait.

we count breaths per minute.
we monitor water intake.
we celebrate tiny bites of food like they’re olympic victories.
we listen for coughing (good, apparently).
we sleep (very) lightly.

what has been hardest about all of this is realizing how deeply i want to fix things when my only real job is to wait. and it turns out waiting is its own kind of labor. and maybe that’s why moments like this sharpen everything around them.

i think mothers are uniquely bad at helplessness.

give us a problem and we’ll research it, organize it, color-code it, make a list for it. we’ll google things we absoLUTELY should not google. we’ll become accidental experts in whatever crisis walked through the front door that week.

and maybe that instinct to fix everything is really just love looking for somewhere to go.

we spend a lot of our lives trying to keep little ecosystems running smoothly. snacks stocked. blankies retrieved. dogs medicated. tiny people tucked back in. and maybe, sometimes, love is just a thousand small acts of noticing stacked on top of each other.

because the truth is, most of our lives are built from tiny rituals we barely think about while they’re happening.

the sound of paws following me into the kitchen. blue and lucy circling each other before settling down for bed. the way lucy still tries to follow me from room to room, even when she’s exhausted.

ordinary things become sacred very quickly when you realize how much love has been quietly living inside them the whole time.

and i think that’s part of why i care so deeply about documenting ordinary life.

not because every moment feels monumental while it’s happening, but because someday you realize the small things were holding entire seasons of your life together. and maybe those are the things worth remembering on purpose.

here’s hoping for more ordinary days ahead.

[this note was written while lucy snores (nice and slowly) beside me, which feels like the best possible soundtrack for today.]

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