How ten minutes becomes 45 minutes!

Today Addison and I walked Easton and his friend to school. I pushed Addie in the double stroller, with our rubbermade tote full of paper to be recycled. We stopped on the way and dumped it in the bin, then went to Eastons school and dropped off a large bag of food for the food drive. After dropping off Easton at class I decided since I had done something for the earth and something for folks in our area I would do something for Addie. I let her walk all the way home. She was giddy with the thought of me letting her out of her stroller. The walk normall takes 5 minutes, 10 if I dawdle. It took us a full 45 minutes to walk home. We stopped and looked at every plant, flower, bug, rock and crack in the sidewalk that we could find. We helped out quite a few houses by returning stray rocks to their flowerbeds. We examined one ant as it wound its way home. At one point Addie blew on it to help it out (poor ant)! We found dandilion flowers that were ready to be blown on. Addie loved picking them out of the neighbors grass and declared that she had "enough" of them, then blew to her hearts content. When they wouldn't come off as fast as she wanted she waved them in the air, back and forth, until the little seeds went flying off like the baby spiders at the end of Charlottes web! Addie stopped and smelled every "pretty" on the way, picked one yellow one to give me, and then told me "no bite". We had a delightful walk and I was reminded of why I am a mom. I get so busy and caught up in the day to day business that I often forget to stop and smell the "pretties". I could have been home prepping my house for Thanksgiving. I could have been doing laundry, cleaning toilets, sewing, or a million other things. Instead I took 45 minutes to do what I could have done in ten minutes....and I loved every minute of it!