Parent's Morning Out went well last week. Forty kids rode scooters and played ball while six grownups and thirteen teenagers mopped up spills and served crackers. All in all a lovely distraction while their overworked mothers dashed to the store.

The youngest among them did start wailing as soon as her mom left, but once she was perched on the top of the snack cart she cheered right up. She was ushered around like royalty for the next hour and forgot to be sad. 

One little boy won my vote for Most Magnanimous by bringing and SHARING his new battery operated crane. Which was taller than him. Kids crowded around to get a turn to swing the boom and pick up Lego blocks.

Someone brought jump ropes, and the line of girls eager to skip didn't wane for quite some time. I remembered many recesses in my own childhood spent in such a pleasant way, and allowed myself to try. I only fell once. 

There were a couple of tears. Once when the movie we announced that was about to be shown was not the first pick of a small child. I held her and remembered that it was just a few antsy days before Christmas, and who doesn't need a good cry? Before I was ready to let go of her curly head she burst out of my arms and ran to get a good seat. 

The emotions that get most air time around the holidays are the big three. Peace. Joy. Hope. But it need not come as a shock that other feelings are part of the package too. As I write there is noise coming from my own son, perhaps not because anything is particularly amiss but simply because he is saturated. 

Maybe we can all just widen the berth on our expectations of how each silvery minute will sail by. 

“That innocence and peace go together like good and its delight can be seen in little children, who are in peace because they are in innocence, and because they are in peace are in their whole nature full of play.”

Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell 288