"Ripon has great rocks." - James P.

We had an unexpected small adventure yesterday afternoon, and it all began with a trip to McDonalds. They were offering toys from the new Angry Birds movie, so we took our little Angry Birds' loving boy for a Happy Meal.  One meander through the library (one of my favorite past-times!) and three 99 pence foam swords later, KJ was teaching the kids how to skip rocks in the river and staging sword fights on the footbridge.  And I was photographing it on an unexpectedly beautiful day, so we were all in our happy places.

It was one of those happy afternoons that comes by pure grace when you aren't expecting it, when--in my case--you've been awakened unwillingly by the sun at 5:20 a.m. two days in a row, and you definitely didn't go to bed early enough for that to be okay, and you're wondering how you're going to interact with your family the rest of the day without being too irritable.  In those quiet moments of whispered prayers, grace always feels like such a surprise.

In the early hours of the morning I'd read an article about children and imagination that left me wanting my kids to have more play, more of the simple pleasures of childhood, and our walk by the river felt like a lot of that good stuff. 

I didn't immediately think of The Wind in the Willows when we walked by The Water Rat, but when I got up close to the sign it made me so happy.  There were Toad and Mole and Ratty.  There's something so wonderful about that book, even amongst its stranger passages.  I think it's what C.S. Lewis said about it:

"The happiness which it presents to us is in fact full

 of the simplest and most attainable things—food, sleep, 

exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion.”

I hope your week is full of all those good things.