Weekends are beginning to regain their value now that I’m going back to work. Not sleeping-in-until-10 value–we’ll never see those days again. But the laziness that comes with being together, the three of us in one place, taking our time and sipping our coffee (TK loves his babyccino while reading the Times) and lying in the hammock–these are weekend moments. Moments when the rushing around of weekdays subsides, when not every second is filled with activity but we are allowed to just be and let our little family take shape. We can linger over The Kid’s flirty half-grin and gurgling laughter and marvel over how much better life is after the first three months.

We can do some of this every day, of course, and we should–joy doesn’t take Monday through Friday off. But there’s a bliss in Friday afternoons, the kind that’s been there since we were kids bounding off the school bus toward two days of playing. TH pulls into the garage and TK and I greet him, less of a weepy mess than we were at the beginning and more of a “guess what he did today” exhilaration.

Also, there are cocktails.

But The Kid…man, is he something. Gone is the fuzzy-eyed alien phase. Now each day holds a new trick, like the other night when I finished feeding him and we sat on the couch watching TV (he loves Sportscenter if Daddy asks, but he also likes Glee–shh!). I would smile down at him and he would turn from me to the TV, as if he were bored with my face, then when I turned to the TV he would look back at me and grin. There are times when his smile–always higher on one side and bordered by a dimple–is so big that it seems the happiness is stretching him out with its fullness.

Thank God I love him more every day. There was a time I thought we would have to take him back to the hospital–and I didn’t have a receipt or anything.

Anne says, “It’s great to feel better, to be back in the saddle again. And it’s so hard to let chaos swirl around without needing to manage or understand it. It’s so hard to get quiet enough, free enough of the bondage of self…It’s like Sam opened this window for us, and all this grace flooded in.”

The gifts are so much easier to see when they aren’t soaked in frantic tears and total sleeplessness. It’s not lost on me that I prefer to have presents delivered straight to my lap, unwrapped and ready to go. It’s also not lost on me that the best gifts I have received in my life–the gifts that changed me and freed me from that distorted devotion to myself above and at the expense of everything/one else–have taken awhile to open. Damn, TH took a year to come around, and there are still days when I catch him trying to escape. (So I run a tight ship around here. So what? Who cares?) The grace that’s flooding in now, though–the moments when I realize that my heart will never be “free” as I defined freedom before–this grace alters reality and makes the mundane holy. When you arrive at the terrifying point where nothing will ever be the same again? That’s when you know the story is getting good.