Quotes on Children – Appreciation of Life & Christmas (Dec 2011)

December 15, 2011
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Susan's Thursday morning note December 15, 2011 
Children's Perspective on Christmas 
Children's Quotes on Love & Appreciation for Life
Good morning!   Pink sky, Christmas coffee with extra filler, cat purring, baby bouncing, child sleeping, the beginning of a beautiful gift of a new day.  As Eleanor Roosevelt quoted, “Yesterday is memory, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.”  I see that on my wall in the mornings and am thankful for new beginnings.  Each day.  A new chance at the opportunity of using the time given to me, the time is like wind sweeping by, the moments today.  My present.  As we enter one more week before celebrating Christmas day, observing the excitement, dreams, eyes, wonder of the season from our children helps me go back.  Help me keep perspective.  If, by watching one child’s excitement over the season’s gifts of sounds, lights, tastes, smells…if, by observing one child I can learn from that child to go back.  To go back to the simplicity of the gift of life.  So short.  So changing.  Here are some of my favorite quotes on the beauty of being a child.  We have 10 days until we celebrate with our children the birth of Christ.  In these 10 days can we try to think as a child, regardless of the exhaustion possibly in our particular stories.  To think as a child.  To wonder.  To exclaim.  To notice.  To stop.  To observe.  To cherish.  To believe. 
 
Sometimes looking deep into the eyes of a child, you are conscious of meeting a glance full of wisdom.  The child has known nothing yet but love and beauty.  All this piled-up world knowledge you have acquired is unguessed at by her.  And yet you meet this wonderful look that tells you in a moment more than all the years of experience have seemed to teach.  Hildegarde Hawthorne
 
I love little children, and it is not a slight thing when they, who are fresh from God, love us.  Charles Dickens
 
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
    For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
    For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
    which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
    but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
    You are the bows from which your children
    as living arrows are sent forth.
                            Khalil Gibran
 
I must take issue with the term “a mere child,” for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.  Fran Lebowitz
 
There once was a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things.  He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion.  These two used to wonder all day long.  They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.  Charles Dickens
 
If you can’t hold children in your arms, please hold them in your heart.  Mother Clara Hale
 
Children are like wet cement.  Whatever falls on them makes an impression.  Haim Ginott
 
I have found that the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want, and then advise them to do it.  Harry S. Truman
 
Know ye what it is to be a child?  It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief.  Percy Bysshe Shelley
 
The soul is healed by being with children.  English Proverb
 
And now, I’ll add to the description of the morning, baby drooling and deciding if he should cry or smile at me as I ignore him (now he’s sucking on my foot!), cat knocking things off of the table to get pet, baby tasting the edge of the humidifier siding, coffee gone…but the day is still my gift.  The moments not yet lived.  Mistakes will be made.  Laughter will be heard.  Goals will be met.  Goals will be unmet.  Another quote at the store on a magnet I love is, “Life is what happens when I’m making other plans.”  I like that one.  Today.  Who knows.  But we have the perspective of children and the ability to wonder.  To fall to our knees (even if in our heads), to look up to the sky, where our joy and our hope, and our eternal perspective come from.  Today.  Our gift.  No matter what it brings may we honor our Creator in our use of the moments.  Thank you for letting me enter your Thursday.  Thank you for your encouragement in the store.  If I’m not in that great little shop in Aurora when you stop in, know that I noticed you were there, and I thank you from here!  Let’s go enter our day.  Tonight we will write on our epitaph in our mind how we used today.  The gift of today.  Will the writing be worthy of imprinting the stone?  Susan
Latin for this week:
admiratio - to wonder, astonishment, surprise, admiration, to marvel at