The kids’ passports are expiring and we have a trip to Costa Rica scheduled for this summer. My wife made an appointment to renew the passports. My job was to gather the materials we’d need, gather the children we’d need, find out where we had to go…

It’s a weird thing to wake up in your forties, in the thick of raising kids, and wonder when the last time was that you did something frivolous.

I’m sitting with my son at a restaurant and I so badly want to tell him about all the beauty in life—all the wonderful moments he’ll have that I hope so badly he internalizes and enjoys.

My eight-year-old was reflecting on something his grandfather had written — a story about an art lesson where you draw your hand. The catch is that you aren’t supposed to look at your drawing until it’s done (your eyes never leave your hand) and you don’t lift the pencil from the page. In the end, you have an abstract, continuous line drawing that likely doesn’t look much like a hand at all.

At night I often read the book Outside Your Window: a first book of nature by Nicola Davies to my kids. It’s a beautiful book with poems for every season, and my four-year-old in particular loves it.