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This morning, like most mornings lately, I got up before dawn. For some reason, my entire life, I’ve been one of those very irritating morning people, the kind that wakes up at six singing songs even before the coffee is on. (I know, I know. Brian accepts your sympathies.) No grouchy-bear mornings allowed in our house because it’s my best time, the time when I’m most creative, most alive, most happy every day so I can’t really complain that the tinies are morning people, too, up and singing every morning despite Brian’s half-hearted pleas from the bed that “in some cultures, there are people that like to sleep in, you know.”

Every other morning, I quietly pull on my clothes and sneak out. Sometimes I go for a walk at Mill Lake. Sometimes I go to Starbucks to read. Other mornings, like today, I get my coffee and head to the high hills to watch the sun rise on the mountains across the Sumas prairie. I don’t stay long – maybe 20 or 30 minutes but long enough for the sun to rise slow against the hills, for the mist to begin to lift off the valley, for the wind to take my breath to prayer and rest for a while.

This? Makes me feel like a real person again, a human being instead of a human-doing.

Most of what I pray nowadays is just thank you. And that’s enough.

588. Best friends in your own family.

589. Joe’s constant tending of his “vegable gar-den” in the pool.

590. This summer, they have grown into being real friends, playing for hours and hours together.

591. Water rats, both of them. They would never get out and swim like little trout.

592. And then this little one, sitting poolside with her mama. All smiles and eyes and eyelashes.

593. The smell at the base of her neck, right above her birthmark, is simply a taste of heaven.

594. Her absolute delight in life, her content curiosity.

595. Blackberries that grow like weeds. We walk up the hill and fill another pail.

596. Teasing Anne that I’m going to call her Sal because it’s plink-plank-plunk and then she eats all three.

597. Dimples in her elbows and hands and creases in her wrists. Fat, happy baby girl.

598. Dandelion gifts, just for me.

599. Monkey bars.

600. Wooden playgrounds that are always empty for some reason, everyone else at the fashionable busy ones, I guess.

601. The walk back home, back down our hill, to our white house, past the blueberry farm in the valley.

602. Discovering that I must have missed my true calling as a carnival face painter.

603. Blue-eyed lizard pirates playing bare chested all afternoon.

604. Butterfly girl, decorating herself with leaves in her hair.

That’s a lizard pirate, in case you were wondering.

605. The girls at SheLoves Magazine. (Seriously, if you have subscribed to that site or friended them on Facebook, get on that. The variety of female voice and experience is wonderful. Never mind that I write there, too… *cough cough*)

606. My sister is back on maternity leave and I’ve never been so happy to be making pancakes for a houseful of tinies in my life.

607. The way my little niece Addison calls me “Auntie-Mama.” And how we’re raising our tinies to call each other “sister-cousin” and “brother-cousin” because, clearly, there is a difference in this type of cousin.

608. The hard, unglamorous work between the great grand idea and the finished project. Know what I mean, Megan and Nish? Grateful for that and a steep learning curve, too.

609. My new little Thankful Tree sitting in my kitchen window sill.

Linked up, as always, with the Thousand Gifts community.