Following Bap

Today's not-so-favorite moments included . . .

. . . suddenly realizing that Daniel was fiddling with the fire alarm at our chapel. Immediately initiated hyperdrive.

. . . hearing Daniel start crying really hard in another room, and later noticing that he had a Joy-sized bite mark on his cheek.

Today's favorite moments included . . .

. . . playing random sofa cushion games with my kids.

. . . making actual solar cookies (not muffins), using my usual chocolate chip cookie recipe. They turned out more moist than usual, and it was still a little odd to eat a muffin-cup-shaped cookie, but otherwise they were good. I can see myself doing this a lot in summertime so we can have cookies without heating up the kitchen. I'll probably use a regular-sized muffin pan, though, since the wider, flatter result seems more like a cookie instead of a really dense mini muffin.

And another thing . . .

. . . Joy has some random nicknames for Daniel. They include "Bap" and "Dudie" (presumably an affectionate variant of dude).

. . . the kids and I took a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure walk today. At every intersection or crosswalk, they took turns choosing which direction we would go. It was an interesting exercise in chaos theory.

. . . I still had some terrible Giver flashbacks today, but by evening they had become less frequent and I pray they will soon be gone altogether. I found it was somewhat helpful to use a method I learned from Tuesdays with Morrie. Instead of mentally cowering in fear of the memory, I would face it and acknowledge that it was terrible, then set it aside. I had to do that repeatedly last night and today, but it often gave me a reprieve from the horror and made me feel more in command of my thoughts and emotions.