The smaller stories of the everyday are in danger of passing unnoticed. I have my mind set on the bigger story of planning, packing, cleaning, and preparing to leave mid-week for this wedding. But watching them hold their pumpkins close to their coat-covered chests and hold out cold hands for Halloween stickers slowed me down in the pumpkin patch long enough to remember how easy it is for me to get my stories mixed up.

Do you need a little story-shifting? Little story gifts are being told all around. You simply have to slow enough to receive them and enter in. Link up to a new or previously published post for our weekly tradition of unwrapping the day.  If you are new around here, please join us! Read here for more details about how to link up to Tuesdays Unwrapped. Feel free to grab the button below and please link back here so your peeps know what it’s all about.

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Sometimes I have a little trouble balancing things. I’m no good at doing one load of laundry every day. I have good intentions, but I typically end up doing most of it all at once because we’ve run out of underwear. Another thing I do? I wait too long for ‘me’ time, and then when I get it, I hoard it like a starving dog, worried I may never get it again.

Perhaps it’s because for the last six years, it has been mostly about them. Now that I have two days a week where they are all in school, I’m not sure what is allowed. Can I spend the entire four hours on my favorite introverted activities like reading and musing and chatting at the sky? Do I need to be productive and clean the house from the top of the fridge to the baseboards? Shouldn’t I finish that project? Write that book? Learn a new language? Save the world?

I’m still trying to find that happy place between living restfully and being productive. But today I have put all that aside because I have made a hair appointment. Then? I’m going to lunch with a real-life girlfriend. It seems so indulgent, those things. Still, they are the very things I always say are so important, yet very rarely schedule for myself.

Sometimes its the little things, the daily things, the ordinary things that I need to notice and celebrate. Today I am celebrating a different kind of gift: permission to be indulgent.

And one more thing. See that necklace I’m wearing? It’s a Lisa Leonard piece. And it could be yours. Come back tomorrow. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

What are you celebrating today? Link up below and tell us all about it. (If you are reading from a reader, you will need to click over to see the links.)