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This past Sunday evening, I watched my daughter raise her arm and swing her tennis racket, hoping her energy landed in the right place. The breezy air made the yellow ball look like a meteor streaking across the sky. I felt a little coolness as the wind rearranged my hair. It was an out-of-character moment for the desert summer. As she continued to play, I interchanged my focus between my phone and journal.

My 5-year-journal sat in my lap. When I encounter some down time, I try to jot down a sentence or two to commemorate the key and mundane seconds of my days. With my pen, I chronicled some of the events over the past weekend. We had a festive dinner with friends on Friday evening, where our kids enjoyed playing with one another. We watched fireworks. The younger kids still love the lights in the sky, while the older kids had fun swinging their sparklers around in a circle. On Saturday, we lounged around the house, filling our time with sleeping in, reading books and catching a family movie during the day. In the afternoon, we went to a friend’s house where my daughter mingled with new children and enjoyed tossing water balloons in the pool, loving the bounce, pop and the splatter of the water. We rounded out the weekend with a Sunday brunch at our home. Kids raced around and played tag, while the adults enjoyed French toast and Bloody Mary’s.

I reflected on how all of these threaded moments didn’t appear to  amount to anything dazzling on their own. We were just like most families in the country. Spending our time with friends, laughing, eating, watching fireworks and squeezing in wholly ordinary moments in between these outtakes. The weekend consisted of other everyday glimmers: washing dishes, doing laundry, driving to the grocery store and vacuuming around the house. I know that this kind of normalcy isn’t to be taken for granted. This is the backbone that keeps my life moving forward.

Just as my daughter’s tennis ball landed near the baseline, she yelled, “Momma, look behind you.”  I stood up, shifted my gaze to the sky, and caught the yellow, pink and blue hues of the sunset. I grabbed my phone and snapped the shot.

A thought crossed my mind about this life – paying homage to the ordinary is spectacular.