I kept thinking about last night’s post and the whole idea of keeping that child like wonder in the midst of the daily grind. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to admit that frame of mind can be way easier said than done. There have been more times than I care to admit that I’ve dragged my little one along to a round of errands with my focus set clearly on getting things done, and there’s nothing fun about that.

Today after work I asked my mom if she wanted to make a quick run to Costco with Elysse and I, and she said sure. My mission was to see if they would be able to refill the ink cartridges from our printer. So little off track here but did you all know Costco does this? They fill up your ink cartridge for like $8 each. I wasn’t sure if it would be doable since we haven’t used the printer in like 5 years, but figured it was worth a shot to try. And it worked, the guy told me the pad wasn’t dry yet and that cost me $19 versus the $70 it costs for a brand new set of color and black ink. Score! Since it was going to take about 30 minutes to refill, we decided to look around and I grabbed some food items I needed. At one point my mom needed her own shopping cart and Elysse wanted to go with me to go get it.

Without even thinking about it, I grabbed her hand and started to skip and sing to her “let’s go get a shopping cart, let’s go get a shopping cart!” with tone variation and all. Elysse’s face completely lit up with that beautiful smile of hers! And what I thought would just be maybe 5 skips of this, turned out to be us skipping and singing our song from the back of Costco all the way down the aisle to the front entrance for a cart.

Mid way through our journey to the front I will admit I suddenly became aware of all the customers around us and felt a little self conscious, but thankfully just as quickly I pushed the thought aside and just went with it. Elysse was laughing and so happy!

Then as we got our cart and made our way back inside, Elysse told me she wanted to sit on the cart seat, which rarely happens. So as we walked in I whispered to her, “Elysse, get ready, this spaceship is about to take off, here we go!” She totally got into it and we made our way back up the aisle as I glided her along and at times moved side to side telling her we needed to dodge the comets coming at us. Then we happened to pass these round heaters they were selling and I gasped and said go her, “Elysse it’s the sun! Feel it’s powerful warm rays!”

We continued to let our imagination roll for the rest of the time we were at Costco those last 20 minutes or so were probably one of the best of my entire day. And I thought to myself, wow what got into me? This was fun!

I’m sure not all my days will go like this, but if I can be more mindful to allow joy and fun to be present in more of the things that I do, especially the tasks that can seem mundane, I’m all the better for it.