A little bit of magic goes a long way to relieve the long hours and hard work of being a working parent.

Once in a while, when my girls were young, I would stop the car at a park on the way to the sitter’s house in the morning, and we would spend twenty minutes on the slides and swings. We would have the park to ourselves, first thing on a weekday morning. And I got a little extra play time with my girls… The best present in the world for me.

I collected comp time like a miser collects pennies, so that once in a blue moon I could leave work early, leave my younger child at the sitter’s house, and take my four-year-old on an adventure, just the two of us. I will always remember the weekday I took Elizabeth to a water park near the sitter’s house, and the two of us piddled around in the shallows of the zero-depth pool. For an hour or so, we had some concentrated fun together… outside of our routines, outside of the constraints of our daily lives.  It was a burst of magic that made the week sparkle…

Or the weekend sparkle, those times when Frank and I stole away from the “to dos” at home and turned the kids loose in the Arboretum…

One year when my kids were in grade school, my birthday fell in the middle of the week and my husband was out of town.  I decided to blow off our evening routine and treat myself and the girls to an evening of fun. After I brought them home, we put on our bathing suits and walked to a nearby water park. We forgot all our structured week-night tasks. Instead we did the water slides, floated on the lazy river again and again, and splashed in the sunlit pool. We finished with hot dogs from the concession stand, which tasted like the best birthday supper I had had in years.

Then we walked home, the kids nibbling on ice cream treats while still incredulous that we were walking instead of driving, and me, savoring the sunlight, the warm humid summer evening, and the joy of being alive.

A little bit of magic…  a burst of joy that gave energy for the daily work and made my heart sing.

Sometimes a little magic, outside of my routine, changes everything.