Today, as I sat in the car with my daughter, waiting for my son to wake up, we got her unbuckled and listened to music while eating some chocolate. We stayed like this for ten or so minutes, and she proudly exclaimed that it was, “The funnest, most best, day ever.”

Last night, she asked to dye her hair pink. We’re staying home due to the pandemic, so I figured, why not? We dyed it pink, and she told me how beautiful it was. These little moments that I spent with her, maybe ten or fifteen minutes at a time, meant the world to her. 

It’s funny though, because I always seem to worry that I’m not doing enough. I always want to take her to fun places, do fun things with her, and take her on more amazing vacations. And don’t get me wrong, she does talk about the vacations too, but I find that she talks most about the small, day-to-day things that we do much more often.

So, as I sat on my phone, scrolling through old photos and videos today, I found myself stopping at certain ones. A video where she holds a lizard in our backyard. A photo of her petting our dog. Just small, daily moments that didn’t mean much at the time to me. But when looking back, I found these moments more entrancing than the vacations or expensive events. 

I found myself laughing and smiling at these mundane photos, and like my daughter, I thought to myself, these are the funnest, most best, days ever.

When I think back to my past, to the years that defined me, you know what’s funny? I don’t really think of those often “big” things. Like in high school, I remember when someone bought six trays of Chick-Fil-A chicken nuggets for a student government meeting that had five people. I remember laughing in class with my friend as we both failed a pre-calc test. I remember freezing at early morning swim practice, and the long car rides with my friends.  

And years later, in college, I remember laughing at the TV with my husband on our first “date,” or the time we took home a mattress too big for our car, and I had to hold down the straps through the window. I hardly remember our wedding, but I remember the time we bought our first car together, and when he belted out John Legend’s “All of Me”  in a soulful, but joking manner, while we drove to his old apartment. It’s not the Disney trips or the lavish vacations to Hawaii or Mexico. It’s the daily moments, the ones that seemed so small at the time, that I look back to.

Maybe that’s how life is supposed to be. Maybe we’re supposed to enjoy the big, but treasure the small. And maybe that should be a lesson to us. We don’t have to overload our days for them to be joyful. We don’t have to sign up for a million things to do for a bit of happiness. Because in the end, it’s the little moments that matter most.