Happy Sunday!

I’m joining in for another week of Song Lyric Sunday with Helen over on her blog.

This week’s challenge is to find a song about the parent/child relationship.

So motherhood?

My kids?

I’ve given that some thought on this blog.

Here’s a collage to give you a sense of some past posts when I reflect on it all in the broader sense:

Becoming a parent changes you. The love for your children: the overwhelming desires to protect them, teach them, bring them joy, and grow them into awesome human beings is so powerful and became part of what motivates so much of my life once I became a parent.

As far as music and parenthood, I’ve done this a few times already on my blog. I love music and I love sharing it with my kids. So I’ve posted about songs my kids enjoy and I’ve posted songs about motherhood.

But today? This is the song that came to mind:

I Hope You Dance – Lee Ann Womack (2000)

Here are the lyrics. They are beautiful:

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger.
May you never take one single breath for granted.
God forbid love ever leave you empty-handed.

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens.
Promise me that you’ll give fate the fighting chance.
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance,

I hope you dance … I hope you dance.

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance.
Never settle for the path of least resistance.
Living might mean taking chances but they’re worth taking.
Lovin’ might be a mistake but it’s worth making.
Don’t let some hell-bent heart leave you bitter.
When you come close to selling out, reconsider.
Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance.
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

I hope you dance.
(Time is a wheel in constant motion always)
I hope you dance.
(Rolling us along)
I hope you dance.
(Tell me who wants to look back on their years and wonder)
I hope you dance.
(Where those years have gone)

I hope you still feel small when you stand by the ocean.
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens.
Promise me that you’ll give faith the fighting chance.
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

Dance.
I hope you dance.

My kids are getting older and, to quote Womack the song “made me think about my daughters and the different times in their lives. As a parent, you just hope those are the kinds of things you will make your children think of.”

Well said. Mine are seven and four right now. So while they are young enough to still express that unbelievable joy at certain things, they are old enough to be self-conscious. So as they grow, I hope they keep their sense of wonder in the world around them and that, well, when given the choice, they dance.

To end this week, I’m going to post one of my favourite photos of them. It was taken back in 2013 at Hog’s Back, which is a large park area in the middle of Ottawa with a waterfall in the centre of it. As we were leaving that day, a stranger came up to me to show me a picture he’d taken of my girls and offered to send it to me. I wondered vaguely if it was a scam of some sort, and felt a bit uncomfortable about the experience, but the following Monday, I got an email from Victor Deveau with this beautiful photo of my two girls, which he had titled Princesses and Diamonds.

It was a nice reminder that sometimes strangers are just kind.

And then, in the sometimes wonderful way of the Internet, he found my previous post here with the photo and commented thanking me for both posting and crediting his photo. He then wrote a bit about how the photo reminded him of summer afternoons lost in the innocence of childhood and that you could replace this with two boys playing in a sandbox; date it back 16-18 years and it was his recollection of his sons.