Among the thousand gratitudes, I am grateful for the times when I feel peace about the calendar, and peace about the clock.

Walking the dog today, I found myself in a winter-wonderland kind of scene – snow on pine trees and on cedars. If it were December 15, I would have been thinking about how beautiful and holiday-ish it all was. But today is April 7, and I didn’t really want to take the dog out for a walk. It was cold. And snowy. And my resistance to the cold and to the snow was big.

And familiar. When my older daughter was born, you could set a clock by her timing. She nursed every two hours on a 24-hour schedule, “starting” at 7 am. After a week, I was pretty exhausted. But I noticed the schedule didn’t bother me when it was daytime – I was supposed to be awake, and in those early weeks, I didn’t have anything to do but take care of her. At night, I still didn’t have anything to do but take care of her, but I thought I was supposed to be asleep. And more to the point, I thought she was supposed to be asleep.

But one night, somewhere around 3 am, I just decided that for the period of her infancy, I would think differently. I would just treat time as a number. There was no real difference between 3 am and 3 pm, other than my thoughts about the times.

It wasn’t perfect. I still sometimes grumbled about being waken up at 3 to feed the baby. And certainly, a few years later, my very worst parenting moment came when my older daughter woke me up at 3 am because her baby sister was nursing at night, so she believed it was open season for early early morning mama time. I was not feeling “clock peace” that night!

But it helped to remember that 3 am was just a time, and not I-should-be-sleeping time . It helped a lot.

So today, I shifted my thoughts again. April 7 is just a day on the calendar. Just a day, and not it-should-be-a-spring day. And then I could appreciate the sweet little pine trees – looking for all the world like they could be draped with twinkle lights – and snow accumulating on the branches of the cedar trees. Happy April 7 to all.