You can see a lot from the bleachers

It is hot. And humid. And very Oklahoma.

I am now personally acquainted with what both a heat advisory and heat warning feel like. While the suffocating heat makes me want to curl up into hibernation mode somewhere with central air, my husband is crazy enough to go outside and play soccer. (A moment of silence as I pause to marvel at how opposites attract.)

Insanity.

Worse, the girls and I went to the fields to watch said husband tempt fate toward a heat stroke.

Mia and Maggie did really well. They climbed onto the bottom levels of the bleachers and pretended the bleachers were balance beams at gymnastics. When that got boring they shagged balls from the neighboring baseball field, and when the allure of that activity wore off they scampered down into the gravel to build stone castles.

I held Mikayla, hid in every shadow I could find, and tried not to melt, envisioning the pure bliss that would come when I went home and took a shower.

All in all it was a good time. The girls were happy, I was watching my husband do something he loves and I was holding my baby, which is something that I love.

(I love it more when its not so hot & humid that our skin actually fuses together and causes Mikayla to cry when we're peeled apart, but that's beside the point.)

Do you ever have those moments that seem to freeze in time? Where you pause, reflect, and admonish yourself, "Remember this always – this is what matters, this is what it's all about!"?

It happened right then for me. I stood there watching Mia & Maggie on the bleachers and Isaiah on the field and remembered a time not too long ago when I was a bride and I attended soccer games with my little white poodle, Munchkin.

A year later I was in the bleachers of soccer games with a newborn Mia, getting parenting advice and life wisdom from the Sedona women who became an extended family to me.

The next year I approached a group of students who were complete strangers because it was a blazingly hot Oklahoma August, I was one week short of birthing Maggie and they had put a tarp in the bed of their pickup truck and filled it with water to become a pool. I was so desperate to cool off I invited myself in and experienced first-hand the generous hospitality that makes OKWU students stand apart.

Those same students played with the girls the following year while Isaiah coached both the mens and womens teams, making for long, soccer and sun-filled days for our family.

It takes much longer to write these memory pictures than it took for them to slide through my head as I sweltered in the shade!

I was saturated in images, holding a third baby and marveling at a life that just six short years ago was located in Arizona, fulfilled with a husband and a dog. The life I live now is so different and not at all what I would have imagined, yet I see a symmetry to it and believe it can be strung together with blades of grass from a soccer field.

Which probably means I should have been paying more attention to the World Cup.

Alas. I have been watching small children and organizing an orientation weekend instead of watching soccer and now the US is out, so my opportunity has passed.

I wonder our life will look like in four years during the next World Cup?