<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/lake.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-444" title="lake" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/lake-538x403.jpg" alt="" width="538" height="403" /></a>
<h5 style="padding-left: 420px;">Photo by Jason Berg</h5>
<em>As many of you know, I'm at Lake Michigan on a family vacation. On Tuesday evening, our 11-year-old daughter fell off her Razor scooter near the cottage, breaking both bones in her forearm. This post is taken from something I wrote in a notebook on Wednesday, as we all began recovering from the experience.</em>

<strong>Yesterday was a day for wave jumping and village building.</strong> It was a day for welcoming grandparents and singing loudly, for silliness and constant activity.

Yesterday was about independence, bravery and daring acts. It was a day to careen down hills too big, on scooters too fast.

<strong>Yesterday was a day for pain and tears</strong>, for needing your mom to say everything will be OK as you drive to the emergency room in a town that is not home. It was a day of drama and waiting—for doctors, for pain medication, for x-rays, for answers—a day partly charged, partly dull. It was a day of new experiences—drugs that make you forget your pain and even forget who you are, as bones are pulled and shifted, and a cast is wrapped, heavy and foreign yet a part of you.

<strong>Today is different. Today is a day for rest—for doing as little as possible, and being just fine with that.</strong> It’s a day of jigsaw puzzles and colored pencils, of feather pillows and naps, of concerned looks and reassuring smiles.

Today is about moving slowly, or almost not at all. It’s a day for forgetting what you should do, or what you thought you wanted to do.

<strong>Today is a day for being thankful for what is, and thinking of nothing more.</strong> It’s a day for time to slow drastically down—for the people that matter most to come into sharp focus, and for everything else to blur and fade away.

<strong>Because of yesterday and today, we will see tomorrow with new eyes, whatever it brings.</strong>