“I need rice milk, Mommy!”

“Okay, David, hold on!”

“No, Mommy, you don’t say, ‘hold on!’ Daddy says, ‘Hold on!’ You say, ‘In a minute, David!’”

Oh boy! Convicted by an almost 3 year old! Yes, I am! As he watches his morning movie, and I try to get my e-mails read and a few things done, I find myself saying that a lot. Apparently he hears it from both of us.

What can happen in a minute, besides putting off the needs (or sometimes it is really rather “demands”) of a young child? A policy can change. A job slip can be handed out. A kid on a playground can hurt another kid’s feelings. They can make up and be friends again. An online order “in process” can be thrown off in cyberspace when the link goes down. A knock can come on the door...either one you are expecting or one you are not. A gecko can shuffle up the wall when he feels the vibration of your feet approaching. A cockroach can literally disappear into a pinhole in the wall. A good decision can be made, or a bad one.

As I count my minutes up lately, way too many of them are spent in contact with people on e-mail. In some ways this is excusable: It is cheaper than long-distance phone calling from here, and it helps me from feeling so isolated. But some of my minutes would be better invested taking my kid to the playground before the sun gets strong, connecting with other people, getting out of the house somehow. When I count mine up, they are spent on house chores and cleaning, meal preparation (3 times a day here since they all come home at lunch!), potty training, e-mailing, placing an order for something they don’t sell here on island, booking a reservation for some event on our upcoming Australia trip, making sure homework is done and in the bookbag along with the library book or object for “letter of the week” in kindergarten, etc. Sometimes my minutes don’t include a shower, sitting down to enjoy breakfast uninterrupted, even reading the mail at a leisurely pace. Island life or no island life, the stay-home parent’s life is essentially the same during these years.

Last night, with husband off-island and hyper kids needing to burn some energy, I decided we needed to take a walk to the lagoon beach here and set some of our bigger hermit crabs free, in the interest of them finding bigger, suitable shells to move into. The walk in the dark looking at the starry sky was just what we needed, and when we arrived to our sandy destination, we broke out into the song (by Sting): “Free, free, set them free, Free, free, set them free. If you love somebody, set them free.” After parting with our crustacean companions, we danced, sang, hooted, and hollered all the way home. You might say that was a minute (or twenty) well-spent and hopefully minutes my children will someday remember. Life is a series of connections we make and appreciations we form. When we someday look up at the Boston sky again, I want my kids to remember how big the world is and that somewhere on some Pacific island, a kid is looking up too (maybe at a different time). I want them to remember dancing in the moonlight and singing their hearts out to small Marshallese hermit crabs. I want them to remember looking out over the lagoon to the satellite dish all lit up in the night sky, looking so far away, but really just 2 miles away. I want them to close their eyes and remember the sand in their flip-flops, the way the gecko scooted out from under their bookbag when they went to put it on in the morning, the smell of humidity and salt in the air. I want them to remember the homemade stories we made up about our friend “Macadamia Nut Crab” before we came here (my way of preparing them for the adjustment) and the “Kwaj bread” we make in the bread machine, using all of our tropical delights: mango, papaya, and coconut. I want them to recall the sweat on their brow biking home from school at lunchtime and the amazing freedom of biking on their own to piano lessons or cub scouts just a few blocks away. I want them to remember the smiles of their Marshallese schoolmates and the beautiful Christmas dancing they do in lines. I want them to have these fun flashbacks for the rest of their lives. When they hear or smell something that triggers these memories, I want them to remember minutes well spent here.

So, David, here I come. I am getting off the computer now. Let’s play Hi, Ho! Cherry-O, since you dumped it out all over the floor anyway! Then let’s go to the playground! Let's go look for "baby coconuts”!