To be born small and shelled is to be born slow and delicious.
There is no better (um) recipe for hope than this one.
Every day, you hope to eat and not be eaten.
Every night, you aspire to snooze and not be seen.
In summer, your goal is to stay cool, while in winter, your aim is to stay warm.
Always you are balancing challenge with opportunity, risk with reward.
If ever there was a being born with a “glass half full” outlook, it would be you.
The more tense your surroundings, the more chill you become, training yourself to take big, deep, calming breaths while you wait until it feels safer to move about again.
In this way, you pass one year and then the next and the next and the next, until you become older and (much) wiser (not to mention cuter than you could possibly have hoped for or imagined).
You discover that sometimes, if you just sit still with patience, life will bring you delicacies on a silver platter.
You learn that someone (who loves you so, so much) will come to scratch your shell in precisely the places it itches most.
After all, hope doesn’t move quickly.
Then again, neither do you.
Pearl, Malti, Bruce & their mama
