The ‘I Love’ List

I love:

• Karachi clothing lines
• stepping out of the Abu Dhabi airport and having my glasses fog up instantly 
• the word tapioca
• my children reading in rectangular pieces of sunlight on the brown sofa
• Plants with leaves that kiss the wooden floor
• A yellow tub of magna tiles waiting to be used 
• clouds going to sleep
• Pakistani crows cawing

• any tropical breeze
• my grandmother’s voice
• skylights
• the days my children get hot lunch at school
• packages in the mail
• the inverted question mark stretch that tiny babies do when you take them out of their car seat
• squishy toes

• sprinkling turmeric onto Maggie Ramen noodles and letting it saturate in the spicy soup, turning the noodles from skinny to fat
• my mother’s aloo-gosht curry with meat and potatoes
• children greeting their great grandparents and grandparents

• the sounds of my once baby crawling on the wooden floor with her hands slapping the ground pat, pat, pat
• the personalities of my three brothers
• The sound of dishes being done when it’s not me doing them
• a warm shawl
• bubbling laughter of my cousins
• flyawayhair

• when my father acts goofy with my daughters
• seeing my name on Amazon
• when my mother bathed my children as babies and their cheeks shone
• lemon scented foaming kitchen soap
• toddler reflections

• The fleeting time of nursing and rocking my babies to sleep, forward, back, forward, back
• hugging a warm towel from the dryer
• seeing my children cackle and greet my husband after a long day of work
• the chirpy sound the red cardinal makes at sunset and catching him feeding his mate

• photoblogging
• Lugging home a bag of fat crinkly books from the library
• The quieter moments when the children are at school when the silence is so delicious you can slice into it
• The sound of my 4 year old rolling a dice to play Monopoly
• The inviting roundness of a child’s cheeks 
• My grandmother’s weekly biryani where the aloos tasted like sugar 
• My grandmother who slept with curlers to have curls so that if you didn’t know her you would think she had curls

• the language of eyelashes

• Karachi beaches

• The sound of a smile
• Turning in my book and the anticipation of it going to the printer 
• The satisfaction of making a fat French braid on my daughters hair

• A pretty windowsill
• “The photo” with the perfect golden sunlight

• And so much more!

And so much more!
Thank you for the inspiration writing prompt @shannon_scribbles , @ashleegadd , @sonyaspillmann , @katiemblackburn , @courtwrites