Last night I saw my 2-year-old son draw a circle on his magnetized drawing board.

“Mommy, wanna see me dwah a circle?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, “I would LOVE to see you draw a circle.”

And I meant it. In my current world of cancer and bills, errands and cleaning, there would have been nothing else in the world I would want to see more in that very moment than watch my son draw a circle.

And he did. Oblong but connected and certainly circular, he drew one—chubby fingers clenching his plastic magnet pen, attached to the string of the board.

Then he said he’d turn it into Daddy. He drew two more circles for eyes and a third circle for a mouth.

“Where’s his hair?” I asked.

And he quickly scribbled a patch of hair on the top of his circle Daddy head.

It was his first drawing of something that took a real shape. No longer the scribbles where I’d have to ask what it was. Oh how I wanted to keep that drawing forever–to tuck that precious circle away in my scrapbook box until the day I could frame it in construction paper and etch it with lace on a background covered in photographs of his dark brown, orb-shaped eyes that look like chocolate when he cries or smiles or laughs.

But I couldn’t–he erased it before I could even take out my phone and snap an Instagram worthy shot.

So instead I frame his picture on a page in my notebook, etched with words too minuscule and insufficient to capture its impression on my heart and my mind.