Thursday, March 28, 2013

Just a Thought

Sometimes this happens.  
Yes, that is the mattress and those are the couch cushions on top of every single toy we've ever owned on the floor.

Yesterday my mind was a torrential downpour of stuff:  Things to do, worries, stresses, expectations, new goals, plan changes, some gratitude, disappointments, befuddlements, and so on—though I am not sure about the “and so on” part.  I think that list caught everything.  So add the “and” before befuddlements and cross out the “and so ons.”  No need to be mellow-dramatic.

And as Paul and I kneeled to say our evening prayer, I could feel the insomnia setting in.  It’s a curse I share with lots of worriers and over-thinkers out there.  And it all just tumbled around in my brain, but not with the grace of damp clothes in a dryer, or even the jittery movements of ping-pong balls in a lottery game thingy, but with the frantic desperation of a kid in a money machine trying desperately to grasp at bills that have no sort of predictable movement.

So after we finished our couple prayer, I prayed my own prayer on paper.  “Dear Heavenly Father,”  I wrote.  “There’s a lot of stuff in here right now that I need to talk to you about.”  And then I made eight categories on my paper and every time a thought blew around in there I caught a glimpse of it, wrote some short hand version of it under its appropriate category, hoping that God would know the whole story behind the three word condensed version, and moved on to the next frantically flying dollar bill.

Can we just say that by the time I was done, if my thoughts really had been money, I’d be rich?
But the point is, I got it all out.  In my very own version of praying that I made up by my own self.
And then I slept like a rock.

Till the kids woke up.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

We're bringing Tufty back...

Okay, a dear friend requested a special post on today's events...

So Jess, this is for you.

All others are welcome to read it but if you dare judge me for one second, my only response is that your time will come.
See these bangs?  12 hours ago they were a  perfectly shaped little line just above her eyebrows.
See those sprouts?  There are 5 other patches across the front of her head to match.  All in all, not the worst case, but I'm telling you, it still hurts a mother's heart.

So, here's my journal entry from today.


What a day… at least Paul is home for it all.

Grace cut her own bangs this morning.

Then while I was in the shower, she ate 1/3 of a bottle of chewable vitamins.  I still am not quite sure how she got past the child proof lid.  We might have a genius on our hands.  Or, at the very least, a wildly determined child.  I might add here that the only reason we had these particular vitamins is because she opened the bottle WHILE WE WERE IN THE STORE.  They are the Disney ones that are double the price of the generic.

She slapped me.  Yep.  I was already raving mad about the hair.  And then she slapped me.  Mad you ask?  At this picturesque / right of passage moment? Yep. Fuming.  Her hair was SO FREAKING CUTE.  And now…  It was all I could do not to slap her back.

Then, we barely caught her as she was inches from shoving a key into the electrical outlet.

Then she whipped said keys hanging from a lanyard at me like she was David-slaying-Goliath-with-a-sling-and-a-rock.  Again, I did not hit her, though the temptation was considerably stronger.

Then she colored all over her book with a pen.  10 minutes after apologizing to the librarian for ripping a book ON PURPOSE last week.  Will I ever learn?

She’s napping now.  We’ll see how this evening goes.

When we took her to the store this afternoon, we cinched her so tightly into the cart; there was no telling what she might have done otherwise.

She still got out.

So that was my day.  Nope.  No pearls of wisdom or perky conclusions.  Just a plain old rundown of some of the more colorful events of the day.