Life Is Good

I don't know what writing looks like anymore. Sometimes snippets run through my mind like little news flashes, but I find most of the time what's rolling around upstairs is pretty mushy and domestic, hardly the makings of something I'd want to put to paper. Most of the time I'm either scrambling madly after my one-year-old son with something resembling a fire extinguisher or waiting on bated breath for the world to come completely unleashed as his feet hit the floor in the morning. I measure the difficulty of my kids now from the ground up. The closer to the ground they measure, the more challenging they are to keep up with. Abby's a cinch now. "I'll take Abby to the store with me, honey; can you stay home with Essie and Caleb?" Funny how you forget what having a toddler is like, even though it was only a short time ago that your preschooler was one. Funny also that I'm calling my youngest a toddler. I fully realize that time is whizzing by me at an alarming speed, and I also fully realize how completely out of my control that fact is. It's oxymoronic [yes, it's a word; I looked it up], however, that the day-by-day sometimes can feel snail-pace slow, like babysitting felt at 13 years old. That was when two hours felt interminable, those times I watched the second hand on the clock and kept thinking, "Am I almost done?" The afternoons are like that sometimes, like watching the grass grow, only you're wearing a 26-pound fussbudget while trying to keep your spinning-top of a 5-year-old from clobbering your half-grumpy, just-woke-up-from-her-nap 3-year-old.

Life is good. No, I mean that. I love my little microcosm. It's waking up to impromtu dances and delighted squeals. It's morning devotions with a backdrop of "Max & Ruby." It's dishes and laundry and home-schooling, bikes and scooters and swinging, dollhouse and Polly Pockets and Hide-n-Seek and storybooks. It's meeting God in the cracks of my day and asking for renewed energy. It's sometimes losing my patience and asking them and Him for forgiveness. It's grocery shopping, dinnertime, pick-up time, and bathtime. It's Bible story, songs, and prayer time. It's kissing their sweet, sweaty little temples as they sleep.

Life is good.