Little People to the Rescue

It's been a tough week. Not the garbage disposal isn't working right kind of tought week, or the annoying parking ticket on your windshield kind of tough week, or the "my kid is kinda whiny and frustrating" kind of a tough week, but the kind of week that makes you want to just curl up in a ball and only come out to eat pints of Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby ice cream. Tragedy in our extended family and some heavily emotional job/life decisions have made it a week full of endless late-night discussions, plenty of grown-up tears, and more prayers than we've prayed in a long, long time. This is life-changer stuff. 

But in the midst of all this heaviness, on the days when I've been most tempted to tend toward despair, one look at Eli with a grin covered in chocolate pudding or Jonah sharing his silliest knock-knock jokes offers me a much-needed respite from the larger struggles. One recent day, I was feeling particularly down when Jonah, upon learning that our local grocery store was open all night long, exclaimed, "I see... so wombats and King Soopers are both nocturnal!". It wasn't hard for me to find a deep laugh, laughter that made my heart feel just a bit lighter.  These little guys just keep doing their daily thing: we visit the geese at Golden Ponds, we bake brownies, we snuggle up before bed and read Curious George. We visit the the library, we run errands, we build Storm Trooper helments out of cardboard boxes.  My little boys have very little knowledge of the chaos swirling around them.  And although I'm sometimes envious of their oblivion, spending my days with them allows me, if only for brief moments, to be a little oblivious, too. Life with small children just doesn't allow for curling up in a ball; there are just too many diapers to be changed, PJ&Js to make, and games of Candyland to be played, and for that, I couldn't be more grateful.