Picking Two

It was there on my facebook wall this morning, when I said, -I am responsible for keeping three things clean:  myself, the children, and the house/laundry and I laughed to realize this morning that I can pick two of those things each day but one will always be crazy messy.-

And it's true and I would like to hide the crazy messy and when I snap pictures of our life to have only well-groomed children in my lens and those pictures where you can peek into the background of my living room and actually see the unfolded laundry piled in baskets and the toys in every nook and cranny disorganized, and the piles of paper that I just can't seem to find a place for...?  I'd rather keep those to myself, or delete them.  But some days those are the only pictures to share because where I live, we are messy.  

The baby fusses to get out of her high chair and gets put down on the floor so Momma can enjoy a few bites of her dinner in peace but then someone (...who me?...) forgets to wipe the sweet potatoes from the corners of her face and then doesn't notice the mess until looking back at pictures late in the evening and maybe... just maybe she is in bed like that and the only way I can explain missing the mess is that I was so caught in the beauty of her eyes and smile as she proudly rummaged through the drawer in the kitchen.

And the bigger girls, they play with "Fun Glop," their nickname for the homemade silly putty from Grandma, and their evening hair, unkempt after a long day of playing, falls in their eyes and that headband, OH the headband bunched up in that funny way Millie loves to wear it, her special purple headband like it's a sweatband. 

And the beautiful shelves Jesse made me this week above my washer and dryer, beautiful but already cluttered with the signs of our life, but aren't they lovely?  I regret not taking a "before" picture of what we have had since moving in to this funny old house, because then I could really make it clear why these are so beautiful to me. 

And in all the mess, I choose to rejoice at the beauty before me and I can laugh at the fact that I must choose whether to style my hair after showering (every other day) or do the dishes because there is only so much time in the day and the things most important when the sun goes down are the smiles I remember as we read, yet again The Piggy in the Puddle, and the giggles as Jesse danced in the kitchen during lunch.  And the proud smile as Lyddie wrote the names of her friends Karis (but oops, she wrote "Karir" but this time I'm not going to correct her) and Evan; and two little girls on their tummies on the floor, big sister reciting to little sister the story of Henny Penny out of the open book before them.  

With the development of the gratitude habit in my journal, it has become easier to find the gifts of each day, and I am always surrounded with blessings and gifts of God, the messy, the happy, the hard, the obvious and the harder-to-see.