Redeeming Moments

As a mom there are times when life is anything but calm and collected. There are moments of the day when it's just plain crazed around here. On weekday mornings from 8:00-8:15 is one of those especially crazy times. Shoes on, lunches packed, snacks in backpacks, hair combed, check for homework again, coats on, backpacks on, kisses for Mommy and out the door with Daddy. To make matters crazier, on the days that Billy Boy comes, that's when he walks thru the door, making it all the crazier. Most mornings I wake up praying that Bee will stay asleep thru it all, but she very seldom does, as the wall our shower is on in our bathroom is shared with her bedroom and there is no way to keep the noise out of her bedroom. She actually sleeps longer on those mornings when she has come to sleep on our floor sometime during the night. When she gets up everything comes to life. The boys can be fairly quiet if the occasion calls for it, but Bee hasn't got that figured out yet. If she comes in to wake us up at 4:30 AM because she wants something, she uses her regular voice, which at that time of the day sounds like a foghorn. She's got a very short fuse... tell her no and caboom... she starts screaming and you just wanna hand her to the first well-dressed person that walks by. Smart Guy is much more patient with her than I am... that's why God put us together... his fuse is much longer than mine is and we somehow balance each other out. Bee is famous for her crafting ventures in our house. They usually involve paper, lots of paper, lots of cut-up paper, and sometimes paint. She can make a perfectly clean space look as if Hurricane Katrina just came thru in a matter of minutes!! It's really quite impressive. We can put her to bed and she'll still be in her room awake 3 hours later. Why is it that at 5:30 in the afternoon you can't hardly get her to stay awake, but if you do, by 8:00 she's wide awake? Her version of cleaning her room is somewhat daunting. Pile it on the bed... works for her, not me. She hasn't quite figured out that she's supposed to put her shoes in the closet when she takes them off, so we're always looking for them, sometimes having to settle for a pair other than the intended because the intended is nowhere to be found. If I give her a pile of clean panties and tell her to put them in her panty drawer, I'll more than likely find them on the floor in the middle of her room next time I go in. Good golly!!

But I was just reminded of those "redeeming moments" when Smart Guy came up and said "you have to go look at your daughter." So I did!! She's sitting straight up on the couch with a big pillow over her body for a blanket and she's sound asleep, looking as sweet and innocent as the day she was born. Yah, she drives me bonkers sometimes, but I seriously can't imagine her any other way. She has spirit without a doubt! She also has this remarkable way of calling me "mama" in the sweetest little-girl voice ever. "I love you, Mama", just makes me melt. She's a cuddler, she loves to hug and kiss me. She loves to help me in the kitchen. She loves to make me pictures. She loves to write "mom" on my pictures by first writing the "o" and then putting an "m" on both sides. She's my baby and probably always will be because right now I don't plan on anymore kids, so she's a bit "tainted" as my dad would say. She gets away with way more than the boys ever did. I want to make sure I slow down and relish every second left of her little-girlhood. She'll start kindergarten in a year and a half and at that point they seem to grow-up even faster. Sometimes it she seems like she's been three years old forever, and other times it seems like I should still be waking up in the middle of the night to nurse her. Where has all that time gone?