Today has been a day of messes and mishaps. You have those too, right? It would have been so so fun to have taken more pictures, had I not been so frazzled and emotionally compromised in each situation! Among the many stories I could tell of pudding, broken bottles of syrup in the pantry, inordinate amounts of sand, I must share the most memorable of all the messes.
I discovered today that Number 4 has 2 new molars. That would explain the night crying. The fussiness. And the unappealing diapers. (You know what I'm talking about.) This afternoon, during one of their routine wrestling matches (yes-the baby wrestles), I discovered that the contents of Number 4's diaper was smeared all over his older brother, on the sofa, on the carpet, and in both of the boys' hair. No joke. In horror, I snatched the baby up for clean-up while instructing Number 3 to freeze. In effort to comfort my over-reaction, my 3 yr. old proclaims, "Mama, it's not poop...it's food! It's just food!" Number 3 does not know the ways of teething diarrhea, and due to color and other characteristics, really thought his baby brother had leftover "food" coming out of his pants. I'm so glad they were wrestling and not sampling. Not long after this incident was the 3 hour-long cleanup of the Number 3's sticky-syrupy-shattered-glass-pantry mishap. Thankfully, my Mr. Clean was on his way home by this point, and offered both assistance and empathy.
How messy, how imperfect. How trying, how tiring. And yet, how temporal and fleeting these moments of disarray, the hours of cleaning up after our kids, the days of noise and chaos, the years training our children up in the Lord. Today presented an opportunity for me to preach to my own heart...and to give praise for a now newly scrubbed pantry.