No good thing...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that your favorite tank top (and the only one that will match perfectly with that soft pink shirt you want to wear) can only be found in the bowels of your tee shirt drawer or at the bottom of the abyss of unwashed laundry.  Another universal truth is that no good cake worth serving from a cake plate can be made from a box.  Why is it that everything good must be so necessarily impossible to accomplish?

Sometimes I have to remind myself of this as I hear that predictable cry a mere forty five minutes into naptime.  As I reach into the crib to pull out my squirmy, squishy, red faced William I have to think about how if he weren't so exhausting he probably wouldn't be so great.  And then he points to the photos on the wall and coos, looks at me with tears still in his eyes and emits a questioning, "Uhh!?," and I smile.  I don't know how I do it, but I guess it is because I know that even for all of the alone time he is depriving me of, he's probably worth it.

My friend Emily showed up at my house on Saturday with her daughter and a box of scary looking art supplies.  That mass of pastel paper, sparkly Modge Podge, florist tape, and paint pens made me squirm.  I thought we were just making Valentine heart garlands??  She introduced the project: homemade flowers, with individually cut out and painted petals to be wrapped together and set off nicely with the sparkly stuff.  I took a deep breath, gave the kids full rein of the house, and dug my heels in.  Hours later (and several meltdowns from the little ones... several more from the moms) I was sitting at my dining room table in the dark with my petals strewn around me and everything glittering.  Now they are my prize bouquet, and one that will not die, one that I can set at the table every Valentine's Day and be proud of.

I know this is cliché, and I write more as a reflection for myself than anything, and I think that it is appropriate that I reflect on this on Valentine's Day.  Marriage just may be the most poignant proof in the pudding.