today

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”  Goethe

my mom, younger brother johnny + me circa 1977

it's been a week. you know the kind? 

(i should insert here, the week has not been apocalyptic- there have been giggles and silly jokes and snuggles and snacks and great mommying moments....

good mundane kind of stuff.)

plus:

thought the girls might have pink eye (hooray they don't but they stayed home from school anyway)

i slept on my neck wrong on sunday and still killing me four days later

my house is essentially one huge mess made up of 4,576 little messes

monrovia was late to school today despite my very best efforts (she was totally sabotaged by ruby's slow as molasses routine)

i haven't done last nights dishes (ahem, see above re: messes)

my studio is a disaster zone and looks like someone broke in. 

child #1 swings between being helpful and kind and rude and demanding

child #2 swings between being clingy and snuggly (same thing basically but one is with whining and one is with sweetness)

homework battles and somehow i'm already googling proper comma use for my first grader when supposedly that's a subject i'm good in (you know, just to double check)

oh, also i'm solo parenting

BUT

i was looking at this picture of my mom with my younger brother and I from long ago, (yes, that's me looking like a boy) thinking about how all that stuff doesn't really matter. i'll never know how crappy my mom's day was there. maybe she yelled at me, maybe i was perfection all day long, maybe a hundred things went wrong, maybe jonathan and i had the flu. i have no idea. but here i see a beautiful young (27 years old!!) mom reading with her children who love her.

i mean i should probably do the dishes eventually, and work harder to get out of the door faster in the morning (for the record it is crazy rare that m is late to school,) and i do need to figure out what on earth is going on with my emotional roller coaster of a 6 1/2 year old. 

but big picture? today is a good day. i have healthy children who i love, a home full of love, a car that runs, a body that works, and so much more goodness. my kids will probably not remember that i yelled to put their shoes on or that they lost a third book at bedtime because they were being crazy or the 4,576 messes everywhere. they might not remember that i apologized for getting frustrated so fast and that i came and kissed them extra times at bedtime and that i did super fun after-school activities with them and let them watch a movie when they were home sick-not-sick and didn't work so i could play with them. 

but maybe they'll run into this picture someday that we took for matt and know that even if all the details are hazy that they were loved messily and with flaws, but loved.