crazy for you

I am bursting my proverbial buttons because I did something totally domestic the other day.  Are you ready for this?  I.  painted.

I've painted my houses before - repeatedly, actually.  Our first house (and second, really) was a fixer-upper and we painted over half the rooms in the house - AND those infernal kitchen cabinets.  It was quite the education, and quite the undertaking.  But the other day as I was wandering around the house, stressing out about the state of things and if it was even possible to host 12 guests in here next week, I bemoaned the little dents and scratches that only children can inflict so perfectly on poor, painted walls.


So I grabbed some paint and a roller, no dropcloths or pans, and just started painting certain spots.  It looks fabulous!!  I OWN this house, man!  I don't know if I can adequately express why this makes me feel like  SuperWoman, but it totally does.

In other random news, I foolishly read a blog this evening written by a sweet mother of a little boy with a horrible disease that made any touch painful and dangerous, and eventually fatal, all before his 3rd birthday.  Oh, the tears, people.  I was laying here on my bed while the kids ate popcorn and watched an Elmo DVD (a daddy-has-church-meetings tradition we've had since before the Dude) and BAWLED my face off. You better believe the second Elmo was over I turned off the tube and snuggled those kids like my life depended on it.

I'm often surprised by how mind-blowingly infuriating parenting can be, and how euphoric it is the rest of the time, especially in parenting the Dude, who in a small way has the exact opposite physical condition, where I have to be constantly smushing, squishing and squeezing him.  He can be SO upset and crazed when he feels denied and confused, but the joy that comes out of this child is something I have never seen come from another soul.  And when he is chastised, he crumbles and begs forgiveness and that things be okay again in a wildly humble and earnest way that is positively Biblical.  Oh, my heart...


I adore my mini humans.  Have I mentioned this before?  Because they have me completely useless and besotted.  We all know I'm a terrible person, so you will not register any surprise when I say that I often pity parents of calm children.  Oh, I still want to bury my head in the sand almost every time I have to go out in public with them (the Dude's new thing is trying to stuff food into random vending machines he finds), but the kind of mad crazy love a completely psychotic child can give is ... well, I've never been on crack, but I hear it can be fantastic.  So we'll say it's like that.  Especially because parenting them has also made me look like a crack addict, so it's a perfect analogy.