You may have to dig a little...

This beautiful lake is balm for a weary heart.
Watching my very own sweet candy-colored children
play with their cousins in this lake makes a nearly-perfect evening every time!

My beloved reminds me that this tiredness and my feelings of defeat are
part of every new-baby-roller-coaster-ride we've embarked upon.
Sometimes it helps to have that balanced perspective which reassures me I'm not going crazy.
I suppose that at 2 months past the babymoon, interrupted sleep is catching up.

My sis Hannah provided a picnic for this outing, and Oh how I thank her
for doing all the dinner-thinking!  It gave my hands and brain a short reprieve.

Isn't Watermelon summer's Pop Corn?  It's almost a meal in itself when you just need
something quick to fill a number of bottomless pits, and the children think that  
eating Watermelon is a party all it's own.

Besides food for... for.... for a LOT of us, Hannah provided me with some precious fellowship as well.

She is at that 4-children-5-and-under season which by my recollection is more hairy than the one I'm in now.
She understands my hard days.
And I can relate to hers.

It was good to recall the frustrations of the day and discover they were
actually kind of funny in retrospect. 

Too bad I can't see forward to that more often when I'm in the moment.

We laughed about trying to bake bread in an oven with an unlit pilot.  It doesn't get too hot that way.
The bread doesn't really bake too well.

We laughed about cleaning out the girls sock drawers and finding... a Squirrels tail?
Oh yeah.  You can bet there was a good reason for keeping that in there!

She confided to me that when telling her husband she was struggling,
he asked "what's wrong?"
she stated simply: "everything."

"That's a lot of things to go wrong." he tenderly said.
and her answer to that was "I KNOW!"

Me too Hannah.  I know.

We watched boys fish.
We watched girls get as wet as we'd let them.
We watched babies and tried to keep the mosquitoes off them.

We chuckled at how silly all that turmoil seems after the fact.  But real nonetheless. 

The world comes down around your ears just as the baby needs to nurse.
It's something you can count on, but it still feels crushing when it occurs.

I really do understand.

It's good when that frenzied moment passes and we can look backwards on it with a grin.

"That wasn't so bad"  we can say now that we're through it.
And it's true. It wasn't so bad.

Most especially if I used self-control in the heat of the moment and didn't say or do
things to taint the fun of later story-telling.

And if there's a friend listening who can relate.

And if the stories can be told while both friends nurse hungry babies and bat at bugs.

And if we may watch our children do all the things that make childhood so spectacular!

In that case even the hard days should be remembered. 
They are somewhat softened in the retelling
so as to filter out the despair and illuminate the hilarious.

Some people call it denial.  I don't.  I call it choosing to worship.
Just look my way and you'll see a silhouette of a woman with both arms stretched out
pointing - waving wildly perhaps - towards Gods glory.
HE is faithful.  HE is long suffering.  And even on days that seem lost we can choose
to glorify Him.

We might have to dig a little; do some detective work and sleuth it out,
but it's worth it to find these sparkling snippets of joy!

Linking up with another treasure hunter...