A thought plus a photo dump.

 

I was innocently sitting on Friday night, when a nasty mood wriggled its ugly self right into my emotional atmosphere.  It was instantaneous and likely hormone-driven (as my face has recently exploded), and it was mean.

I consider myself a fairly even-tempered individual.  Mostly cheerful, not much for wallowing in self-pity.

Oh, but Friday, I wallowed.  It wasn’t even specific to anything!  School stress, my family situation, cavities in my teeth; just everything was bad, I hated it, wahhh!  Even as I rolled about in my despair, that cool, collected part of my brain whispered, “This is silly.  This is pointless.  If anything, you should be wallowing about the fact that you’re being so embarrassing right now.”

So, I went to bed.

I woke up at the moonlit hour of 6 a.m. to run with Cara and Aislinn, then arrived back home before Olivia awoke.  Throughout my day, simple, but sweet things continually happened.  I was proud of my body for running a long, difficult distance.  Olivia came to me, with her heart in her eyes, and told me, “I love you, Mommy.”  I nearly burst into tears.  I held a chubby, gurgly baby who beamed at me when I kissed him.  Cara gave me a gigantic bag of  beautiful clothes from her own closet (this was not such a small thing, actually).  I got texts and emails from people who were randomly thinking about me.  The whole day was like this! (except when BYU lost, but I don’t want to talk about it!)

As I lay in my bed last night, I thought about the stark difference between my terrible evening the night before and my lovely, cheerful day that followed it.

I think sometimes we need the bitter that we experience from life’s trials to really appreciate the sweetness of our blessings.  And I’m not really sure I would have even noticed most of the things that stood out so starkly yesterday if I hadn’t been feeling so terrible the night before.  If everything were lovely all the time, the small and simple joys would get lost in the shuffle, I think. 

The best part is, none of the things I was bemoaning had been fixed; I still face the exact difficulties.  But, somehow, my burden feels much lighter when I remember that my blessings exceed my trials by at least a million degrees.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Now I’m going to dump all my recent phone photos on you.

It is cold enough to wear jackets! (and also pajama pants when no other pairs of pants were easily at hand.)

Emily drew that crown, and while we were chatting, Olivia snuck up and drew herself underneath it.

If you are immune to dimpled baby hands, then you’re probably a robot.

After running around and around the backyard, Olivia plopped down. Out of breath, she said, “Whew. I just ran a half marathon!”

I left Olivia with my mom while I went off to take a quiz at my school.  When I came back, she was dressed up in this outfit that they’d found in the dress-up bin, and I couldn’t get it off her the entire day.

She even slept in it.