One of Those Moments

You know when you’re trying to make dinner because it’s after five and, if you’re not quick, all hell will break loose so you’re a little on edge and tonight you’re making pancakes, the ones with vegetables hidden inside and blueberries on the side because the kids love them and have no idea they’re eating zucchini…

and then, in the midst of making the dinner, you stop to mop up the sticky floor where your sock got stuck in some old spilled juice at the exact same time that you notice the dishwasher needs to be emptied and your oldest son calls out for you to come and see his drawing so you go to take a quick look at his picture and tell him how great it is right before you smell cooking pancake and run to flip it before it burns because children around here are allergic to burned bits and throwing food out drives you nuts; then you empty the dishwasher and refill it with the dishes from the sink when you spy mangled pieces of plastic men stuck in the dishwasher drain (again) so you pull them out, wipe the counter, and remember that you need to write a note to your son’s teacher but you flip another pancake on the way to his backpack and make it only as far as the bathroom before realizing that you have needed to go for the last half hour but there’s no toilet paper left and the last time you tried to get to the cleaning cupboard where the paper is kept, you got stopped halfway by that juice spill on the floor where your sock got stuck and now you think a pancake might be burning and Grayson calls out for some more juice and the phone rings but you ignore it because, yes, the pancake is in fact burned so you will eat that one. Then, in the midst of all this, you wonder why the dinner-making is going unusually well because it’s all so … peaceful, relatively speaking. That’s when you walk into the living room and see this:

And suddenly everything is very, very good.