I had been having a pity party for myself yesterday like no other.  I was totally and utterly exhausted.  My 10 month old has decided over the past month that she is going to wake up 2-3 times between the hours of midnight and 4am and scream bloody murder until I get up and nurse her back to sleep.  I’m not exactly sure why she has decided to torture me like this, but I think it may be karma working its way back around to bite me in the butt.  She wasn’t this high maintenance when we brought her home from the hospital.  She started sleeping through the night at 2 months old, and I bragged to all my friends about what a great sleeper my angel was….boy, is karma a bi#ch!!  (Needless to say, every little detail seems overwhelming when you are sleep deprived so please keep that in mind as you read on.)

 Regardless of being so tired I couldn’t see straight, my girlfriend called in the morning and asked me if I wanted to go walking with her.  Now, my original plan was to come back home after dropping the kids off at school and joining Miss Natalie for her morning nap!  However, I have been whining and complaining about needing to lose weight to this particular friend for months now, so when she called and offered to exercise with me, I couldn’t really say no.  So, we headed out to do our 3 mile walk with the kids in the stroller…mistake # 1….I really should have stuck to my original for-mentioned plan for nap time! 

To make a very long story as short as possible, we were caught in the rain with the kids.  My husband called and had experienced two separate flat tires and needed me to drive 50 minutes to rescue him.  In the mean time, my dashboard console stopped working so I had no gas gauge, no speedometer, and no idea whether or not I was in reverse, drive, or third gear.  The garage door would not open because the spring broke in half so I couldn’t get into my garage, and along with the dashboard issue, my van’s back breaks had decided to go out virtually instantaneously. 

When all was said and done, by 11am yesterday morning, my husband was on his THIRD flat tire…yes, three separate flat tires…my van was in need of major repairs, the garage door was broken, I had been caught in the rain with my 10 month old….and we were out roughly $1,800!

By the time I got home from rescuing my husband, I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

 I decided to cry.

 I threw in the towel for the day and made the decision that nothing was going to turn this day around for us.  It was ruined and I could only hope for a better day tomorrow. 

That is when God stepped in and worked His mercy into my life as He always does.  Through my children, God chose to wake me up to what I was really missing yesterday.  Right in the middle of my extremely pathetic pity party, my 6 year old came home from school.

 We were in the midst of our normal after school chaos when he jumps up and excitedly says, “Oh mom, I forgot to give you something.” 

He dug his little hand into his pocket and pulled out two of the most beautiful, shriveled up, dead dandelions and held them out in his tiny hand for me to take.

 “I picked these flowers for you at school today,” he said. ”They were alive, but they must have died in my pocket.”

And with tears in my eyes, I snatched up both the dead dandelions and my son and thanked God for such an awful…beautiful day!

PS  The real proof of God’s presence in my day….dandelions are not even in bloom yet here in Wisconsin!