Treats and other Oddities....

The past two days have been long. Really long. It's always hard for Miss Mouse when we have spent a lot of time with Grammy and then have to say goodbye. She's having an especially hard time this time; whether it was because she came down with a nasty case of tonsillitis last week and spent most of the end of the week feeling crummy, whether it is a nasty case of the "4's" coming on a bit early, whether it is missing her Grammy - I have a sense it is a combination of all these things. Whatever it is, it has not made for a happy Miss Mouse. We've had defiance, eye-rolling (where she has seen that, I have no clue.....perhaps it is inate within a small girl, waiting to jump out at approximately 4-years-of-age....), and just general grouchiness. I cooked a new recipe for supper tonight, cream cheese enchiladas. It took 40 minutes, which for me and my Mice can often be an eternity in the kitchen, but tonight cooking went smoothly. Normally, I'm called away several times through meal preparation to solve disagreements, aid injuries, etc., mostly all caused because of the annoying wall which separates my visage from the living room. Tonight, though, they played happily together in the kitchen, and I counted that a blessing.


To my shock (and somewhat horror), they asked to lick off the mixing beaters I had used to smooth out the cream cheese into the enchilada sauce, which, by the way, I had to make from scratch since I couldn't buy the canned kind once I had read the ingredients and knew it would upset Sunny's stomach and my restless legs. I refused, several times, Miss Mouse's offer of a taste of her beater, but here is the proof that the two of them where happier than little clams-filtering-algae.

She's saying "Yummmm!!!!" Really, she is. They loved the tomato-y/cream cheese-y/sour cream-y/cumin-y goodness.

These long days where it seems that I fold laundry from sun-up to well past sundown, where I cook a fairly extravagant (for me) meal even though I know only the women of the household will be home for dinner, where it seems that we've had endless timeouts followed by endless "I need more cuddles", where I wonder if I've accomplished anything as I put away the leftovers of a meal that only I ate.....it is on these days I need the reminder that two girls gleefully eating tomato sauce mixing beaters gives me. The mundane does matter. It is in the mundane schedules of our lives right now that I have the most productive opportunity to set them on healthy, Godly, happy paths in life. And that matters more than anything, and as long as I continue to (prayerfully! I'm not a naturally patient woman!) do so...then whether or not the laundry stays folded or the books stay on the shelves in an orderly fashion, whether or not any of that happens, I have accomplished something*.

*But I need to write about it to remind myself of it sometimes, and I thought the tomato-sauce-eating-Mice were just too funny to pass up!