It has been a rough week or so at our house. Talking to my sister and other friends with kids, apparently there is some sort of highly contagious virus going around that causes erratic misbehavior in our children! LB seems to be working on some teeth, but I have no idea what AG’s excuse could be! ;)

My husband has been putting in some long hours with work for a variety of non-bloggable reasons, and I’m feeling drained. Packing up the children and sending them to Grandma’s house has been a tempting idea!!

Last night and today, in the midst of insanity and ill-temper from all three of us, I had some precious snippets of conversation with AG. These are the little moments that remind me that the sacrifice of finances (and occasionally sanity) to stay home are so, SO worth it.

Last night as I sang to her, the John 3:16 song from Hide ‘em in Your Heart has been a favorite recently, we again discussed perish. [Remember last year's "perish" discussion??] Then she asked, “Why does it say, ‘whoever believes in Him?’” So, we went through the basics of salvation again. She smiled and said, “those were the two things I couldn’t remember – perish, and ‘whoever believes.’”

Today we were coloring a picture of Adam (don’t you love his blue hair??) and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in our God Created the Dinosaurs book, which will be reviewed in the very near future. It had been an unpleasant morning, and I was simply trying to occupy her long enough to limp us along to naptime! But in that little window of time, she asked why it was wrong for them to eat the fruit; aren’t apples green light foods?! We talked about how they chose to disobey God, and as she picked out her next crayon she seriously said, “but He still loved them, even though they disobeyed.” Ah, the fruit of many instances of discipline and consequences, while discussing God’s unconditional love.

We then discussed how sin affected the earth – she thought that the picture we were coloring was “a little scary” because Adam and Eve were eating the fruit (scary, indeed!), the serpent was in it, and there was a dinosaur. From there we got onto the discussion that dinosaurs weren’t scary when God made them – they ate plants, and wouldn’t hurt people or other animals. Sin changed everything. When I said, “when sin came into the world,” she paused and said, “did it poke a hole in it or something? How did it get in?” Stinking adorable, and great ground for some theological discussion, too!

In the midst of the craziness, we have little golden moments. Moments while we sing a lullaby, moments when we’re disciplining, moments when we’re coloring… moments to teach our children the miraculous truth of a holy God who loves them and has moved heaven and earth to buy us back from our slavery to sin.

So, to my fellow drained mommy’s, this song is for you – I needed to listen to this after a very long day! In the midst of time outs and temper tantrums and 17 month olds who insist on hitting their sisters and obstinately disobeying :), we have a big job to do with immeasurable worth. No one else knows what you put up with today, how you struggled to keep your temper in check, how you wanted to go back to bed and let the kids tear the house apart, how you cried in the kitchen by yourself in frustration, how you kissed a boo-boo, how you taught your child about math or science or a new word, how you triumphed over that long-awaited potty training victory… but God knows.

Who cares that it’s not really mother’s day? :) This is a tough job 365 days a year, but it’s worth it. Keep up the good work.