Saturday Morning Laughs

I love all of my children, and I’m so thankful I get to be their mom. They all are gifts from God, and I’m thankful. They all also have taught me much about how sinful my own heart is and how impatient and selfish I actually am, which does wonders for helping me learn to ponder the amazing grace of the gospel and our amazing and loving Savior. Having to share day in and day out with people in your home for whom you are responsible to teach the gospel in a real and daily way really can expose your heart as you take seriously the Word of God.  I’m thankful for this, too.

Something else my children have done, though, is to teach me to laugh more, even when they don’t mean to be teaching me anything.

There are days I’m convinced we just needed our third child. She’s six-years-old, intense, creative, and funny, and she just makes me see life differently, in a good way most of the time. All my kids are intense, by the way. We are an intense kind of people in this home. My husband’s favorite phrase is, “Lighten up, Beck.” That’s why I’m so glad for the laughter, too. 

Which brings me to this morning. I almost never sleep in. I am not a night owl, and am pretty much an ‘early to bed, early to rise’ kind of girl. Most weekdays I’m up at 5AM. That’s just how I am. I do my best work in the morning. And now that I'm 40+, I also seem to have developed an annoyingly persistent habit of waking up in the wee hours of the morning with my brain on full tilt, but that's another post.

Anyway, we slept in today, and it was nice. Sometime along the way this morning I heard my daughter wake up and begin playing in her room before I drifted back into that nice, sleeping in kind of doze. A little later we heard her whimpering just outside our door, and we asked her what was wrong. She came in, tears on her cheeks, and said, “I’m hungry for breakfast.” To which we said, “But why are you crying? You know we’ll get you breakfast, right?” And she said, “But I was hungry, and you were still sleeping, and I was hungry, and I thought now you were nocturnal.You were still sleeping.”

And I started laughing. And yes, I was laughing at her, not with her, because she wasn’t laughing. Forgive me, but I laughed and laughed while her little tears kept flowing until she finally grinned that sheepish little grin she has sometimes. That was just funny. Y’all, I looked at the clock and it was only 8AM.

Such sluggards we are. Sluggards who got up at 8AM and gave our little early bird some breakfast so she wouldn’t continue to think we’d somehow become nocturnal.

I’m still laughing......