Today I was an impatient, easily-angered mess. I’m going to blame a combination of hormones, too little sleep, reading and thinking about this post of Loralee’s, and Troy being gone. Not to mention that Annalie was being rather challenging today, growling at me or calling me stupid when she didn’t like what I said. Clearly I don’t want her to think it’s okay to talk to anyone like that, so we had several stern conversations and I ended up losing my temper during one of those chats.

I apologized to Annalie for speaking sharply to her and explained that I was having a sad, bad day. She kindly patted my arm and said, “It’s okay Mama, when I don’t feel good I have bad days too.” At least we weren’t both having a bad day.

Then bedtime came and I let Annalie stay up longer than I should have. By the time I laid down with her for prayers she was overtired and giddy, bouncing off the walls and having trouble settling down. Normally I stay in the bedroom singing lullabies or hymns till she’s asleep but tonight that clearly was keeping her awake and her antics were annoying me, so I decided to give myself a five-minute time-out in the other room. I kissed her good night and told her I’d be back to check on her soon. She wasn’t happy about that and I could hear her crying for a couple of minutes—that’s when I took the above photo, thinking a photo that showed my annoyance and frustration would be an accurate representation of my day.

But then I went into the bedroom to check on her and she was snuggled up with Brownie Bear, almost asleep. I quietly sang one more song, kissed her and told her I loved her, and was rewarded with a drowsy, “I love you too, Mama,” before she zonked completely out. I decided that that was the moment I wanted to document.

And really, despite my moodiness today wasn’t a bad day at all. We’ve developed a tradition of having a breakfast of doughnuts and lattes on Snail Mountain with Brenda and Bug while they’re here visiting, and last night after they’d gone home Annalie realized we’d missed out on doing that this time. I suggested we could do that today, just me and her. She really liked that idea.

Photo by Annalie, age 4

We had fun climbing around on some rocks we don’t normally climb on, and saw a bunch of swallowtail butterflies swooping about in addition to enjoying the scenery and our delicious doughnuts. And later this afternoon we did some alfresco painting with watercolors on the deck while the cats watched. We even strung up some twine on the deck so we could hang watercolor paintings up to dry, and watched a praying mantis who sat on the ceiling of the deck all afternoon.

It wasn’t a bad day at all when I look back on it. But I still am very happy that Troy will be home tomorrow. That alone will make it a much better day than today!