Sometimes at Their Convenience

Yesterday I had a nice mother moment in which I actually stopped to just be. I had been batch cooking and was very tired (and let me comment that I now have in my freezer individual servings of chili and beef stew, as well as 17 hamburger patties, six mini meatloaves of two to three servings each, and about 20 meatballs). The past few days I've been depriving my three-year-old of a nap because, even though he is yawning and exhausted by the noon hour, if I let him have his nap then he spends from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. in bed reading, playing, and calling to us a dozen times--thereby ruining any time without children we were trying to have, as by the time he is finally asleep we have to go to sleep! And yet the little guy is still often awake at 6:00 a.m.! So, I've been depriving him of his nap, which makes for an awfully long day, but then he just about passes out by eight o'clock.

Here it was four o'clock and I sat down on the couch to nurse Mary. John ran over to me crying for no apparent reason, and he snuggled into my side. Within moments, Mary fell asleep and then I noticed John's breathing unmistakably rhythmic and quiet: asleep! I was trapped under two sleeping kiddos, with no television remote or book in my hands to entertain me, plus I needed to start cooking dinner. I sat there grumpily wanting to do something about all of this.

But then it occurred to me that I really don't know how many times I'm ever going to have my babies fall asleep on me all at once like a pile of puppies. I sat there imagining when there would be a third child in the mix and how there will come to be so much chaos in the house, how often could it really happen that kids would fall asleep in my arms so easily like that? I always want snuggles and hugs from the kids on my terms, at my convenience. Here they wanted my arms at their convenience.

So, I decided just to sit there, let my mind wander, let them sleep on me, and let dinner be half an hour late. Someday when I'm an old lady, God willing, I will have no clue whether dinner was on time or whether we ate frozen, storebought corn dogs that night, but I won't regret an armful of sleeping children. It was a really sweet moment for me.