This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Thankful

I woke up about an hour ago and have not been able yet to go back to sleep. Getting the girls to bed was a bit rough: Delaina refused to be put down in the crib, and Sofie kept poking her head in to see if Delaina had gone to sleep so she and I could pray and rock in the rocking chair. In the end, I lay down in the bed with Delaina, hoping she would fall deeply enough asleep so I could transfer her to the crib. Sofie, tired and sleepy by this time, crawled into bed next to me. Next thing I knew the three of us had been asleep for some hours.

I got a call from Anna and she'd made it safely to ALA. The girls were able to say goodnight to her over the phone. And Anna assured me that she's doing the buddy system, and that she's not going to be out late by herself in Nawlins.

Both of the girls had been their most perfect angelic selves yesterday at the sitters, according to our friend who's watching the girls during the day while I'm at work. And when I picked them up, though Sofie had been awakened from a nap and was a bit cranky, both of the girls were happy to see me. In fact, on the way home, Delaina was cracking me up! I had a Keith Urban CD in the player, and I heard Sofie laughing and saying in her big sister way, "DeLAINa!" I glanced back when we were at the stop light and Delaina was rocking back and forth in her car seat: dancing! She even started to sing with the CD. Too, too funny.

And it was on the drive home that I was just overwhelmed, quite literally to the point of tears, by all the good things that God has so manifestly done for us. Anna and I had a deep and meaningful embrace when she left--the sort of embrace that you achieve when you've been through an amazingly difficult and stressful time together and are now on the other side of the most recent crisis, in a place where tension is paused, there is a geography in which to breathe slowly and deliberately again, and where life is no longer monochromatic but concentrated with color. In fact, when I left work I was as anxious to pick up the girls and spend our first evening of the Mr Mom weekend together as I was to see Anna in those first months we were dating. Traffic couldn't move fast enough for me to get to my girls and have them to myself this weekend.

I thought about the new home, the new job, the return of a sense of the normal. If I'd been alone and not driving the car, I think I would have burst into sobs of gratefulness, of relief. But one doesn't want to frighten one's daughters with such a display, and it would have been a bit less than safe in a moving car. But that's not to say some tears didn't come anyway. And several inward "thank you's" to, as the liturgy puts it, the man-befriending God who is good and loves us.