No, All you Crazy People, It's Monday

This picture is entitled 'free'. This is a butterfly that my girls and I raised from a tiny egg last fall. This picture was taken after the wings had dried, and the butterfly looked stable enough for a light rain and a small breeze. It was a cool experience, raising butterflies. It is sometimes not such a cool experience raising things like, say, children who do not fly away for twenty some years if ever, rather than in fourteen days like a Monarch. Nonetheless, I still find as much beauty in my children and their intricate personalities as I did the butterflies' wings. Face it. As a mom, you face disgusting things like snot and poop and pee and spit and throw up and any kind of food smeared on your clothes, their clothes, the floor, the wall...as the mother of young boys you will many nights have a wet sock after leaving the bathroom in the middle of the night. Or the need for a towel, depending on how deep your young boy sleeps. They never think of these things, those beautiful little children. They are all light, and find joy in the simplest things. They also hit each other and bite each other and talk back and draw on the walls, but the hormone in a woman's brain that even makes them have more than one child kicks in and somehow, we remember those golden moments like first steps and first kisses and first skinned knees and first days of school. Instead of the first time every day you have to ramrod them into doing something, or the first time for the next four hours that you have to change a poopy diaper or clean up vomit during a bout of the puke flu. There's a love that is insane, and unexplainable that we have for our children. It makes us do stupid things like spend too much money on Christmas and yell at them later on in the afternoon when they have stepped on our last nerve and we have had no sleep etc, etc. Oh well. Free. In butterflies and shoes, free is good. In children, free is good. They need to be free. But they aren't. They're the most expensive venture you could possibly imagine....but worth every penny and every moment, gross or good.