One summer day a little girl asked me if I ever feel like the old woman who lived in a shoe.
I laughed and told her
'if I give you all broth without any bread and spank you all soundly and send you to bed' I might!
I only have two today but I've learned two of certain age/personalities is enough!
It was before their naps,
after I returned the from-scratch-veggie-soup back to the
kitchen counter
after they spit it
back at me a few times
after I picked up the pizza pieces they chucked to the floor
...after I picked up the blocks
(because suddenly I stepped on one, once too often)
before I dropped a dish of bite-size ham pieces into the
bucket of just-picked-up-blocks,
that I discovered all they really wanted for lunch
...was the cold kidney-beans fished out of a dish of chili
and they smacked them up almost faster than I could scoop
them out,
as if they were little morsels of Swiss chocolate!
Who knew?!
Sometimes we guess that happiness
Lies in some hard-fought goal
Surprised to find some find it in
The beans in a chili-bowl
Sometimes we try too hard to taste
Somebody else’s peach (THAT was at breakfast)
Bent on the Thing we think we need
But simply cannot reach
Sometimes the ‘pudding in our pot’
Might look a lot like dirt
Until we taste it then decide
To have one more for dessert
Sometimes the noisy here and now
Is heaven in a mess
Before the days when we look back
On simpler happiness
© Janet Martin
okay, now I'll try to tiptoe about the kitchen while they nap
and try to restore some order like
putting the stove-drawer back after retrieving a car
after it rolled under the drawer
and revealed an 'oops, forgot to clean here in a while'
but then we went outside
before the floor was dry enough to put the drawer back
and when we came in, well...lunch and all that!
