Cramming

So, the thing about last night is, at times when I feel like I only have little bits of time scattered here and there to be at home, surrounded by the ones I love, I revert back to that little girl studying for a final the night before and try to cram in every little word, fact and phrase in I can in those quickly fading minutes.

I’ll just leave you with one random fact about last night.  And it’s not the fact that I think I actually fell asleep BEFORE I reached my bed, because I can remember walking up the stairs, snuggled tight in a throw blanket from the couch, and that’s the last thing I remember. Besides waking up at some later unknown hour in the night, throw from the couch still wrapped just as tightly reflecting my own body heat back on me, slippered feet dangling off the side of the bed, as if I fell into place and didn’t move a muscle since.

Okay, so maybe that was the fact I was going to tell you about last night.

And, okay, I’ll give you one more random fact… we counted, sorted, stored some for ourselves and bagged up more to give away… our $16 loot from the grocery store that would normally retail for over $150.  And it was all done by the wiles of my husband.

And okay, here’s another random fact, we let the kids stay up past their bedtime just to spend more time with me… and to iChat with their grandparents who just happen to be in a much warmer climate than us at the moment.  And by much warmer, I mean walks on the beach instead of walks through the snow.

That’s the last thing I’ll say about last night.

Well, okay, here’s something else.

While we stayed up, we rounded up a blanket (which happens to be the one I fell asleep in) scissors, pretty pink and red sparkly paper, and a sweet little mail box I had picked up from the Target dollar bin to make a LOVEly little craft.

After our blanket was sufficiently peppered with sweet little hearts, my girl spent the next hour drawing stick-people pictures of us on the back and leaving them as mail for me. Properly, of course, with the flag up.

There will be more about our fun little craft later.

But for now, I’m going to try and remember what happened to me between the stairs and the bed last night, besides falling asleep.  And hopefully, I’ll make it all the way under the covers tonight.

But here’s the last and final fact about last night, it doesn’t matter how slowly my feet drag or how heavy my eyes feel, whenever I have the chance to let my children’s smiles shine and cram in another glorious second of life with them, I’ll choose that over my own seconds of sleep every time.