Emotional week

It's been an emotional week. The Lauren Hill story has been  daily news not only locally, but nationally. It makes you hug your kids tighter.

I meet our former babysitter, my husband's former co-worker, and a dear friends' 7 week-old baby boy.  He is beautiful! and talkative and alert and active- I don't want to change clothes because I smell like baby.  It's like that episode of Modern Family where Claire is rubbing the baby all over her while her dad looks on like she is nuts.

My children are happy one minute because there is no school on Election Day and then screaming the next because they can't play Nerf wars.  One minute my husband is pumped to go mountain biking in this unseasonal and gorgeous November weather and curing the next because the kids won't pick up their shoes.

It's been a week of up and down. A roller coaster ride. I'm never sure whether I'm laughing or crying, coming or going.  I keep hearing my grandmother saying "Expect the unexpected." But it wasn't until today in a quiet moment after the baby left, with all the boys outside busy somewhere that I smelled her.  Out of the blue, I smelled Grandma.

That's when the water works poured.  I have never felt so completely confident that my Grandmother was sitting right there next to me since she passed.  So I talked - just like old times. I made a cup of tea and almost got out the butter and crackers except I didn't have the right kind of crackers.  I told her how much I loved her, and missed her, and needed her here by my side.

I'm still going to hug the boys a little tighter tonight. Right after we go through old photo albums and relive some of those precious and not so precious moments that have made life richer by far.  Because like Grandma always said, "You have to take the good with the bad." or was that Facts of Life???