is anyone out there???

There is beauty all around, when there's love at home...

Back when the kids were little they fought all the time. In fact, some days I wondered if I should just spray paint WWF on the front of our house and charge admission. Okay, maybe comparing my kids to WWF is a little misleading. At our house, all the fighting was real---none of that faking it stuff.

Now that the kids are older, however, they rarely fight. Of course they have their moments, with smart alek comments and petty disagreements. But overall the kids hardly ever fight. In fact, I can't even remember the last time they came to blows. Can you see where this is headed?

This morning I was driving the kids to church. The roads were literally a sheet of ice. I'm not a great driver on a good day, and add ice----it's not a good combination. So we were inching along very slowly. I'd already slid through one intersection, horn blaring. Not even getting a chance to recover from almost hitting an on-coming car, I slid into someone's yard.

"Next time slide to stay on the road," my son instructed. He was sitting next to me in the front seat. My older daughter in the back seat took offense to his criticism and started yelling at him that I couldn't very well choose which way I was going to slide. He hit her, she hit him back and before I knew it, he flew over the top of the seat and they were going at it full force.

It was way more than I could handle. They might as well have put me on the edge of a cliff and pushed me over. So, I pulled out my cell phone and did what any rational person would do. I called my husband and started crying.

Sometimes it's nice to have someone who can make things all better. He told me to turn around and go back home. Which was obvious, but hadn't occurred to me...he called and made arrangements for my Sunday school lesson for me, as I turned the car around and crept back home.

So we're home now safe and sound. I won't have to prepare a lesson for next week--I can use the one I had for today. The kids feel pretty bad about how they acted, so I can probably count on them to volunteer to make dinner for the next week or so. Life is pretty good.