Deer and Sneezes

I had written my last post, and was trying to decide if I should hit the publish button. My blog has gotten a lot darker this past week or two, and I never know if honesty is what people want to hear, or if they’d rather me make up some funny story that never happened. As I was debating this, I realized that my next post would probably be depressing, too- I am so far behind on sleep that I’ve found myself crying every time Millie wakes up at night. We’re both getting colds. I sat down to try to finish Blue Like Jazz, cup of tea in hand, and got through half a paragraph before she started to fuss. I was searching hard to find some sort of brightness in all of this, and was coming up completely empty-handed, when she sneezed.

That was it.

When Millie sneezes, her entire face lights up in a huge smile. She thinks it’s hilarious. Maybe it’s the tickle, or maybe the sound she makes, but she grins every single time. Most people would prefer to avoid sneezing, myself included. But something that nearly everyone else finds uncomfortable, she revels in. There could be ten reasons why I don’t enjoy sneezing, but she has found something about it that she likes. I need to find more good in the sneezey- parts of life.

Later on, my baby brother Matthew (okay, he’s 15, but he’s still the baby) pointed out a photo op. I was busy with a cranky baby and barely heard him. “Hey, uh, Erika, there’s some deer outside and there’s like misty stuff around them, if you, uh, want to take a picture.” I thanked him, and ran upstairs to change Millie’s diaper. But as I walked back down, I happened to look out the window, and there they were; four or five dark shapes stood in silence, barely moving their necks in the grass, with a dense fog surrounding them and mountains behind them. It was breathtaking, and it was something that even a teenage boy had stopped to appreciate. I grabbed the Nikon and thought, as I went outside, how I had almost missed that sight. What a shame it would have been.

And so, sneezes and deer- it takes kids to teach me things sometimes, things that I should know by now, things that I should figure out on my own. Thank you, Matthew and Millie, for being so wise.