Walking on Hot Lava

I love this image.
I my head this is me.
In my heart, this is so many of us.

For two days I have been stuck in confines of my home, in my bedroom, on my bed with a puking toddler, 7 year old, 9 year old ...and you know the "other ones", that fortunately were not projectile vomiting, but unfortunately for me, healthy enough to be bored.

Toddler's with the flu are not ticking time bombs...hell no, those give warnings and count downs. Toddlers with the flu more like unexploded detonated grenades...you never know when, or how ..but you know it is coming, and the likelihood of it being messy is inevitable.

As I sat there with her.
Most the time offering clean towels, clear liquids, comfort, fresh pajamas. Anytime I had to retrieve more supplies, remove soiled items, parent other children, go pee...there was a fear that she would throw up while I was absent, and I wouldn't be able to direct, help or contain the mess.

I had time to think between the laundry loads.....

This is my life, this constant juggle, one crisis always requiring my attention while attending to everything  and everyone else.

I am always playing hot lava.

Did you ever play that game as a kid? One rule, do not touch the floor, for that is the Hot Lava.
My brothers and I would go in their room and play a precarious game of tag crawling, jumping and climbing over all the furniture in their room, but not allowed to touch the floor...we would jump, bunk bed to dresser to chair to scaling the window sill. How nothing was broken is a mystery.
Once the game was over the steaming red hot burning, waiting to consume us LAVA turned back into shag carpet....we jumped down into the middle of the room, and we walked out.

That has been me for three years. Balancing, straddling the window sill and the dresser, except I have become so used to the floor not being safe beneath me, I stopped looking down, trusting it, or remembering I had the say when the floor gets to turn back to something I can safely stand on.

I have the say.
In some things and in some ways, we all have that say.

Things have been hard for so long...and continue to throw me for loops...but there are things I am reclaiming as I look around and see what I am missing, what was once important to me and I want to pick back up, and those things that don't hold the same value to me.

I love this image, because she is not only rising from the ashes. She is dancing on the hot lava.
Dancing.

Last night between Insomnia and re-evaluating I picked something up I dropped three years ago, my family diary/blog/journal.
Like me it looks different now.

I will remain here with my personal and parenting trials and successes...but the other parts of me, the better and worse parts I don't share on this very public blog.
The boring shmoring stuff, like kids having the flu, and pictures of birthday parties and trips to the library park and dentist, art projects and skinned knees...things I wished I had written down.
I am starting to write down again.

Bam.
and then in a small brave way, she turned that Lava back into shag carpet, and is dancing on it...