Today I am preparing my hearth and home for a very special friend who's coming to visit and I can HARDLY wait.  I am hoping to pack each available moment of our time, and I'm quite sure that as always, the time will pass wayyy too quickly.  Coffee will be consumed, pictures will be snapped, laughter will be heard, and good times will be had by all.  But before all the relaxing and the chatting and the fun, things need to get decent and clean around here.

   Yesterday I made a few meals for a couple of families and it left my house in a national state of emergency.  Also, the central AC which has been chugging along faithfully like the Little Engine that Could all summer thus far, decided to quit on the ONE DAY I would be spending all day cooking.  Perfect.  I always wanted to welcome my friend to a house of horrors and a sauna to sleep in.

My husband (being the heroic figure that he is) texted me asking,

"How could I make your day better?.....Name it."

And I replied (with my usual wit and candor),

"Hire a maid. Ha."

  And you know what?  That's precisely what he did.  And so today I had the help of a dear sweet cousin of his, and we cleaned and mopped and scrubbed and shined and the Heavens opened up and the angels sang when I heard her say those four little words that EVERY woman everywhere loves to hear......."I love cleaning bathrooms!"

????!!!! Who IS this person?  And how did she come to be this way?!

    Regardless of her inexplicable taste in cleaning preferences, I'm choosing not to question it, I'm thanking the good Lord for sending her my way.  And for giving my husband the discretion of knowing when his wife has reached the end of her rope.  Because let's just get one thing straight off the bat here folks, if you ever start to wonder how I "do it all" than let's just play it safe and assume that I'm NOT doing it all.

   I mean, don't get me wrong, I have my superpower days where I feel like tackling the world and I actually get pretty far with that goal.  Don't we all?  We make a monstrosity of a to-do list and one by one, we push ourselves harder and farther until we even surpass our own expectations.

It happens sometimes.

   But then sometimes my whole family suffers a little bit because of it.  Or suffers a lot. Or maybe they don't, and everyone's still fairly ok and the house is sparkling and the car is vacuumed and the to-do list is neatly crossed off, but I'm in the closet eating Nutella with a spoon and sobbing into a pillow.  Figuratively, anyways.  I mean, come on, everyone has their limits.

   So the beauty is found, not in never having weaknesses or limitations or imperfections like we always assume, but in recognizing the ones we have and not continuing to live in denial.

   So today, I'm thankful for friends coming to visit, Heaven-sent text messages, husbands with an eerie sense of timing, and cousins who mysteriously, actually like to clean bathrooms.

What are you thankful for today?