Sometimes, your two year old spills an entire bag of Splenda, makes it snow all over your kitchen.

Sometimes, your four year old helps make his own peanut butter and jelly sandwich, smeared with enough jelly to make a half dozen PB&Js.

Sometimes, the same two year old, fresh from her post-Splenda Blizzard bath, dips her fingers directly into the jelly jar and you realize you’re thankful that you hadn’t yet drained that bath water.

Sometimes, you wander around the war zone of your home and realize that at any moment you could be starring on a reality TV series (unfortunately, one that would air with a promo more along the lines of “Mommy’s Going to Snap!” than “Super Mom Accomplishes It All!”)

Sometimes, you spend forty-five minutes sweeping and scrubbing that sticky kitchen table and floor.

Sometimes, you choose instead to sit and have coffee and stare at it, wondering how you got here. (And you wonder, honestly wonder, if you’re doing a good enough job to get everyone, yourself included, out of the house happy, healthy and mentally well-adjusted enough to face the world as adults in a little over a decade.)

But then, sometimes, you realize your oldest daughter is wearing her new favorite shirt, because it reminds her of you.

And sometimes, that same daughter comes and asks if she can help give her sticky sister a bath.

And sometimes, the look on your son’s face was enough to justify the sticky disaster left behind.

Sometimes, while reaching over the mess on your kitchen counter to pour yourself (another) cup of coffee, you see the flowers that your eight-year old brought in yesterday while delivering you the mail from the box.

Sometimes, you catch a glimpse of the beauty in your disaster.

And sometimes, that’s enough.