A Night of Normalcy

Life during grief is not without its good and pretty normal times. At least, some good and normal times come after a period of time has passed anyway. And tonight was one of them.

Before supper, we prayed blessings over our home, our week and each member of the family. Enjoyed our dinner and after cleaning up the boys and I joined Mark outside where he had prepared a small fire for us in our firepit. I brought out the marshmellows and we enjoyed a few minutes around the fire showing the boys how to roast marshmellows.

Mark is of the camp that you don't burn your marshmellow but slow roast it to a nice golden brown. While I am in the camp of, go ahead and char the heck out of it if you want to. So we chuckled at our differences in style and how the boys kept landing their marshmellows into the logs. At one point Mark commented that Samuel was moving his stick around so fast that he was going to launch his marshmellow into Mark. That got me laughing so hard I started to cry.

It was a great evening topped off with our nightly Family Bedtime Theatre. That's just my silly way of making bedtime stories into something a little more fun. Probably more for me in title than for me. But we enjoyed some Mickey Mouse, Nemo and dinosaur opposites books to settle us in for the night.

So life can be normal. Hum-drum. Typical. Average.

Andrew may come to mind during the normal times. And sometimes he doesn't. And just because he does doesn't mean that I suddenly become sad or down-hearted. Right now it's no problem. He's not here. And I'm wondering if he would be crawling out of the crib by now or not. And I am fine.

My guess is that these times will continue to increase. There will still be times of grieving. Times of hardship. But it's coming.