Keep your sunny side up...

I forget sometimes... how the innocence and perfection of my children washes over me when I least expect it. It's startling, and a blessing, to say the least.

My two year old found this old t-shirt in his drawer this morning.. hasn't worn it in about a year or so. He brought it to me to put on him, it says "Keep your sunny side up."

Ben is one of the brightest, happiest, most infectiously delightful children I have been blessed to know.. even better that he is mine. :-) The shirt suits his personality to perfection.

So as boys do, he was rough-housing in the living room and slipped and hit his head on the coffee table... An event that has likely happened a hundred times or more in his short life-span thus far... Chris consoled him, but when he pulled away, he was covered in blood. It quickly became clear that we would actually need to take him to the E.R. The half-inch long, quarter inch deep clean-cut gouge was merely oozing, but without care, it would have been a nasty scar.

So we loaded up the kids, sans shoes, in the car. By the time we got Ben buckled in, he had already stopped crying. He spent the short drive telling us to go to the "Docture house", over and over. When we got to the E.R. he ran around, as happy as could be. He played with the other children in the waiting room, and he played with his Sissy. He laughed, and told the other children what happened to him, pointing at his "owee" and smiling. He flirted with the nurses and was his normal, amazingly chipper self.

He didn't flinch when they gooped up his head with numbing stuff. He cried quite a lot when they finally pinned him to irrigate the wound, I would have been shocked if he hadn't. Poor dude. Then they wrapped him up like a burrito to DuraBond the cut closed and he cried a bit. But by the time they were done, he was done, too. Back to chipper ol' Benny.. No matter that it was already an hour past his usual bedtime...

As we were walking out, Ben walked out and told the doctors and the nurses, "Tane-choo, Bye, bye, bye, bye," waving like a beauty queen on parade, flashing his million dollar grin and making them all coo and ahhh...

all the while wearing the shirt...

The shirt that reminds me that sometimes life hits us hard, but as long as we keep our "sunny sides up" we can beat ANYTHING.


My son, my own personal sun.