I sit in a used office chair that we bought down in Greenville while I write this blog.

It’s a good chair…fully adjustable, goes up…goes down…probably goes sideways….leans back. This chair does it all.

It will go where I tell it to go.

It will stay where I put it.

I am not in love with my chair. It is not an inanimate object that inspires any affection.

Mostly, I appreciate that I don’t really notice it.  It’s comfortable and does the job it’s designed to do.

There isn’t anything about it that stands out…good or bad.

This morning, I sat down in my chair….and someone had lowered it about 6 inches.

I almost broke my neck.  For a moment, it felt like I was dropping down into an endless mine shaft, never to be seen again. I was falling…and I knew that I wouldn’t get up from this new escapade.

Someone, hopefully in my family…because if it wasn’t someone in my family, then that opens up a whole new can of worms to worry about…screwed around with the levers on this chair and allowed it to go down when I expected it to be up.

They adjusted it to suit their comfort level.

Some people have a lot of nerve.

It was probably that little one.

Not the really little one…she’s not messing with too much yet…except for our sleep patterns.

I think it was the next in line for littleness. I think that he messed with my levers.

He already pushes all our buttons…why not start on the levers, too?

I suppose that I’m being kind of a “drama queen” …just for literary effect, of course.  If I’m that blown out of the water when something changes, it would be kind of pathetic.  I need to be more flexible than that.

I need to BE A MAN.

I shouldn’t whine about sitting down and being freaked out about the changing level of my chair.

That is what children do…they screw with stuff.

They keep our lives interesting.

“They keep our lives interesting.”

I can envision a day when everything will stay “just like I left it”.

That should be like a little slice of heaven….when all the chairs stay at the same level, when I always know how much orange juice is going to be in the container, when I never wonder what happened to that last poptart I planned to eat.

When I’m the one who “upsets the apple cart”…and it’s always only me…I can plan ahead a little easier.

If I don’t have to worry about random weirdness…or how someone else’s needs affect my life…that should be just the sweetest little slice of heaven I can imagine.

To be here with only another adult…just doing the things that adults do, just taking care of our needs…not having to worry about helping someone get a glass of water or a snack, not talking to anyone about how their day went or what it felt like to go through a new experience, not worrying about whether or not I’m really taking care of these little ones to the best of my abilities…never sitting down hard in a lowered chair….well…that will truly be the sweetest, most attractive little slice of heaven on earth I can think of.

Holy Smokes, I miss these little guys already.

It’s all the random weirdness that makes my life interesting.

It’s that moment where we catch our breath at the bottom of the big hill and say, “You alright? You OK?  We made it!! We made it!!” after taking that fast ride down….it’s that moment that makes it easier to understand everything that came before.

It’s the victorious survival that makes our lives together so good.

I would gladly “endure” a lifetime of awkward “sit downs” if it meant that I could be with my family for just a little longer.

That’s a good and easy trade.

And really, I know what most of these levers do, too.

I’m good at fixing stuff.