Greatest Show on Earth

All Moms know about the witching hour; the last sixty minutes of the day before Dad gets home and rescues you from Crazyland. For some reason, it is the time of day when the kids are at their absolute worst, more tantrums are thrown and messes made in this short span of time than the whole rest of the day. It’s also when you are trying to get dinner started and transition into the evening hours.

When I was in the middle of this chaos (and it lasted for years) I found something that worked really well to keep us on an even keel. We put on a show. Most every single day. Everybody had to put on a costume or something very beautiful and special. Buzz Lightyear, Spider Man, Pocahontas and many, many of her princess friends came to our shows. The players would then sell tickets, sometimes made of construction paper, most times made up of coasters on the table. Once the tickets were sold, the audience would sit and wait, this was usually me with an assortment of stuffed animals. The players would come onto the ‘stage’, Christian music would blare from the stereo and they would dance. I would yell, “Bravo, Bravo, Bravissimo!” as they showed me their latest skills, and would usually get invited to join in the dance with my babies. When I played my cards right, this lasted until Dad walked in the door from work.

The great thing about this was that my guy came home to happy, sweaty children who had just been worshipping God and I got to be on the front row of the show, instead of losing my cool at the end of the day. We decided that dinner could be a little later in our house, in exchange for the greatest show on earth.