How's that title for a howdy, and welcome back?

I started collecting the kids' Easter outfits and assembling them in the laundry room on Saturday afternoon, knowing any bit of time I could save searching for a rogue shoe or missing bow on Sunday morning would help us maaaaybe get to church on time 

for once in our collective family life of five.  

(It didn't.)

Nelle saw her Easter dress and squealed because she had been dying to put it on.  Girlfriend loves a good dress, and I've been talking this one up pretty big to her.  

I had checked the forecast again because earlier in the week there had been a chance of snow on Sunday, but that obnoxious snowflake icon wasn't plastered over Easter anymore so I didn't grab tights and cardis out of closets and drawers and instead just hung the sweetest pastel trio of outfits I ever did see up on the rod and went about the rest of the day, wiping snotty noses because all three kids came down 

with either some sort of cold or allergies on Thursday.  

I had woken up Friday morning and waited until 8am on the dot to call the ped's office to sneak us into their last available appointment for the morning.  Since, all three have been getting a nice syringe of Claritin in the mornings and Benadryl at night, except June gets a little extra medicine pumped into her little peanut body because the smallest has been officially welcomed into the crap ear club 

with her very first ear infection.  

No wonder she didn't sleep at alllllll the night before.

I should have suspected the reason behind the kids sniffles because my own allergies have been pretty terrible this season as everything is blooming early and vivaciously and the gusty wind we've been dealing with is swirling all of it 

around and around and around some more.  

After the kids' doctor, we came home for a little regroup and then set out to a walk-in clinic so I could get a script for the killer sinus infection 

I'd developed around Wednesday.  

I'm starting to suspect someone swapped our Lysol wipes with a placebo pack and we're in some kind of toddler-germ petri dish experiment because we did pretty darn good of staying mostly healthy during the late fall and winter and then, bam, the month of March hit and at least one person has been sick in our house every. single. week.  

So I'm not sure what was more surprise on Sunday morning, when I slept through my alarm, and found three inches of snow on the ground OR my puffy right eye, 

red and oozing all kind of yucky stuff.  

I quickly debated finding the girls' cold weather accessories and negated that idea, rationalizing they were really only going to be outside about two minutes total between a front door drop off at church and back through the parking lot to the car afterwards.  

The back-and-forth of do we stay home because I've picked up PINK EYE from Nelle's bout with it about two weeks ago from somewhere in the house that didn't get disinfected well enough took a bit longer.  In the end, it pays (really?) to have gone through this with her not so long ago because I still had her drops and after putting one in, it cleared up decently, and I, unlike my little babes, can practice enough self control to not touch my eye and then touch anyone or anything else.

And so we did our typical Sunday morning scramble of herding three littles into their Sunday best, out the door, into the car, various amounts of minutes after I told Andrew we absolutely positively had to be at church by.  Bah.

--

After I let Frank out first thing on Easter morning, I went back to the bathroom to greet the boys who were finishing up showers and told Andrew, "there's s-n-o-w EVERYWHERE", to which he replied, "we won't forget this Easter."  

And, no, I don't think we will.

--

We were thick in the newborn haze, 

the hot summer days and nights running from one into the next.  

We were learning to navigate new levels of exhaustion and love, 

digging deep into reserves we didn't even know existed.

They're treasures to me.  

That phase, that moment, bottled up and preserved to transport me back 

and remember when mothering feels too much about me and not enough about them.

I didn't know what the long days and nights ahead held for us, but I look at these, and I don't think about the hard things, the tantrums I'm sure were thrown, the tears and timeouts, the endless diaper changes between two girls, potty training messes, botched dinners, toddler standoffs, and two parents too tired and at times too overwhelmed to be tender and take care of each other. 

Instead, I think about the good.  

They bring back a flood of memories, feelings, sounds and smells, tucked away that rush back to the surface when I need them the most.  When it's hard, they're here.

I'm reminded of the beauty among the chaos.  

That there is good in even the hard days.  

I know years from now, the stories that are our every day right now, the idea of the round-the-clock sprint we do day in and day out, these toddler tales and sleepless nights will sound outlandish, almost too ridiculous to believe. 

We will be too far removed from the monotonous tasks of raising littles, 

dependent in every way imaginable.

We'll be needed in different ways, and these photos will take us back.

To the good.

To falling in love all over again, 

to doing hard things to make the good things that much better.

To being a little wistful how quickly it's behind us, 

acknowledging the growth and life that's happened between, 

and appreciating all the good, so much good that we've been given.