By Nicole

It will be "lousy" if there are lice in my house.  First break out in daycare EVER (I'm on the 3rd kid at this home daycare) about a month ago.  Two notes home from school, and a scare at my sister's today. I am freaking out and shining a flashlight in Leilee's hair every 3 minutes while she sleeps.  I am confusing nits and dandruff.  It's not like I can wake her up and slather her head with mayonnaise right now!  I am washing everything anyway.  Errghhh....   Someone please console me and tell me I am overreacting.  I picked my share of nits and sent my share of head lice notes home at my last job.  But I've never been the mom that has had to deal with it all at home before.  This is not how I would have chosen a lesson in humility. 

Before I allow myself to get overly rational or lose the element of newness and awe, I have to document, in black and white, one of the most colorful things that has possibly ever happened to me in my life. Just this past weekend, I went with a group of women from my church to our yearly retreat. (I say that like I am a veteran or a pro, even though this was only my second year.) Like a lot of the women who went (I think) I went to the retreat full of bottled up emotion and stress, hoping that in one fell swoop God would rain down love and relief and wash away all my worries, and that I would emerge from the Silverdale Beach Hotel a newly cleansed, refreshed woman of God, all because I paid my $60.00, endured the back seat of a 15 passenger van and made the effort to attend in the first place. The speaker had wonderful energy. Us women had wonderful fellowship. We laughed, we cried, we stayed up late sharing stories and ate Domino's pizza much too late at night. But at the end ...