There's something to be said.

After a weekend like this past one, when a particularly nasty stomach virus took down two of our troops (the boy had his bout a week ago, and I have THUS FAR, PLEASE KNOCK ON WOOD been spared), it's good to let oneself bask in the good things.

So I won't tell you about Katherine's new skill, wherein she lets out a bone-chilling scream when she doesn't get what she wants right away. Or about how today she tried to and for all I know succeeded in shattering all the glass in Publix by testing that skill when she caught sight of the Gerber Graduates puffs container that I put in the cart (GASP!) without giving her any.

I won't tell you that Alex's first teeball game got canceled because of the rain and that he cried his poor little heart out even though his parents were secretly rejoicing because (a) his dad was just mastering being in an upright position without a violent vomiting episode and (b) his mom hadn't had time or inclination to procure all elements of his ridiculously specific uniform. And (c) his grandparents were also ill, making it a double blessing in disguise that the teeball field was a mudpit, because sick baby sister in attendance would've brought down the SKY.

I will skip over the place where my diet just stopped even pretending to work, and the one where I felt really, really isolated and starved for the kind of grown-up water-cooler conversation (and hell, Idol gossip) I used to take for granted.

And I'll tell you, instead, that things are better. Baby K hasn't forgotten how to scream your eardrums loose. Alex still thinks that running more than one base at a time is cheating. I still haven't finished buying all the parts of his teeball uniform.

BUT.

I've already achieved most of the things I wanted out of life, and I experience all of them on a daily basis. I'm a wife. I'm a mommy. I'm a WRITER.

I have fantastic friends, people who would answer the phone if I called in the middle of the night to say "Bail me out of jail, " or, far more likely, "I need to talk."

I know more than anyone ever wanted know about unpredictable (and thus un-divulgeable) topics, I watch Judge Judy religiously, and I'm currently, shamelessly, reading Books I and II of R.L. Stine's The Baby-Sitter.

As of Wednesday, I will have been married for nine years to the only man in the world capable of not just putting up with, but somehow actually loving me along with my unshakable jumble of unclaimed baggage.

My kids, they are wonderfully weird, incurably awesome, and heart-piercingly sweet. And they remind me that, even when I manage to explode the tempered glass oven door facing and reduce Kraft mac and cheese to unrecognizable mush because I got sidetracked by some court show or other, I am loved and I've been given the rarer-than-you-might-think gift of loving unabashedly, brazenly, and without a filter.

It's the best I could've hoped for, and more than I ever expected.