Its Saturday and I’ve been cleaning for most of the morning (while listening to my podcasts, of course :)). We just got back the day before yesterday from a week long camping trip and I’m hustling about trying to get all my after-vacation tasks completed. There is laundry and dishes to be done, bathrooms to be cleaned, groceries to be bought and weekly lesson plans to be written, a blog post to write ;), etc.  I approached my sliding glass door with window cleaner in hand and began cleaning the indoor side of it, wiping off all the smudges that are the result of three or four weeks of neglect. "This feels so good" I thought as I worked my way around the colorful stained glass fish (made in VBS a few weeks ago) that adorn the window.

As I finished the inside and began to start work on the outside, I stopped in my tracks. There on the window were six perfectly placed muddy hand prints.

 Handprints (you have to look carefully to see them) with the "VBS fish" 

Although I have three children, and the poetic side of me would like to attribute a separate set of prints to each of them, in reality, given the size of the prints, the true culprit was probably my youngest daughter, Isabella (age 7). She loves to "garden" and dig in the dirt. She is flighty and wistful, lives in the moment and is sometimes somewhat oblivious to her surroundings. No one would ever accuse her of being a neat freak. Like most children (and adults), there are parts of her personality that absolutely delight me and other aspects that make me want to pull my hair out and scream "Calgon! Take me away!" (usually when she is trying to negotiate her way out of a punishment). I try to have more chuckling-and-smiling-while-shaking-my-head-responses, however. I am so thankful the Lord made her the way she is.

I decided to leave the hand prints on the glass. They make a fine decoration alongside the VBS fish. They are works of art that remind me not to take myself and the tasks at hand so seriously. There will come a day all too soon when I won’t have to clean up hand smudges off the sliding glass door and the only VBS fish I’ll be able to display will be those from years past. In less than 5 years I will have an adult child. Yes, I will eventually clean those handprints off the window but for now and for the next week they will stay. And I’ll smile, chuckle and think of my whimsical, little imp every time I look at them.