The Many Faces of Joy

For the last two days I have felt like I am part of some reality show that I don’t know about. Dramatic things are staged so that they all happen at once to see how well I can handle it.

Sunday morning I woke up with back spasms, which forced me to spend my morning at the urgent care center and the rest of the day barely moving. Later that afternoon, my new roommate, Lauren, and I discovered that our air conditioner was no longer working, so we were forced to endure 83-degree temperatures throughout the night.

As if those events weren’t enough, we woke up Monday morning to find that we only had power in half the house. So we made coffee on the living room floor, broke a sweat from the stifling heat before 7 am, and somehow made it through the day.

Everything is back in working order today. Even my back is starting to feel better. But in the spirit of having low spirits I wanted to share some pictures that I came across that made me smile…

My mom is a preschool teacher, and she is phenomenal at her job. I went to her class a couple weeks ago and took these pictures as she read them a story:

She knows just what to say to make sure every 4-year-old understands the moral of her stories. As one of her students so eloquently put it: bragging is "when you cheer too much about you."

You can just see how much she loves her job by the way she reads the stories and becomes the characters (here she is trying to smell something 100 miles away).

This is a face I get all the time, but her unending patience never falters, even when she is being told about where someone's mommy promised to take them to lunch in the middle of story time.

With moments like these there really is no doubt how much her preschoolers love her...she truly is spectacular in every way.