"I Love Turtles" and Cars for Mothers Day

Our lives have been a jumble for quite some time now. We are balancing Aarik's 3rd shift with my afternoon job, keeping the kids quiet in the day time for Aarik to sleep, cooking, cleaning, not eating this, always eating that, going to church on Sundays, grocery shopping on Fridays, dealing with loss after loss, Monday night FHE, scripture and prayer at 8pm nightly, family events, friends, no friends and the constant stream of trials that we are getting to teach us some lesson that we must be too hard headed to learn... you get the point! Some of you are going through similar lifestyles I am sure. So I have reccently changed my prayers from " Father I CAN NOT do this anymore, please fix it..." to " Father I CAN NOT do this anymore! PLEASE help me find peace and happiness in this life somehow!" The funny thing is, as I changed my prayer to this, my family, specifically my children have become my lifeline. Granted they drive me out of my ever loving mind a lot lately. (they are 3 and almost 2 I think it is their job) BUT... If I can laugh, it is b/c of them, IF I can smile, cry tears of happiness or look forward to something it is them! So I thought I would share two quick cute and funny stories.
1. My sweet husband has been prepping our children all week for Mother;s Day. I am not really sure what these conversations entail when I am not around, but i know they take place. Today, we were sitting around the dinner table and Aarik said to the kids "You guys know what Sunday is?" Konnor stood up from the table and yelled "Mother's Day". He grabbed me by the hand, led me to his room and told me to sit down. "Cars for Mother's Day!" He said. So as I sat in the floor in his room he put ALL of his cars in my lap ( for any of you who have seen his collection you realize the time this took) As I sat there wondering what was going on, it dawned on me that my sweet three year old son was giving me his most prized possessions for Mother's Day. I am one of the lucky few mom's who get "Cars for Mother's day"
2. We always play a game with our kids to get them to calm down for bedtime. Aarik and I will ask them what their favorite "fill in the blank" is. We honestly do this every night, with the same colors, animals, foods etc. I guess we don't pay attention much or maybe we just don't act like we care b/c tonight as we played our nightly game I happened to be holding Mckenzie and when I asked her what her favorite animal was I expected her to say a Lion b/c that is Konnor's favorite and he answered before her. When Konnor answers first Mckenzie always says what he does. BUT tonight Mckenzie informed me that her favorite animal is a TURTLE! It caught me off gaurd and I laughed a little trying to figure out why my little girly girl would pick turtles. This really did something for her and she repeated over and over "I like TURTLES!!" " Kenzie likes TURTLES!!" She was so pleased with herself. It was such a cute and funny thing to see her sitting there looking so small and cracking up that she loves turtles. I know it might not be too entertaining to most people but I loved seeing her pick her very own favorite animal and love the one she picked. I'm glad my 23 month old daughter loves turtles.