If you keep a kid

your flowerbeds will be full of strange holes and sticks coming up in weird places.
your garden may be more attractive to Tonkas than the sand box.
your clothes may be covered in dirt, snot, food and spit up.
your hair may not have been washed in ten days? no eight? um, a while.
your pantry may be filled with baggies of half eaten fish crackers.
your car may be covered in hard little raisins and reek from splashes of old milk.
diapers may be the only laundry that gets washed semi-regularly.
eating dinner while facing your plate and not getting up 18 times for different things seems like a half-remembered dream.
dusty furniture is the new black.
your biggest surprise of the day is finding cheese in a sippy cup behind the couch which you were certain contained milk once upon a time.
you find dirty dishes mixed in with the clean ones because somebody was trying to help.
but you have a kid.
now isn't that something?

Sometimes I get well down the path to insanity before I realize that this is what it's all about. I get wrapped up in these frustrations and my own sadness over not being pregnant yet, or the debt we have to pay off yet, or how hard it is to be away from my family, and sometimes I even cry before something or somebody smacks me over the head and says, "Dude." (I grew up in Southern California - my conscience often sounds like a surfer). "Dude. Look at your son."
And then I just sit down, on the insanity path, and look like a crazy person just sitting, and am in awe that I get to watch this person growing right before my eyes.
Put dinner on hold, put the broom down, stop cleaning up behind the little tarzanian devil, and just watch ...and play.