Is the Glass (Door) Half Empty or Half Full?

Well, one pane isn't exactly half...  more like one fifteenth.  Or one thirtieth, if you count all the panes on both of the French doors.  However you do the math, the clunk followed by the music of shattering glass equated to one young man, whom for the duration of this post we shall call Bam Bam, sitting on the couch for several minutes while I vacuumed the floor and broke glass out of the door and vacuumed the floor some more. (Every mother should own a Shopvac!)  By the time I had applied duct tape (another essential tool of motherhood) around the sharp edges, Bam Bam was standing on the couch, offering his sweet regrets.

"I sorry, Mommy!"

I can't say I was thrilled with the breakage of glass - or that I softened in my resolve to get Bam Bam quickly to bed before he broke anything else.  (Our morning included the demise of a plastic lawn chair under the assault of a metal baseball bat in the skillful hands of Bam Bam, but that's another story...  I promise he's not an inherently destructive child!)  No, even as I assured him of forgiveness between warnings to stay back, I was tired and ready for him to go to bed.  But one mind-soothing reality dawned on me as I cleaned up shards of glass:  We really have had it pretty good.

Granted, our walls are in constant need of soap (and possibly paint).  And a lot of things do break.  But big breaks are relatively rare, given the number of children we have and the energy with which they move through their daily activities.  Statistically, you'd think we'd have had more than a couple windows to replace and more than one bone to reset.  Even our one broken bone, being a collarbone, didn't need to be reset.  All it required was rest and immobilization in a sling.  You'd also think that the broken bone would have happened in some more dramatic way than a toddler falling out of bed.

But there it is.  Our crazy, chaotic, buzzing with energy, beautiful brood has managed, surely by nothing more than the grace of God and parents wise enough not to invest in fragile valuables, to keep damage to themselves and their surroundings to a tolerable minimum.

Without doubt, Bam Bam is pushing the boundaries of that minimum, but for now, I'm going to look at my glass (door) and pretend it's all the way full, even overflowing.  Because let's face it. The way things work around here, it might be awhile before we get around to replacing that broken pane!