And when I say....

*Song of the day: Glitter, by Motley Crue

My dear friends, this is a 5" tall EMPTY bottle. As you can see, it was once filled with pink glitter.

And when I say "glitter", I really mean pixie-dust-fine-sand kind of stuff that stays on your face after you wash 3 times. (Believe me, I know. This glitter is an every day accessory to my daughters' eyes and hair, and just as commonly, my son's mohawk.)

Also, when I say "filled with", I mean that this bottle was almost ENTIRELY full, as it was found only a month ago, tucked into one of my girls' Christmas stockings.

And when I say EMPTY, I mean "all over my house"

You see, I am not a morning person. I am now, and always have been, a night owl. It worked very well for me in school because I could stay up and study (socialize) all night.

When I was first married, my husband had to wake for work an hour before I did, and he would have 10 minute long conversations with me that I would never remember, and so would call him from work and chew him out for not kissing me goodbye. (Luckily, my husband is a good soul and never used this would-be-useful habit of mine against me.)

My disdain for the morning hours followed me into motherhood. I hear my children when they call me easily enough, but I learned to teach my children to sleep through the night early on and made the most of my sleep that way.

Now, all of my children sleep in regular or toddler beds, and though they still sleep all night, there is no way of keeping them in bed beyond the butt-crack of dawn (which, right now is about 6:45 or 7:00.)

Lilly is usually the instigator, and the first one up. She sneaks into my bedroom to whisper (as though it won't disturb me) "Mommy, can we watch PBS kids?" So, I say yes, and they slip down the stairs in their jammies, pulling along behind them their pillows, blankets and baby dolls/teddy bears, to curl up on the couch and veg out until they get hungry enough to come and pounce on my bed.

This particular morning, though, Lilly made her way into the bathroom before coming in to see me. The RULE of the house is that you do NOT play in the bathroom, and that if you need to go, you close the door behind you so that no one else sneaks in behind you. (And when I say 'no one else', I really mean Scarlet.)

Lilly didn't close the door.

Scarlet got in.

And STOLE the glitter.

It wasn't but a few minutes later when Mahone, always the tattle-tale, started shrieking "MOM! LOOK WHAT SCARLET'S DOING!!!!!"

So, fearing the worst, I jump out of bed and run down the stairs to find my couch doused in tiny, light catching stars. The amazing thing was that there wasn't even a pile. It just spread over the upholstered surface in a thin coat, like some sort of germ, or like in the Disney version of Peter Pan, when the pixies shake their dust all over Captain Hook's ship and waves of it turn the ship to gold.

Gone. It was all gone, and to my own surprise, I wasn't even mad.

That couch was a mess anyway. We bought it when Lilly was born, and it had been peed on (potty training), puked on (both spit up and many accounts of the stomach flu), bled on (skinned knees) and colored on with various shades of sharpie pens and 'washable' crayola markers.

Besides that, there are MUCH worse things that my children could smear all over my couch than glitter. (Peanut butter, for example.)

So, I didn't even bother to vacuum it up, or sweep it, or wipe it. I just went back to bed.

In the mean time, we all look like little fairies. Glitter has made itself at home everywhere in this house. It nestles in the carpet, on my kids ruddy little cheeks, in my dog's hair, and my husband's beard. Whenever we sit down on our couch, a sparkly cloud floats up merrily around us, only to settle along the hairs of our arms. My children enjoy it immensely.

It's a fairy wonderland.

And when I say "fairy wonderland" I mean that's-my-excuse-not-to-vacuum.