Yesterday evening, I was trying to relax after a super busy day of work meetings, running errands and shuttling the kids all over God’s green Earth. I was sitting in the recliner watching a television show. Well my 4-year-old had other plans.
She started fighting me for the remote because she wanted to watch one of her cartoons. She finally got it away from me, so I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a thing of Oreos. I sat back down in the recliner and very noisily opened them in front of Ashton.
She glanced over at me, eyeing my Oreos. So, I offered her a few. When she walked over from the couch to get it – I grabbed the remote back.
A look of utter shock mixed with disappointment came across her face. She straightened herself up, shook her head and said, “Wow, I never saw that coming.”
She walked back to the couch to enjoy her Oreos and MY television show.
I may have giggled and relished my moment of triumph a little bit, but I believe it was a lesson well learned.
Life hits you out of nowhere sometimes and more often than not … you never see it coming. There is really only one thing that you can expect when it comes to life and that is the unexpected.
Sometimes those things may be unexpected in a bad way, like car trouble, a failed relationship or losing your job.
But sometimes they may be unexpected in a good way and sometimes you just have to find the good. Perhaps that car trouble slowed you down and prevented you from being involved in a wreck on your way to work. Maybe that failed relationship was holding you back from reaching your full potential. Maybe losing that job opened possibilities that you would have never dreamed of or even explored.
That is what life is all about, making the best out of what you are dealt because you definitely cannot control it.
I eventually felt bad for sneakily stealing the remote from Ashton. I tried to give it back to her, but when I offered it, she said, “It’s okay. I’ve got Oreos now.”
(Paige Nash is a wife, mother, publisher of Bienville Parish Journal and Claiborne Parish Journal and a digital journalist for Webster Parish Journal who believes “life is like a bag of Oreos.”)
