Gratitude: Silence

Today was a bad day. Crazy busy hectic day at the office complete with an hour and a half interruption to drive out to Post Falls to pick a kid up, into Hayden to drop him off, and then back to the cubicle. Complex work day with conference calls, technical difficulties, and a complete reformatting of a regular report to match a client's new expectations. One of those days where everyone wants something from you.

Today was a bad day. Hard rain, extra driving, failures in communication, and missed appointments. A bad day that culminated in an empty tank of gas and hungry kids demanding dinner the moment we got home.

After days like today, there is little that I cherish more than one thing. A rarity.

Silence.

You won't often find silence in our house. We're a loud family. Three kids who wrestle and roughhouse and fight and play together. Three kids who love each other with joy and vocal abundance. They also loath one another with the fiercest of grade school sibling rivalries. They scream and laugh and shout and giggle through almost every waking hour.

You won't often find silence in our house. Noise seems ever-present, be it a primary source of entertainment or a background distraction. It's the TV. If not the television then there's music playing. And if not the MP3 jukebox, then one of the kids is playing the Wii. And if they're not broadcasting the soundtrack of some Nintendo game, they're playing with the dogs, or on the trampoline in the back yard, or jumping on the furniture.

We are a loud family.

After a day like today, silence is a blessing. Silence is a warm fleece blanket wrapped around you while watching the rain fall outside the window and drinking a mug of Baileys and hot chocolate.

Not that I did any of that today. I wasn't drinking Baileys and cocoa. I drove through the rain, but didn't spend much time observing it. There were no blankets involved.

But there was silence. Glorious silence.

Bekah was still out between meetings and errands. I had made dinner for the kids and fed them. They changed into their jammies, brushed their teeth, and crawled into their beds a few minutes earlier than normal.

And then there was silence. Nothing but the sound of the ticking clock on the wall and the fridge's droning hum to distract me from my thoughts. Peace. Stillness. Silence.

I needed that. Today was a bad day. After days like today, I am grateful for silence.