My youngest was getting upset about everything this morning. He cried when the dog barked too loudly. He cried when I told him it was time to start school. He yelled at his brother to hand over the Little Debbies when it was late in the morning and he just really wanted a snack.

I swear, every situation was the end of the world and my little boy was over this day before it was even 10:30 a.m.

So when it came time to practice writing his name a little later, the ensuing exasperation didn’t surprise me at all. 

The anger as he put pencil to paper didn’t surprise me. The tears of frustration shed over his lowercase ls didn’t surprise me. The 15 years it took him to write it even once didn’t surprise me.

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I’m telling you, after the morning he’d had, absolutely nothing about this kid’s “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” attitude surprised me in the least.

But what did surprise me was, well . . . me. 

You see, I didn’t flip out like I usually might. I didn’t fly into the room in my typical fashion and growl in his face that “enough was enough and it was high time to knock it off.” 

Instead, I took a breath, walked calmly into the room, knelt eye to eye with my boy, and proceeded to scoop him up. 

I scooped up the little kid who’d been upset at every turn all morning and carried him to the chair and we rocked. 

We just rocked.

Nobody yelled. Nobody further lost their mind. We simply rocked and talked about those lowercase ls, and how the most important thing was that he do his best and not give up. 

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And it was no more than a minute or two that my little boy crawled out of my lap, stood to his feet, and quietly returned to work.

And I guess it was just a moment that made me feel good as a mom. 

Because isn’t that something all of us want, to be loved exactly where we’re at?

I don’t know why my buddy was in such a bad mood this morning, and honestly, the reason doesn’t matter sometimes. Sometimes we just need to be scooped up. Sometimes we just need to be held and loved on. Sometimes? We just really need to be shown a little bit of grace.

(Oh, and those Little Debbie snacks? They work wonders, too.)