Precious Moments...

 ... ahhh, those 'rare' precious motherhood moments, when all the stars align, the kids eat all their vegetables, and skip to bed without complaining...and then there is reality.  Those 'more often' precious moments where you wonder how in the world you are going to survive this gig called motherhood.Let me take you inside one of the latter...It's a Monday.  I have offered to babysit for a dear friend so she and her hubby can go to a work function and have a much needed date night.In an effort to not miss our own family home evening (the night in our church that we set aside to have a lesson, songs, and activity), I devise this 'wonderful' plan (read:  'wonderful' = insane-what-was-I-thinking-plan!) to have all of our kids come with me, have hubby meet us there after work, have our family home evening, then have him take our kids home while I stay with their kids the remainder of the night.  Sounds simple enough, right?!As the FHE activity, hubby decides to help our kids learn some service and has the 3 olders go out with him to shovel their driveway.which leaves me inside with 5 youngers (from age 4- 3 months old) who are all very tired and ready for bed.still doing okay.I get friend's two olders ready for bed, in between holding the 3 month old and fending off my bouncing-off-the-walls 2 year old and tasmanian devil 4 year old.... I have just finished putting down their second child, and am walking down hallway to pick up crying 3 month old- oh, did I mention that in said hallway, they have a corner GLASS cabinet, with GLASS shelves, housing a collection of GLASS precious moments dolls, collected over years and years??!!....  yes, I did hear your collective gasp, and yes, you do know where this is going...Just as I scoop up 3 month old, I hear that gut-wrenching glass upon glass shatter sound...and turn to see 4 yo in a sea of precious moments bits.... first and foremost - no, he was not harmed (at least by the precious moments!).  He had pulled one glass shelf down onto another shelf, shattering about 85% of the precious moments collection.. Wow.If I had my wits about me, I would have snapped a picture of the whole thing.I did NOT have my wits about me.Seriously - what do you do in a moment like that??!After thorough investigation, there was no hole in which I could bury myself.I tried to super glue some of the not-so-shatteried heads back on - no luck.So I carefully placed the decapitated heads next to the jagged bodies,wrote a big fat check,and waited for the dreaded moment of return of the friends.The worst part was, they walked in so happy because they had come home to a freshly shoveled driveway...and I got to shatter that feeling, letting them know what their shoveled driveway had indeed cost them.Lovely.Being the amazing people that they are, they were very gracious about it (they really are next in line for sainthood!!), but it still did little to relieve the utter anguish of this lovely,precious motherhood moment.