I AM a working mommy of two beautiful children.  Although I only work three days a week, those days are long and both mentally and emotionally challenging.  We're always busy looking for new and fun things to do, but in the midst of all that we're doing, what really matters most?

MY family.

Family makes my life matter.  Five qualities that matter most to me in my family are love, fun, loyalty, growth, and faith.  Alone, these are just plain words and are part of our family life already.  But they do seem invisible at times in the reality of our life.  Where is the love on a rainy Sunday afternoon when the whining eats away at my ears?  Who cares about fun when I can hardly keep up with the daily necessities of feeding, wiping, laundering, and cleaning?

But then, I see Kendall offering her hand to help another kid at the playground.  Or hearing her say "thank you daddy for getting my milk", without even being told.  In moments like this, invisible becomes visible and everything I've strived for within my family becomes reality.

Children change everything.  They suddenly fill our world with burp cloths and car seats and passionate new fears about safety and germs.  They give us a whole new context from which to live out God's purpose for us in life.  They create a whole new circle of roles and relationships.  They turn us into parents, our parents into grandparents, our siblings into aunts and uncles.  They continue to shape those relationships as we keep discovering what it means to be a family with all the fun and sacrifices and new experiences and messy challenges.

But what do children bring most of all, (the number one quality that matters most to me in my family)....LOVE.  That unconditional love that children have for us and we in return have for them, is like no other.  With love,  we thrive.  Without it, we can die.  And when we reach the end of our lives, we won't care about what we've accomplished; we'll care about how well we've loved and been loved by those closest to us.

Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there and especially to my own mommy, who was the first one to teach me about unconditional love.