When I was little we liked to fold paper toys that yawned and shut, and used them to tell fortunes.

While I have not fashioned a cootie catcher in a long while, the thirst for predictions lingers still. I wonder whether the weather will be copacetic for my daughter's outdoor wedding. The uncertainty around Benjamin's long term care still haunts me. Decisions about retirement bounce like a ping pong ball. 

If the friend penning prophecies about my adulthood had been brazen enough to be accurate, I would have scoffed. 

Yet all of those things came to pass. And all of them were blessings. 

Let me be clear. Those circumstances, and a slew of others qualify as blessings, but they were not, I repeat, not always fun. While the memory of sleeplessness, and physical exhaustion has been eclipsed by the joy of two young women auditioning dresses for that outdoor wedding, it was my modus operandi. For years. Benjamin is moaning upstairs, and I do not have any guarantees that today will be scream free. But this week he sat next to me in church and found joy in singing words he knows by heart. 

So bring on your cootie catchers. Scribe it with lofty dreams. And watch them flippity flop until some of them come true.