Today, I pulled up to the Burger King drive-thru. It was a specific request from my son, who found out from our previous Burger King trip last week that the toy in the kid’s meal was a set of Pokemon cards. We were out and about and insanely busy, and I just didn’t have it in me to drive my kids home for lunch.

I knew it was really bad, though, when my daughter, who just turned 2 and has only about 25 words in her entire vocabulary, starts shouting, “awant TICKEN! TICKEN! TICKEN!”

For those of you who are not fluent in Little Sister-ese, this means, “I want CHICKEN, specifically CHICKEN NUGGETS.”

To have this reaction when she sees me roll down my window? People, that’s just sad.

It didn’t used to be this way. I swear. Honestly. For about a year, I was a vegetarian, per doctor’s orders, and I subjected my children to all manner of healthy meals that they found completely repugnant. Beans and rice and fish were all the rage over here, and I was even into soy milk for a while. Fast food was evil, and we didn’t go there. Plus, we were desperately trying to save money to pay off our student loans, and so all of that adds up to healthy meals at home.

Well, the loans are paid off (can I hear a big WOO HOO!) and my doctor took me off the vegetarian diet, summer swimming schedule has kicked into high gear, and face it, I’m just that lazy. Hence the recognition at the drive thru from a toddler who can barely talk.

But healthy meals aren’t the only things that fluctuates around here. For a while, we did awesome at the scripture reading thing. Every morning, we’d get up as a family and read scriptures before sending our small child out into the scary world. I felt a need to give him an extra boost, something to take with him as he faced big bad kindergarten.

These days–yup, you guessed it. My scriptures lie on my nightstand, unopened, except when they mock me from my car when I get back in it on Sunday and realize that they’ve been sitting there all week.

And when scripture reading goes, everything else gets tossed out too. Well, not tossed, exactly. I don’t toss stuff like this–it kind of sneaks away and plays hide and seek for a while. Without telling me. I hate it when the game’s afoot and I don’t even know I’m ‘it’.

I’m not really sure what causes these waves. I just know they happen. I’m freaking out less about them, though, because I remember when there was a time when I served healthy meals, and we read scriptures, and had regular FHE, and didn’t take short cuts at bedtime and skimp on stories. And so I know we will eventually get there again. I’m just…waiting for the wave to carry me there. Or get enough energy to kick my boogie board out to find it.

(Did I just mix metaphors? Sorry, it’s been a long day that ended with me sitting in a downpour waiting for the swim coaches to cancel a swimmeet, something that only occurs if the thunder is deafening and the rain is coming down in blinding sheets. When a thunder clap actually shook the earth, the coaches finally let us go home. But hey, my kid thought running around in the rain in a swim suit with his buddies is way more fun than swimming the breast-stroke, so there you go.)

What waves does your family surf?