On a recent holiday, my 7 year old bought a souvenir snow dome with his pocket money. You know, the ones where you turn it upside down, and the snow swirls around in the water?

Well, he took the snow dome to school, it got crushed in his bag and all the water leaked out. When he got home, he wanted his Dad to fix it. So the snow dome sat on the edge of the kitchen table for a couple of hours, waiting for Dad.

But before Dad came home, my 1 year old, Liam, found the cracked snow dome, carried it away, and dropped it on the floor. Already fractured, it fell apart completely, and all the plastic “snow” came out. Liam played with it for a while, scattering the “snow” all over the room and himself.

When he got bored and wandered off, he was sprinkling tiny little bits of sparkle, like he was a big, ugly, clumsy Tinkerbell.

By the time I realized what had happened, thousands of tiny little sequins were hopelessly scattered around the house. It was like an army of gay pixies had held a really wild mardi gras parade after-party at our place.

The sparkles have some kind of static electricity stickiness that make them tend to cling, and no amount of vacuum cleaning got rid of them all. They have now found their way into every corner of the house. Even weeks later, I am still noticing them on our clothes, our hair, stuck to the boys faces, and it even appears in their food! It’s so irritating!

But, it is kind of cute in a way… I’ll be walking along, and suddenly notice a gleam of bright green or silver in the carpet, or on the couch.

It’s like a little bit of magic in my day. Irritating, but beautiful.