Comforting moments

So I am known to quip the line "parenting is merely a very poorly paid cleaning job"... as I de-clutter, de-toy, de-food scrap, de-mountain-of-laundry, de-puke my home AGAIN (several times a day...).  Today however I will qualify that statement... parenting is indeed a very poorly paid cleaning job, but this job comes with interspersed fleeting moments of extreme beauty... moments which take your breath away and make all the cleaning somehow worth it.  Its a package deal, and I accept whole-heartedly.
Every day my angel does new things... changes, grows up.  Its mind-blowing to watch her start to think like a real person... not simply an inanimate eating pooing puking machine (as she has seemed at times)... Today I awoke, as usual, to the screeching alarm clock of the child who somehow knows, despite the fact that it is pitch dark and freezing cold, that it is now exactly 5:30am.  I dragged my sorry butt out of my toasty warm doona, and stumbled blearily into her room.  I had been up to the same screech almost hourly through the night each time she distressed herself coughing her little head cold out.  If I said I was not feeling perky I am sure you would understand the degree of understatement - especially when I add that I have had the night coughing routine every night for the last oh, I don't know, four weeks or so?   Give or take a week...it all goes blurry after a while... But where was I?  Oh yes, escaping from the bleakness into a moment of radiant sunshine.  As I swayed sadly by the side of the cot, arms out-stretched to lift the angel from her cot-of-entrapment (as she describes it so vocally)... A moment... she sat back, looked around her bed, found her pink bunny comforter... picked it up and hugged it, patted the bunny on the head... cuddled it again and put it down...before smiling and stretching out to me to be picked up.   Suddenly the fatigue and the cold and the darkness were irrelevant.  How did she learn to comfort her comforter to say good bye?  Was she thanking bunny for supporting her through the night?  Was she reassuring bunny that she would be back and all would be ok?  Was she getting one last cuddle in before the day began?
I'll never know... but I do know that she thought about something, acted on it, believed it, felt good about it...
Moments of pure untainted beauty...