(Mother’s Day 2017, the first Mother’s Day since I was a mom that I spent away from my kids, except the one I was pregnant with)
I started to write a post about Mother’s Day and how difficult it can be. It occurred to me as I was writing that there was still time to do something about that.
It has been a long debunked myth that men can read minds. Yet I still remain hopeful in certain situations that this will prove to be untrue.
One of those situations is Mother’s Day.
Last night, I lay awake in bed while my baby cried.
He’s at the tail end of a cold, and was actually less congested than when we’d put him to bed hours earlier, but he was having trouble staying settled. I fed him, my husband changed his diaper, I put chest rub on him, and gave him Tylenol. I held him while he flopped around restlessly, wanting to be asleep, but unable to wind back down.
Nothing worked. So we did something we haven’t done before with this particular baby. We put him in a room by himself, and let him cry himself to sleep.
For homeschool devotions, we are reading Rediscover Jesus: An Invitation, by Matthew Kelly. It was handed out at our church during Lent.
The the book was written for grown ups, but on a very basic level; I’m guessing third grade. The only thing that makes it adult is that the examples he uses to illustrate points are ones that primarily relate to work, marriage, parenting, etc. I mainly edited these references on the fly to either eliminate things my kids wouldn’t get, or mostly, change the examples to ones kids would relate to. I incorporated my own examples about school, duty as it relates to being a kid (obedience, chores, etc.), friendships, and siblings.
I have appreciated the bite-sized chapters. In them, Kelly challenges us to add practices to our lives to help grow our faith. He supports his claims with his examples and with scripture. He gives the reader things to do right now – ways to start small with direction to take it to the next level with time.
A couple of days ago, chapter was “Comfortably Comfortable.” The subject? The importance of self denial in spiritual growth.
The first two images in the post below are our little guy at two months. The rest are him in all his ten-month-old glory.
When you’re the firstborn, you get your three month, six month, nine month …. and every milestone in between, tirelessly documented by parents frothing with pride and joy. And rightly so. Kids are amazing miracles. 
When I’m editing my photos so that the sheer magnitude of them won’t take down our desktop computer, it kills me to delete those blurry shots or ones where every child but one is blinking – and that one child is in the middle of the zombie faces beaming, but there is no way to crop out everyone else so that it looks normal.
Problems of a perfectionist? Perhaps.
In the name of doing things partway rather than not at all, I wanted to give a nod to our youngest, who is not at any official milestone right now (except that everything a baby does in its first two years is amazing).
In our second apartment, year two of our marriage, we painted feature walls in the living room, kitchen, dining room, and master bedroom. Our ground floor apartment got little light and had all white walls. Before the feature walls, our living space was both dark and stark. Not a good combination.
My favorite wall was the orange faux finish we did in the dining room. I don’t really like orange, so I don’t know why I ended up going with that color, but it was rich and deep, and made me happy every time I walked past it. I was sad to paint it over with primer when our lease was up at the end of the year and we moved into our first home.
While I miss my orange feature wall, I could never make myself do anything so bold in this house. Each time I paint a room, it means my kids have to fend for themselves for 24-48 hours, which they don’t mind, but means that laundry, dishes, and cooking aren’t happening. Plus, my energy waxes and wanes, and if I paint it and hate it, I may not have the get-up-and-go to fix it for months.
I don’t know about you, but for me, winters have gotten harder as each year has gone by. My body and mind suffer from the lack of light. Many times when I start getting my energy back in the spring, it is spent working to bring more light to the house to help with the dark next winter. I paint lighter colors on the walls, add timers for my lights (the poor man’s smart bulb), and make new pillow covers and quilts.
During one of these nesting pushes, I painted two walls in the gold living room a shade of cream, thinking it would help bring more light in. I had already painted my dining room blush pink and loved it, and figured this would have the same effect.
