(Grandpa Wolfington and the kids)Then the Jones Family came to vacation at Mi Casa Stoddard. They brought Cohen's girlfriend Indi...
She calls these her "ninja eyes"!!!
And then, to end my great day, I got the following email from one of my favorite aunts (in response to my last post): I hope she doesn't mind my sharing but it seems like there are a lot of us who could use her pearls of wisdom.
"Though I have no secrets to share, I acquired a few habits over the years that helped. (I recognize now that the 'habits' were actually gifts from the
Spirit). I remember some radical alterations to my expectations. For
example, after some baby (she had 8), my only goal for an entire year was to be dressed by noon. That's it. Anything else I accomplished was icing. And I got in the habit while lying in bed at night of mentally reviewing a pat-on-the-back list. ie: this child knows for sure I adore her, Mark's white shirt was ready for his meeting, wrote that thank you note, FHE was meaningful, good for me. I remember one morning with three
little girls whining in the kitchen, thinking to myself, "No one is dying here, whatever they need can wait seven minutes til the kitchen is cleaned up for the day." And that helped. Another biggie was seeing this poem:
Cleaning your house
while your children are growing
is like shoveling your walk
while its snowing and snowing.My house standards changed after that - and never returned I'm sorry to say. You're right about the sleep, and the workout. You just find a way to get through it, to fulfill your minimum daily requirements to be able to give maximum daily nurturing. My favorite thing is that the Lord tips the scale for us, and eventually erases the stress memories."
I APPRECIATE ALL OF YOU MAKING ME FEEL "NORMAL". THANKS FOR THE COMMENTS.
1 comment:
She IS so wise! A friend and I were talking about this the other day, and I freely admitted, my house is NEVER 100% clean, my bathrooms are gross, and there were dishes that had been in my sink for THREE days. And I don't care any more. My kids knowing I love them is more important to me, than fussing about the toys (not that I have stopped completely). I do exercise, shower and get dressed almost every day. It's the stuff that fills my tank. The rest IS icing. I decided when I die, no one is going to care how pristine my house was {plus, you know those houses all have cleaning ladies}, but they will care if I loved my kids, husbands neighbors, friends and family. That's what matters most!
PS. Those dishes got cleaned on day 4... and no one died from it.
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