Category: JOY in 2012

I’m already sleepy so this post will be short.

We’re a week into July and I’m feeling panicky about all the things I haven’t done yet, wondering how in the world to accomplish anything this summer.

My grandma passed away on Thursday.  It’s been a sad week.  I find myself  returning to her in my thoughts over and over again only to dismiss them again before I linger too long there.  I’m afraid to cry; I’m tired and stressed and stretched thin enough that I might not stop.

My husband is making progress and we’re moving toward a new “normal” rhythm in our routines.  Because he can’t drive there is a lot that has fallen to me and I find myself in the car much more than I’d like.  He had four doctor’s appointments, totaling over ten hours in doctor’s offices.  No big deal, but I just didn’t realize how long these therapy appointments take or how much they would throw off the daily routine around here.  We finally had a couple of nights when he’s slept well, offering me a couple of nights when I slept well too.  Thank goodness!

We went through 100 pounds of ice this week in his ice machine.  Lots of swelling going on in there.  He’s really being pretty awesome, complaining very little and trying to help where he can.

I find myself behind on nearly everything.  Several of the children had bad days this week, evidence that things have felt off balance to them as well.  I’m doing lots of holding for little bodies and lots of negotiating with the bigger ones.  The laundry needs attention.  The gardens need attention.  My closet and pantry need to be reckoned with.   No meal plan for next week has magically appeared on my refrigerator.  My reading schedule with the younger children has been thrown off and I need to reinstate it.

Tonight I find myself  gauging how much I should cross off my summer list because I’m obviously going to spend most of my time taking care of immediate needs.  Part of me is trying to convince myself that it’s ok, while another part of me is screaming in opposition, telling myself that if I would just work harder I could do both.   I’m afraid to start another school year before I get organized.

But life is good.  Today the children were nicer to each other.  Friday night I spent time with a dear friend who moved away and it was simply wonderful.  We chatted outside in the gathering darkness with some neighbors which went a long way toward making me feel better.  I’m doing some reading during all those doctor’s appointments.  My oldest daughter leaves for girl’s camp in the morning and I don’t know how I’m going to let her go.  She’s been so amazing in the past couple of weeks.  We have company coming to town and my guest room is a disaster.  I’ve got work to do, but it’s a good kind of work.  It’s evidence that my life is full of people, which is a blessing.

I’d better sleep while I can and get to work on that evidence first thing in the morning!

Have a great week!

Jennifer

It’s 10:20 p.m. and I have a house full of children who still won’t hold still and go to sleep.  The girls are trying to negotiate terms under which they can sleep in alternate rooms tonight, and I’ll be honest:  I don’t feel like a negotiating mom right now.  I don’t even feel like a  mom at all.  I feel like I’m about 2.5 seconds away from turning into a wicked witch.

Ridiculous, I know.  But true.  Truthfully, I’m just super tired.

The week has been a blur of ice machines, pillows, medication, meals and small milestones.

This week my husband had reconstructive surgery on his knee.  The damage was worse than the MRI showed, and they did a lot of work.   The result?  A stable knee which will heal just fine, but which will take longer than usual to heal.  He can’t put any weight on it for 6 weeks.  SO I kind of just became a one man show for the summer.  This will definitely be a process.  When I think that the ankle drama a few weeks ago kind of threw me off, I have to laugh at this because the ankle was nothing to this experience.  He’s been a good patient, relatively easy to care for, patient and kind and grateful for my efforts.  But he’s pretty trashed and I guess tonight it’s catching up with me.  The nights have been hard and I haven’t slept more than 3 hours at a stretch for several days, but it’s an honor to do it and I’m grateful I can.  I’m grateful he’s home and not in the hospital.

I’m grateful for a lot of things.

I’m grateful for how many people I’ve talked to because I’ve had countless opportunities to say aloud, “It’s going to be ok.”  I’ve said it so much I believe it, even when I turn and walk away with tears pricking at my eyes.  I just have to get stronger, and this is good for me.  What choice do I have?

I’m grateful we’re all together, that our house hasn’t been eaten up by fire, that we have health insurance, that so many things are right.  But because I’m so tired there’s a part of me tonight that whispers, “I want my life back.”  I know all it means is “I need some sleep”, but it comes out in funny forms sometimes, like wishing for some other point in time when things felt steady.  It hasn’t been a steady year.  But then I have to laugh at myself and ask, “When did I have the sense to look around and think that THIS was the point I would want back at some future date?  When have I ever been fully satisfied with how things were going right then?”   When we’re in it, there’s always something more to do or wish for.  So you blink a few times, check the clock, check the ice, check a million little things and then get ready to do it again.

So here’s what I’m learning:

1.  I should have pursued a degree in Nursing.
2.  When it’s hard to find things to be grateful for/happy about, you only have to look a little harder.  It’s buried in there     somewhere.
3.  If someone in our family is going to break something, it WILL need surgery.
4.  When you desperately need life to slow down but it doesn’t you can pause for a moment on little islands of calm.  If you look around and notice everything in those moments, like the breeze in the tree above you or the smell of the honeysuckle or the sound of sprinklers in the distance or the taste of a perfect slice of watermelon, it helps.
5.  Keep lots of 20 pound bags of ice in your freezer.  You never know how many of them you might need.
6.  If you happen to chip a large piece of cartilage (or two) off your femur in a biking crash, your surgeon can cut away more cartilage and drill holes in the bone to cause lots of bleeding in that area so your body can grow a form of replacement cartilage.  I find that totally amazing.  You just can’t walk while it’s happening.
7.  Enjoy what’s going on right now, even if you’re on the verge of becoming a wicked witch.  It’s all you’ve got and things can always get worse.
8.  If your insurance company messes up the same thing FOUR times with a dozen different claims, just BREATHE.  Keep breathing.  And try to get the direct phone number to someone who works there who also has a brain.
9.  If you tell your little children that you’re about to turn into a witch (thinking, of course, that they’ll figure it out and be quiet) it might backfire on you and cause them to WANT it to happen, just to witness the transformation.
10.  Pray always.  It really helps.

How’s that for variety?

So now that I dumped my frustrations here instead of jumping on my broom, I’ll just say that I did nothing at all this week to reach any of my goals.  I just tried to get us through the week.  I witnessed tender moments with some of my children and had a couple of moments when I was a really, really good, really effective parent.  If only that part of me would take up permanent residence here!  I got a bit of exercise, drank a lot of water and got to see two of my brothers and their families, as well as my sister and her husband this week.  What a joy!

We took care of all the cherries before the surgery.  It took all the children and I five hours in the kitchen to do it.  We dehydrated and froze all of them for snacking and for future use.  There was no time for jam or bottling.

So you see, life is wonderful.  And even though I’m pretty sure I’ll NEVER list 2012 as a year I’d like to go back and relive, I hope I’m living it well enough that I can look back on it as a year in which I grew, a year when I improved in essentials, a year when I chose joy.

So I’m going to paste a smile on my face and go talk to those kids.

And then I’m going to figure out how to make the 4th of July a decent day in spite of  what’s going on here.  It’s my favorite day of the year and I usually do a lot of work for it.  I’m not sure what, but I’ve got to do something to make it memorable (in a good way) or I might dissolve into a puddle of tears.  We’ve been out of town around the 4th a lot in recent years and when we planned the summer I was so happy that we would be home for the 4th with nothing going on!
Oh, I had big plans.  It’s all working out great except for the nothing going on part.  So I have a little re-working to do.

Have a great week!

Jennifer

Week 25.  That sounds big.   As in, half way there.  Scary.  And as for the picture, I know I need a new one, I have since I took this one, but I have no idea when I’ll get around to it.  Like so many things in my life.

Well, it was another busy week.  The biggest news of the week is that I was right.  My husband needs surgery on his knee.  An MRI confirmed that he tore his ACL, his meniscus, and chipped the femur.  All kinds of things going on in there, with all kinds of pain for him.  The surgery will be this week, so he just misses the 2 month anniversary since our son’s surgery on his ankle.  I’m hoping we don’t keep moving up the leg with joint injuries.  I’ll be thrilled if this is our last for a while.  It’s been hard for me to watch him but nice to try to take care of him as he forces himself to bend and straighten his leg so it won’t be too stiff, and even harder to watch him emotionally grapple with what this means for all his favorite sports.  It will be a long break.  I worry and hope he’ll be ok.

But life goes on, even when you’re going from office to office for this x-ray and that appointment.  So we had soccer three days a week for both of our girls (I think they both got something like a 5 day break), piano lessons, violin lesson, a campout, a Scout outing to the Great Salt Lake, movie nights, swimming, friends, and so forth.  Lots of good stuff to keep us busy!  Add my incredibly busy two year old to the mix and there is never a dull moment.

My daughter made a goal to cook dinner for the whole family for a week.  It’s been quite funny to turn to her in the afternoon and ask what’s for dinner.  Seriously, this was no small project considering we have ten people to feed every day.  She has spent hours in the kitchen and tackled some of my more difficult/time consuming recipes.  Her younger sister joined in many times and it’s been a source of happiness for all of us.  I’m very pleased with her efforts, and also with her sense of humor.  Perhaps I should let her keep going since the cherry tart I made for dessert tonight ended up all over the floor.

That dessert reminds me of something.  I had a conversation with my husband this week about my totally ridiculous coping skills.  I was marveling at my ability to quickly find good things to focus on when we have something big happen, but when something little happens I snap.  So silly.  What you can infer from that is that I took all the knee problems in stride with grace and was completely ticked off about my dessert.  The reason I mentioned it to my husband was to jokingly reassure him that I’m not going to get hurt since the Lord knows that all he needs to push me to my limit is to have something little go wrong.  I guess I store up all this stress over the big things and then when something small, which I counted on, goes wrong, all the stress oozes out the corners of my eyes.  I need to work on that.

Let’s see.  My entire focus so far this summer has been on getting my kids in a good habit of working hard around the house.  I feel like I’ve done pretty well with this effort, although we haven’t perfected it yet, especially on those mornings when there’s driving to do.  Still, I’m liking what’s happening.  The biggest challenge is that when I focus on getting the big kids to be detail oriented and work hard, the little ones escape, and when I focus on the little ones it seems that the big ones get off easy.  Perhaps I should just go to an every other day schedule, planning to focus on each age group in alternating fashion.   Overall we’re making strides.

Yesterday I did some weeding of my favorite flowerbed in 95 degree weather.  It’s nice to reclaim that area and I enjoyed getting reacquainted with my plants.  Many of my plans for the yard will be postponed due to the knee surgery.  I’m just not sure we’ll get to them this year, and that’s ok.  The lavender is in full bloom, and I’ve got to get outside and harvest it quickly or I’ll miss it.  Our vegetable gardens aren’t what I wish they were, but once again, it’s ok.  These are busy years, and I’m really raising children.

I finished a book this week.   I had a great talk or two with my parents this week.   We got some good news.  Most of the things on my list weren’t touched, but we had some fairly urgent LIFE tasks to take care of.

So we prep for a surgery this week, and hope for the best!
Life is great.

Jennifer