Category: Yearly Goals

Tonight’s picture of my daughter peering through the “O” in Joy is a good representation of the week.  It’s in the middle of the word, and I feel like I’m in the middle of a lot of things right now.  Let’s be honest, the middle is usually the messiest, least pretty stage in most endeavors, and my middle feels a little ugly right now.  So I’m somewhere in between the J and the Y in this mission of mine to seek and find greater joy in my daily life.  There have been joyful moments and terribly discouraging moments, but a conversation with my parents tonight combined with a few other thoughts and conversations throughout the week made me decide that for now I’m going to focus on the happy parts of being in the middle.  Happy things like that sweet little girl’s face above.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m reading a book about creativity.  It’s slow going because it sits in my purse and I only read it when I’m waiting in the car for some reason and there isn’t some other crisis to take care of.  This week I read a chapter that I particularly liked.  The chapter is about how to get good ideas, how to unearth them and grab them.  I realize that right now, in my efforts to live more joyfully, I’m doing some scratching for ideas.  I’m looking for little things I can change, small adjustments I can make, to feel better about what I’m doing even when it’s crazy.  Because let me tell you, my life sure feels crazy, and if I were to really get going and describe some of it for you, you’d agree with me that it sure sounds crazy.  There is just SO much going on in our home and SO much of it depends on me.  That isn’t going to change anytime soon, so I’m scratching for ideas to make this stage more fun and rewarding for myself, in healthy ways.  And when you’re in the middle you usually have some things that are working and some things that aren’t working yet and some things you have yet to implement and some things that need tweaking.  And that pretty much sums up my life.

So I let myself spend a few minutes most days at the sewing machine.  I enjoy feeling like I get something permanent done, something I can SEE.  The bottom line is that my life is going to be crazy for a long time.  This “middle” I’m talking about isn’t an overnight experience.  The middle of “joy” might be short but the middle in my life reads more like the middle of “supercalifragilisticexpealidocous.”  It’s going to take some time.  I need to enjoy the process.  Therefore, fifteen minutes of sewing is a good investment.

My house needs help.  You might think I’m exaggerating but I’m not.  It really needs some help and I’m hoping to provide that help this week.  I think I’m starting to get over my cold, and if that’s true then there’s reason to believe I might be able to do it.  If I can keep the schedule under control, that is.  There is this very fine line between serving your children and leaving their messes for them to clean up, between teaching responsibility and work and keeping things looking nice enough for mom to be satisfied.  These balances are fairly simple to maintain when we’re not as busy, but when we’re running crazy it’s much more difficult.  We’re really busy.

We had more Parent/Teacher conferences this week and they went well.  Thank goodness!  We had lots of friends over to play.   My seven year old went to her first piano lesson and really liked it (I knew she would, but it did take an ice cream cone to convince her to try).  I went to a great Church activity with my daughter.  We had lacrosse practices, soccer practices, futsal games, birthday parties, snowboarding, choir practices and so forth.  My two year old hasn’t slept well and I’ve had some tender moments in the night when I gathered her into my arms as she cried, “Mommy I want you!”  Every time she says that I remind myself how lucky I am to hear it.  My four year old said some incredibly cute things to me.  She’s really into pinkie promises right now for some reason.  She asks me to pinkie promise her things that are important to her, and it’s quite cute.  Last night she was watching a movie and a character in the story didn’t do something they had committed to do.  She said to me, “They should have pinkie promised.”  So cute.

It sounds silly to say that my children got their homework done, but really it’s huge.  With six children all having homework daily, and all their different reading levels and materials, it takes me at least a couple of hours to get it taken care of.  Sometimes it takes me much longer, like on Thursday night when I was up until 1:30 a.m. with my son, who had to be at school before 6:45 a.m. Friday morning.  But it got done, and sometimes that is victory enough for an entire week.

My planning needs work.  I missed my weekly planning this morning because I had to get my son up for a service opportunity and never managed to work it in later in the day.

I’m doing really well in my goal to talk to my friends more often.  I am so grateful for the blessing of holy scripture to read and study from.  I am incredibly grateful for prayer.  The thing I’ve learned about prayer is that rarely does an answered prayer give me LESS to do.  Most of the time my work load increases.  Lately I feel tired and worn out, but it’s a happy tired in some ways because I know that I’m doing the things I should be doing.  It’s a happy tired because I’m seeking God’s help with my priorities.  I’m not doing them perfectly but I’m getting better and that is all I can control.

So I’m off to try again tomorrow, to remember to pause in the middle of things and remind myself that this is it, that now is the time to find something to be happy about.

Life is good!
Jennifer

I feel a little lost tonight, like I’m not sure how to bridge the gap between the busyness of daily life and the direction I want so much to move myself and my family in.  January felt SO good, like I was on target and moving consciously in that direction.

February feels like an exercise in detours thus far.  Terribly important detours, which are essential to focus on, but which I’m also getting tired of.  All of them are just part of being a mother and I understand that.  Yet I feel like I’ve got a lot of detours facing me right now, creating a web of sorts that I need to figure out how to navigate while at the same time having no idea where they’ll lead.  On the one hand I’m grateful for things like Parent/Teacher conferences, but on the other hand I hate the way they throw off  the entire day, and I hate that almost every day this month has presented things like this.   I guess what I’m trying to say is not that I resent these things, but that it’s hard to focus on things I feel strongly I should be doing and ALSO respond to what the rest of the world wants me to be doing.  It is the tension between those two pulls that drains me.

The sports schedules for my oldest two children have hit us in the face this month, coming about 5 weeks earlier than it typically has in the past.  Part of it; indeed, much of it, is simply due to the mild winter we’re experiencing.  The rest of it is that they’re just getting older and since they’re my oldest I didn’t know it would hit when it did.  I hate subjecting my younger children to so much time in the car, especially around the dinner hour when they all fall asleep and wake up later screaming, but I have no choice.  I’m finding that all of them have been behaving a little differently, revealing in their individual ways the strain of adjusting to their Dad’s new work schedule combined with a long commute after having him work from home most of the time for a few years.  Everyone misses him, myself included, and I’m finding it difficult to be a one man show AND get the driving done AND get the homework done AND get dinner on the table AND deal with all the surprises of teen-aged behavior AND be pleasant and happy and read bedtime stories and so forth.   I feel like I’m feeling drained and I need to adjust faster to it all.  Having everyone a little bit edgy hasn’t helped.  Oh well.  I’m so grateful he has a job again.

One of the goals I set for myself this year was to experiment with my cleaning routines and have a good housekeeping schedule in place by mid-February.  Well, I’ve tried to do that, and here’s what I learned:  if I spend EVERY MINUTE inside my house on cleaning, the house will look ok after a few days.  If I miss even one day of that, the house will look trashed.   So pretty much I have a clean house OR I get other things done, not both.  I figure it’s mostly an indication of my stage in life combined with the intensity of having a large family and the surprises of a youngest child who is positively adventurous.  Honestly, the rest of the school year will likely be wild, so I simply need to do my best.

Although I feel a bit weary I will say that good things happened.  Once more, I got a few essentials done on the weekly list, which was no small task.  I made HUGE progress yesterday with one of my children, faced a massive personal fear and (hopefully) put it away where it belongs, got my daughter off on a weekend trip for her soccer team, sent my husband and son out the door on a campout, facilitated playtime with friends for multiple children, watched a friend’s children for a little while, tried to offer a listening ear for a friend in need, chatted with an old friend about life in general, spoke to another wise friend, and so forth.  It really was a good week.  I guess I’m just frightened that I’m not getting enough done.

On the daily list, once again I feel like a lot of things fell apart because of what we have going on.  But I’m reading my scriptures and so it’s ok.

As I type this I realize that this week I lost sight of my vision for 2012 as a joyful year.  Too many days were spent just getting through instead of seeking things to be happy about.  I forgot that my specific lists of things to do aren’t the goal by themselves, but an effort to find more joy in daily living.  Remembering this is top priority for my new week.

It’s late and I’m dozing as I type.  Can I just tell you how thankful I am that I don’t have to get everyone out the door for school in the morning?  I haven’t folded laundry yet and there’s nothing like looking for school uniforms in a haystack like that.  Hooray for President’s Day!

Have a joyful week!
Jennifer

We’re wrapping up a wonderful weekend.  My parents flew into town on Saturday and we’ve had such a wonderful time with them.  Because they were here, I also saw both of my brothers and my sister who live in the same state this weekend, something that rarely happens.  We watched a futsal game, impromptu piano and violin performances, helped with homework, poured a big bag of Chick-fil-a sauce on my kitchen table and watched to see how many packets it takes to feed 13 people a meal, shared stories, laughed.  We played a lot of ping pong games, talked and laughed some more.  Today we gathered with my brother-in-law’s family for a special occasion I’ll not soon forget, followed by a delicious dinner.  We watched cousins play together and make friends, talked to people we haven’t seen in a long time, oohed and aahed over my newest nephew, watched a group of girls put on a makeshift skit in the basement, played Acquire.  It was a joyful weekend, to be sure.  I’m not starting the week organized, but we’re all starting it happy.  I just hope that happiness is enough to balance out the overtired tendencies of my childrens’ bodies tomorrow.

The rest of the week?  Well, the fact that I haven’t posted once on this blog in almost a week is a statement of its own.   It was a hard week.  More appointments, more commitments, tighter schedules.  Longer hours for my husband left me with crying children every night.   On Tuesday I got hit with an ugly cold that made me feel pretty lousy for most of the week.  Let’s be honest:  crying children and a sick Mom aren’t the best combination.  I didn’t know you could mess up your neck and back from sneezing, but I’m here to tell you it’s possible.  I worked hard to keep people moving but felt like I was in a mental fog most of time.    I also chose to spend every spare minute working on housekeeping.  I made great progress in that area but lost ground in all my personal goals.  I did manage to make a birthday gift for my niece, which she’ll receive a week late, but which was enjoyable to make.

Some hard things happened this week, things that broke my heart and took a lot of restraint to handle properly.  Life is just so tough sometimes.  But you get through it and move on, and you remember that your family represents the group of people you’ll have to count on all your life; everyone else is temporary.

There were some good moments.   Once again I did really well on my weekly list.  I’m trying hard to make certain things a priority and hope that soon they’ll be habits.  A really great moment came on Wednesday night when we finished an appointment and went to get some dinner as a family.  The ten of us sat smashed around the bench in a corner booth, the table covered with drinks and food and I looked around and felt so happy to be where I was.  I was so grateful they were all mine.  The only thing that could have made it better was a camera.

So I’m walking away from the week with a lot of things undone, but also with the satisfaction of having worked hard all week long on things that matter.  I was invested in the right places this week and it feels great.  That said, I still hope next week is nothing like it, and I hope I get a lot done.

Life is good.  Have a great week!
Jennifer