Category: Yearly Goals

Wow.  Here we are, eight weeks into the year.  I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to spring.   I’m excited to spend time outside, plant a garden, see my neighbors again.  I hate the way winter makes you feel like you’re the only people living on your street.  I’m also a little bit panicked about it because it’s soccer season, which means that I get nothing else done for 8 weeks.  I’m running behind!  Why is it that I don’t simply adjust to “behind” schedule?  I wonder if my life would be less stressful if I expected it.


Really, it was a wonderful week.  Full of both expected and unexpected events, as I look back to evaluate I’m a little bit amazed that we fared as well as we did.

Are you ready for a disjointed summary?  Here goes:

Monday:  President’s Day, children home from school, husband started a new job, my Dad flew to town for a funeral, went out to lunch with a friend, attended the viewing with my Dad (these last two were wonderful, but they also meant several hours away from my family with my 12 year old watching the younger six).

Tuesday:  My dad left, five hours in the car driving children around.  Baby finds a fresh jar of jam on the kitchen counter (she now pushes chairs all over the kitchen just to check out the scenery overhead) and bathes herself, the counter, my cabinets and the floor in strawberry jam.  Big brother was “babysitting” a few feet away, but she’s learned how to go on “stealth” setting.  She gets really quiet when she’s up to no good.  Really tough experience Tuesday evening.  I was tempted to feel hurt and offended but I fought it off.  After I cried.

Wednesday:  Baby on disaster setting.  Into everything .  Favorite activity is climbing on the kitchen table to eat or break everything she can find.   Blue and Gold banquet.  Spontaneously took a friend out for ice cream while my huband took all 8 children home to get them ready for bed.  Yay for an understanding man!

Thursday:  Gone all day and all evening.  Had to take a second lunch to school for the daughter who lost hers, errands to run, copies to make, post office to visit.  After school brings gymnastics, etc. plus  Parent/Teacher conferences at the junior high.  Made dinner for the younger 7 children in seven minutes flat.  It was all the time I had.

Friday:  Three hours spent at the school for daughter’s spotlight and elementary grades Parent/Teacher conferences.  Friends come home with some children; others go home with friends.  One hour spent driving around delivering everyone to where they need to be.  45 minute date with my husband for a quick dinner at Rubios.  Long talk with an emotional daughter about life, standards, growing up and so forth.  My brother calls to see if he and his boys can fly to town the next day to stay with us.  Sure, why not?!

Saturday:  Son and husband snowboarding.  Stole a few minutes of sewing before I had to turn my office back into a guest room.  Clean the house.  Someone makes a sandwich and leaves the mayonnaise (brand new container) out on the counter for the baby to find.  She tastes it but decides it would make good lotion and I’ll leave you to picture the greasy mess that resulted.  My brother and his boys arrive.  Another brother shows up unexpectedly.  I wonder to myself, “why did I not start dinner 30 minutes earlier so I could just feed everyone right now?”  My brother leaves for the evening to go on a date and we watch the boys.  My other brother leaves.  Daughter plans a party at our house with her friends and invites them to come over in one hour.  Dinner is made, ten children are fed, six children bathed for church in the morning.  I race to the store for junk food.  Daughter’s friends show up.  I can hardly believe how loud 11 and 12 year-olds are.  Teen-aged son invites a friend over too.  My husband supervises downstairs while I go upstairs to get eight children to sleep while the older ones party downstairs.  The baby flips out and won’t go to sleep, but she also flips out if any of the kids downstairs look at her.  Two and a half hours later I get my nephews and sons to sleep (no help from my ten year old when he pours water on his five year old cousin’s face, pajamas and pillow just to be funny).  We get the baby to bed.  At 10:45 all the friends have left and we feel like we’ve run a marathon.  Somehow the tooth fairy managed to visit our six year old in the midst of it all.

Sunday:  By some miracle we get 13 people up, fed, dressed for church and out the door by 8:45 a.m.  I even managed to make a lunch for my brother and nephews to eat on their way to the airport after Church.  Baby throws tantrums at church (what’s new?).  Kids are totally wired and overtired all day but we don’t want them to sleep until bedtime.  EARLY bedtime.  Three year old falls asleep eating dinner.  We end the evening shaking our heads in wonder at the curve balls teens and tweens threw tonight.  Can I please raise my children in the 80’s?  This internet, cell phone, texting, Facebook world is a lot to worry about.

Too much to read?  Sorry.  I want to have it written down, though, so I can read it down the road and remember weeks like this.  There’s another reason for writing it all down, one that I’m slightly amazed by.  I spent more time than usual outside of our home for various reasons, which meant only a fraction of my usual time went to housekeeping.  I had only a few minutes here and a few minutes there.  Usually that means the family survives and the house falls apart.  It’s that price tag that has haunted me for the last four years.

This week was different.  For the past few weeks I’ve had three words as my housekeeping motto:

Maintain and Reclaim .  Every day I spend my time quickly maintaining any areas I was able to clean the day before, and whatever time is left I spend reclaiming some area of the house in need of help.  Tonight there is a bit more clutter all over, which is usual for Sunday night, but really the collateral damage is minimal .  All the areas that were clean a week ago are still clean, and they have been every day.  I think it might be working.  I just might have found a simple plan that works for my house and my schedule at this stage in life.  Time will tell, but I’m encouraged.  And an encouraged mother is a happy thing.

In a few minutes I’ll sink into my bed with a sigh of relief.  Yes, there are countless things I didn’t get to.  Yes, there are an infinite number of things I’d like to do.  But I feel like I did what needed to be done this week (with one exception:  exercise.  Totally blew it on that one) and managed a few extras.  My husband and I faced some parenting worries head on and we’re working on them.  It feels good to do that.   The oldest ones get lots of attention by virtue of their place in our family.  We had a lot of sweet moments with our little ones and spent focused time on the middle ones too.  My learning curve is still steep.  I still have a lot of moments when I feel like I’m being crushed by it all.  There is a quiet desperation that often squeezes my heart.  But I am going to do this.  I will not give up.  I will keep working at this.  I am going to learn how to care well for this family, to care well for our home.  I am going to learn how to thrive.

God sent me here to succeed.  And with His help and through the grace of Jesus Christ, I will.

Jennifer

I just went back and read last week’s entry.  I was so discouraged.  I worked harder this week to avoid discouragement, to remind myself how much God cares about what I am doing, and to strengthen my faith that he can, in spite of me , do what needs to be done in our home.  When I prayed I reviewed the day mentally and listed rewarding moments I had with each child, moments  that reminded me how great it is to be a Mom.  I thanked Heavenly Father for them.  It helped.  I feel encouraged.


I’m noticing a trend in how my weeks turn out.  Either I do a great job of staying on top of the housekeeping, laundry, organization and so forth or I do a great job of taking care of myself:  exercise, creativity, reading, etc.  I feel like the scale is just bouncing back and forth between the two, and I haven’t yet found a balance.  I’m becoming more convinced that the only way to balance it right now is to survive on 4 hours of sleep every night… which is, at this point in time, a certain recipe for a migraine.  I’ve tried to attack the house one day, then loosen up a bit the next to allow more time for balance but it doesn’t work.  The house falls apart in an hour if I’m not on the ball.

So this week was a house week.   Last Saturday I spent several hours cleaning the toy room and we stayed on top of it.  The children cleaned it every day.  The girls room that I excavated on Wednesday is still clean as well.  I’m moderately in control of the laundry.  The main floor has been cleaned a few times each day and I vacuumed the family room twice each day.  No, I’m not being obsessive.  It really does need it that often.  And yes, I clearly need to work on helping my baby keep food and crumbs in the kitchen so it doesn’t need it twice a day.  She’s a whirlwind, that girl.  On Friday night when we had the full-time LDS missionaries for dinner she picked up one of my favorite dessert plates and literally threw it across the kitchen like a Frisbee.  Of course it shattered into a thousand pieces all over two rooms and left the first real gouge in our floor (we’ve had dents but no raw wood with splinters sticking out until now).  Hello!  I was standing 2 feet away.  I just didn’t see it coming, that’s all.  So we vacuum a lot.  And sweep.  And enjoy lots of hugs and kisses from a darling little girl.

Do you ever feel like your house is being overtaken by paper?  I do, especially with children in school.  I think that lots of homes have paper dumping spots, and ours has been no different.  Our dumping spot is the end of the kitchen counter, close to the telephone.  A month ago I set a goal for our dumping spot:  not a single paper on the counter. I am happy to say that for one month I have gone to bed every night with a completely clean kitchen counter.  Every piece is shredded, thrown away, filed away.  I think I can claim it as a habit now, and it’s my first real habit of the year.  Small and simple, to be sure, but it contributes to cleanliness and order.  Tonight I am celebrating zero papers on my counter.

One last note on another habit.  I’m trying to regain the habit of thoughtfulness.  On Valentine’s day I called a couple who live in Gig Harbor, Washington.  I taught the husband while I was a missionary fifteen years ago and have kept in touch with them.  I’d been feeling like I should call them.  I learned that he had another stroke a few weeks ago, and that his wife is also struggling with her health.  We had a wonderful visit and I hung up the phone feeling so good .  I called my husband and said, “You know how I’m tempted all the time when the house is a mess and life feels upside down to just declare the day or the week a total waste?  Well, I just called Wes and Margot and it was the right thing to do.  The whole week is ok, no matter what else happens.”  I need to do things like that more often.

And so life goes on, each day providing opportunities both unique and routine.  I have high hopes for the coming week and all it holds.  I’ve miles to go, but I’m working at it.

Jennifer

Well, well.  I don’t know what to write.  I’m half tempted not to write at all.  Here we are, six weeks into the year.  Far enough in that SOMETHING should be taking form, right?  At least, that’s how I thought it would be.   Instead I find myself wondering if I have even a single good habit left over from any part of my life.   Does having good intentions count as a habit?

I remember my first post of the year, outlining what I had in mind, how I said that my heart wants to fly, to rise above the daily stresses and soar.  Well, if flying is the goal, then this week might be labeled “Crash and Burn.”


My patriarchal blessing tells me I have the gift of patience.  I still remember the day I got the blessing.   I was walking to the car with my Mom.  I remember how the Sunday sunlight filtered through the air.  She commented on the patience thing and mentioned how humorous it was to her.  Clearly it was a gift I had yet to develop.  In the years since I’ve had times when I felt I was able to summon incredible amounts of patience and persistence.  I felt that I had, at last, developed this gift.

Not anymore.  All traces of it seem to have evaporated with the year 2010.  I want progress, and I wanted it yesterday.  I’m tired of exercising, eating 7 servings of fruits and vegetables and drinking tons of water so I can read the exact same thing on the scale from week to week.  I’m tired of being up in the night with children.  I’m tired of sitting down to read a book at night but falling asleep before the first three sentences make any sense to me.    I’m tired of wondering how many years it will take for my children to stop fighting with one another.   Yup.  The only attribute I seem to have today is tired, and that’s not a good sign.

Yesterday my littlest one came down with another fever and I groaned inwardly.  Seriously?  Is that all we’re going to do for two straight months… be sick?!?

My three year old is currently running what I call “Night Time Drink Olympics.”  She takes a two hour nap, then wakes up to go potty.  Fifteen minutes later she wants a drink.  Fifteen minutes after that she needs to go potty again.  Repeat this every fifteen minutes for several hours.  For the first hour I’m pretty sweet.  The second hour it gets really old, and the third and fourth hours are just plain ridiculous.  It doesn’t matter if I give her the drink or not… she continues her pace.  Then, finally, at 3 am she tries a new one, “Mommy my ear hurts.”  A few nights ago I kept saying to her, “Lay down and close your eyes.  Don’t get up again.”   But she didn’t close her eyes and she did get up.  And then she was a monster all day long.

But you live.  Could that be another habit?  To simply live through it?

And then my baby reaches for me.  I pick her up and she lays her head on my shoulders, clutching me tightly around the neck with her little arms.  I whisper to her that I love her, that I’m sorry she’s not feeling well, and a little piece of my heart that is far too busy shouting about being tired quiets down and thinks that maybe, just maybe, it will be worth it someday.

And as I struggle to find something positive to write about my complete lack of both effort and success this week, my three year old joins me on the chair, tucks her arm through mine, lays her head on my shoulder and quickly falls asleep.  The soft rise and fall of her chest combined with the quiet whisper of her breathing and the tapping of keys on my laptop makes me want to close the computer and take a nap with her.  I must admit, being tired is much better if you have a three year old to snuggle with.

Sometimes I wonder where I got all my ideas about being a mother.  I was never into saying things like “I will never…” or “I will always…” but somehow I did pick up a bunch of assumptions that were, shall we say, false.  Many of them held up through babies 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.  Not so with 6, 7 and 8.  Everything I’d assumed about motherhood no longer helped with the great big group.

But if I underestimated the exhaustion, work, noise, confusion and stress I also underestimated the relief of having a baby who will still hug me when my teenager lists all the reasons he wishes he’d been sent to a different family.  I underestimated the sting of tears in my eyes when my eight year old sees me folding a mountain of laundry and quietly asks, “Would you like some help?”.  I underestimated the comfort of watching my daughter in the kitchen baking cookies for the family, and the unexpected hug from a four year old boy ninja.

I hope someday to fully conquer the temptation to feel discouraged.  It seems to be a daily visitor to my heart.  And in spite of the many moments when I feel like a total failure (and there’s nothing like feeling like you’re botching everything and knowing it will hurt 8 children that you love so dearly) I hope that someday I can make this claim:  I did not quit.

I can’t claim progress this week but I haven’t relinquished hope, either.

Oh, and I designed my 2011 Christmas cards.  How random is that?  I’m trying to learn from my mistakes, make them early, and send them out on time this year.  Nine months ought to be enough time to get them finished.

Hopeful Homemaker