Happy At Home

I always knew I wanted to be a mom and always knew I wanted to stay home with them. I had visions of happily teaching my future children everything they would ever need to know with smiles on our faces and laughter filling the house. I imagined matching bows in the girls’ perfectly combed hair and little boys who said “yes ma’am” and helped me take out the trash while skipping merrily down the driveway. 

You don’t even have to have your own kids to realize this dream would never be reality. We didn’t have to wait long after marriage because by the time we’d been married for a year I was 7 months pregnant with our first bundle of joy. A bright and bouncy baby girl made her way into our world and with her came my first dose of the reality of parenthood. 

There were smiles and laughter and giggles and even the occasional matching bow but there were also tears, so many tears. There were ruined outfits due to messy diapers and spit up and tired eyes and exhaustion. There was confusion and doubt and fear. So much fear. How was I ever going to manage to raise this human without completely ruining her? 

I had the privilege of staying home with my first baby, and then my second and eventually my third. I made this work by always baby sitting for one family at a time on a full time basis in addition to homeschooling my own children. 

Some days it felt perfect, it felt right. It felt like I was meant to be a mom and teaching them at home and like we would always have fun together, side by side as we discovered the world and each other. But, some days it was overwhelming. I felt like I was drowning in housework and homework and like I would never find myself again. I was busy all the time and felt like I had no time for myself. 

I knew I had to find a way to make it work. A way to salvage some joy in the mounting chaos that was life.. I realized I needed to figure out how to be happy at home. 

At first I thought I needed to redecorate and paint and love my environment. This produced more discontentment and so rather than being satisfied and fulfilled I was left feeling frustrated with not only my situation but every little thing started to bother me. And I mean EVERY LITTLE THING. Like the mail being laid on the counter in the wrong place, my husbands shoes kicked off next to the chair in the bedroom, the old couch  we still had from a yard sale when we were first married. I was going the wrong direction. I was growing more and more frustrated with everything and not finding any lasting peace or joy at all.

Eventually through a study I launched myself into through the Bible’s definition of the word “peace” I started to reevaluate what I had understood the word “peace” to mean. 

I thought that once everything was right in my environment, situation and other people changed enough, I could then be allowed to experience peace. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I noticed that in the Bible the word “peace” is actually described as something to strive for, to work for, to maintain. All of these are action words. Peace requires work, striving, and effort to accomplish. 

Peace needs to be achieved internally before it can be achieved externally. For me, internal peace is very much tied to my external environment. I feel the need to accomplish all my work before I allow myself to relax. The problem with this of course, is we all know the work is never really done. I was pushing myself to exhaustion and not finding any joy in all the in-between moments. I needed balance. Big time. 

I’ve been working hard on this for the past year. About taking a deep breath and sometimes letting the mess rest till morning. Sometimes the dishes sit in the sink. Sometimes the floor is just dirty. Sometimes the clothes sit in the laundry basket folded (or maybe not) waiting to be put away for a few extra days. I’m trying to learn to focus on one or two small things to help me relax and find some joy and peace despite not having everything all in order.  

The first one is that our house is constantly filled with music. If someone isn’t playing an instrument, then the other is singing. And if everyone is busy, we are definitely listening to music. Our favorite way is by using this speaker hooked up to Alexa. My husband got me this for Christmas and we all have been loving  it. We love to listen to music to get us going in the morning, to encourage dancing while we clean, or to calm us down after a rough day of school or work. Music is life in this house. 

I have a problem. A candle problem. I love, love, love the coziness that a candle can bring to a room. I also love the freshness a good scent can fill the room with. It literally centers me when I have a candle lit. Give me a cup of coffee, music playing and a candle lit and I can let any amount of chaos take over my life. Lol 

This one is a fun one. We have no “fancy” dishes in this house. I love to use what we have and not save anything for special occasions. A Tuesday afternoon is a perfectly good reason to serve snacks in beautiful dishes wouldn’t you agree? The kids probably don’t care, but mommy Is happy when a pretty table is set. Even if it’s just family and just a Wednesday night. Anything to brighten up our table, is welcome at my house. Because it can’t help but brighten your mood to eat off of beautiful dishes, right? 

Maybe you don’t care at all about how your table looks, or if you ever light a candle in your house again. What small things do you do in your life to brighten up your day? 

Waste Not Want Not

One simple thing that has stood the test of time and been proven to save money, is the practice of using what you have, first. Always. Our great, great, great grandparents would roll over in their graves if they knew how we waste and replace these days. We have lost an appreciation for the art of making things last. It’s so easy to toss and buy again that we don’t often have a real reason to work hard to salvage something. However, this was one thing I intentionally set out to be better at this year. I knew this would be one that would impact our budget and our life more than anticipated. When I thought I needed to go to the store and buy something, my challenge was going to be to look high and low and use some creative thinking to make whatever I could, work. 

This has manifested itself in a myriad of ways over the course of the last two and a half months. On day 8 or something like that my child brought me a white-out cartridge in literally a tangled web of white sticky string, and I immediately began walking toward the trash can. But just before tossing the valuable office tool into the white bag of decaying nastiness, I paused, looked at the disaster in my hand and sighed a heavy “this isn’t really what I meant” guilty sigh. It took me over ten minutes to sort, untangle, tie and restring that red plastic white-out dispenser. But I tell you what, I’ve never been so proud of my diligence. It worked, I no longer NEEDED anything again. I had solved the problem, solved the need and my list for the store remained at a balance. 

The same idea has come into play countless times in the last ten weeks. We think we NEED  to buy shirts for the upcoming parties at school, but I used materials we already had in the craft room and they came together beautifully and kept our hands busy on a snow day. Using this practice once or twice doesn’t add up to very big savings, but a habit of considering all options BEFORE purchasing something new, will lend itself to a surprising amount of money left in your pocket! 

Even though I’ve been meal planning, and we aren’t eating out, there are still days where things don’t go as planned and still times when the refrigerator has a random assortment of food left and it’s taken some major creativity to create a decent meal. Last week, this looked like baking chicken breasts in a bath of marinara sauce, shredding some mozzarella and spreading it on the top and naming the conoction “pizza chicken”. It wasn’t too bad, actually. This weekend however, it looked like making one of my absolute favorite things ever, overnight oats! I had some strawberries and raspberries on their last few days. Slightly soft, and ready to turn. I thought about just tossing them, and then I remembered this awesome make-ahead breakfast or snack! You just put the oats in the bottom of some glass jars or plastic containers, (about 1/3 cup) pour 3Tbsp milk onto the oats. Top with a couple spoonfuls of yogurt, sprinkle of berries and a drizzle of honey. Let sit overnight and enjoy! These are so great! My son and I love these and will take for lunch even sometimes. Also, bonus, they’re just so beautiful! It was the perfect way to use up some slightly mushy fruit and make use of every dollar I had spent at the grocery store!