I am tired today . . . the result of a week of late nights spent working on our ward directory (yes, a month late). Even last night when I had everything done I needed for the day, and my exhausted body collapsed into bed, I didn’t go to sleep. I feel anxious about night time hours – especially the ones that aren’t committed to a project – they are precious, and squandering them on sleep feels irresponsible.
As I type this Calvin, his friend Grant, and Everett are hovered around the Leap Frog game that Cal got for Christmas. Everett is wearing nothing but a sweatshirt and grey underwear. He is potty training, and really doing very awesome. Except today. He’s on this third pair of under-roos.
Olivia is rollerskating behind me. Back and forth across the tile kitchen, the wheels echo making the kitchen sound like the inside of an airplane engine.
And she’s explaining the finer points between “chicken dinner” hot lunch, and “chicken nugget” hot lunch. I’m listening while I type. I multi-task.
My choice at this moment in time is two fold – try and come up with something interesting/fun/meaningful to say on this blog, or go mop the kitchen floor (which DESPERATELY NEEDS IT btw).
But I’m so tired I’m not sure I can muster the mental courage to tackle one more task.
The house is pretty clean other than that – ready for the weekend, when I “don’t clean” – it’s in quotations because I always say “I don’t clean on the weekends” but that is a total lie. I clean every every every day. If I went just one day without it – oh boy, I can’t imagine. But I do clean significantly less on weekends. You should just see my house on Sunday nights.
Today I had non-pregnancy-induced heart burn for the first time in my life. I ate some jalepeno poppers for breakfast (breakfast of champions!) and apparently my heart doesn’t like that much heat before 10 am. My body is starting to break down in my old age. That is the strangest thing to realize.
It has been a long cold month. Today we broke freezing for like, the first time in three weeks. It’s been between 5-10 degrees every morning when I take Olivia to the bus. I don’t mind winter. I don’t mind January. It is my time to catch my breath from the crazy busyness of every other month of my life. But I am tired of the cold. Even in the house I am always cold.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “Faith of our Father’s” . . . I don’t actually assign this phrase to mean that the inheritance of my faith came only from my male progenetors. But it is something I wonder about – the evolution of my own faith, and the cultural shifts found in faith (my faith, America’s faith) in the past two centuries since a young boy first saw God the Father and his son Jesus Christ.
But the other night I was watching a scare-you-silly documentary about the future of America’s economy (among other things). I remember walking up stairs to go to bed, and thinking about those stark predictions. I thought about getting a job.
But then I wondered about the impacts of leaving my children to otherwise strangers for the bulk of their daily interactions.
And then I realized, my better option in this is to have faith.
I don’t think that being a stay-at-home mom is the only way (or guaranteed way) to raise successful, faithful, functional children, but I do believe it is the easiest (and most likely) way. I have faith that the sacrifices Wyatt and I make to give our kids a mom at home will earn us some merit of celestial protection if dooms-day ever arrives.
And this is the heritage I give to my children – the faith of their mother.
Now I really should go mop my floor.