HappyMama

I like to have the house a little extra tidy for Sundays.  It helps me relax and enjoy the day.  (Hence, if you’ve read my earlier posts on scheduling & priorities, you’ll understand why I schedule cleaning bathrooms & windows on Saturdays.)  This past Sat. night hubby took our oldest child to a ball game, and the infant was sick & sleeping.  I decided to finally get the kitchen floor mopped.  The 2-year-old could “help.”

Everyday (sometimes twice) I sweep the kitchen floor.  It often needs mopped, too, but I have this mental hang-up about mopping unless I’ve first swept.  And if I’m going to sweep in preparation for mopping, I always think, well if I’m going to go to all this trouble then I should wipe the table, high chair, and counter tops first, because you know when wiping them crumbs will inevitably fall on the floor.  But before I can do the wiping, the dirty dishes must first be removed & piled in the sink, the recyclables put away, the trash thrown away, the pb & j put back in the pantry.  And by the time I do all those things, I’m too tired to mop.  So it doesn’t often get done.

Sunday morning was not fun for me, because I had been up most the night with my little one (who couldn’t breathe through his little nose,) but seeing that clean kitchen certainly helped my mood.  I held my breath and waited to see how long it would last.  I didn’t have to wait long.

In the afternoon, I made smoothies.  With blueberries.  Outstanding nutritional value, but prone to staining whatever they come in contact with.  The baby was once again napping, so I crept down stairs for a few minutes while the kiddos enjoyed their snack.  Through the floorboards above me, I heard a lot of naughty giggling.

Five minutes into my respite, I headed back upstairs to see what was so funny.  After what I saw, this is what I imagine happened:

• 2-year-old spills a drop accidentally on the table.  Decides it would be fun to draw in the mess.
• 4-year-old thinks, “hey, that looks like fun!” and not-accidentally spills some of his drink, too.  He finger paints a landscape.
• 2-year-old is watching and absentmindedly wipes his messy hands on his shirt.
• 4-year-old sees the messy shirt and thinks, “hey, that looks like fun!”  And dips his hand in his cup & wipes it all over the front of his shirt.  Also thinks, “hey, mom’s not in here anyway.  I won’t get in trouble.”
• 2-year-old pours remaining smoothie all over the table and rubs it all over to make sure the entire surface is covered.  At this point, hysterics set in & smoothie gets rubbed all over the floor, the high chair, their faces, and their shirts. 
• 4-year-old hears mom coming and says, “quick, run to the bathroom and wash our hands!”  Also thinks, “I’m gonna get it.”
• 2-year-old follows obediently, but trips on the carpet in his hurry and smoothie ends up soaking into the fibers.  Mom witnesses this part.  Dad comes out of the bedroom - he also didn’t feel well and had been trying to rest.

What would you have done?  What should we have done?

Well, I’ll keep this brief.  Priority 5 is Everything Else.  God, Self, Marriage (Vocation), Children (Second Vocation), and then Everything Else.  Your occupation, your home, your community, your extended family, and so on and so on.  This is where the to-do lists seem to go on forever, if you don’t take time to reflect and prioritize these items.  There.  End of lecture!

A note on scheduling.  I have always been strongly opposed to structuring our home-life tightly.  After all, isn’t one of the benefits of being a stay-at-home-mom the flexibility to do what I want, when I want?  Well, not really.  Because I’m also naturally quite lazy and inconsistent.  I like to do things when I feel like doing them.  If I get a burst of inspiration, I’ll run around like mad, cleaning every corner of the house.  If I don’t, well hey, no one is scheduled to visit, so who care’s if it’s a bit of a mess, right? 

Wrong.  I have lists of things (mentally & written) that are my responsibilities.  They need to be done whether I feel like it or not.  My experience with the Missionaries of Charity allowed me to better understand the idea of a rule of life.  Regardless of all the miscellaneous variables they encounter each day, the sisters always keep the same schedule.  To the minute.  Mass, holy hours, mealtimes, rest times, rising times, and so on.  And all this, while caring for dozens of homeless AIDS victims around the clock, and without knowing where tomorrow’s food was coming from.  If I had joined a convent, I would have been handed a Rule from the moment I walked in, and it would tell me more-or-less what to do with every hour of my day. 

There are 4 benefits to scheduling your priorities into your daily/weekly/or monthly schedules. 

• First, you will consistently fulfill the obligations of your vocation, whether you feel like it or not, in a spirit of obedience to God’s will for you.
• Second, you will spend time reflecting on your time and figure out how best to put your priorities into your life in a way that actually works.
• Third, you will develop habits to help you live a more consistent life.
• Fourth, your children will benefit from knowing what to expect each day.

An example to illustrate:  Under my Priority 5, I know that my home needs to be periodically vacuumed.  Keeps the carpet in better shape, makes the house look better, and gets rid of sand dragged in by the kids, which is a pet-peeve of my hubby because it scratches the wood floors.  I have discerned that I should vacuum once a week.  So I looked at the family schedule.  Fridays are slow days here.  At 4:00 on Fridays we have clean-up time.  The kids put all their toys away and we clean up everything that is out of place.  That’s an ideal time to vacuum, because the floors are clean. So, Fridays around 4:30 I vacuum.  (Assuming it’s a typical day.  Flexibility is always an option for good reason, granted.)  What happens if Friday comes around and I’m grumpy, tired, hungry, or I feel like doing something else?  Well, then I pray for the grace to do my chores with a spirit of obedience.  That’s what made young St. Therese into a saint.  She had her rule to follow, and despite a hundred excuses she could have come up with, she determined each day to not only obey her rule, but to do it with as much joy and love as she could muster. 

I often fail.  Sometimes I need to re-evaluate my expectations.  Sometimes I’m just too lazy.  I’m a work in progress, but I’m trying to keep getting better each week, each month.  I know that my husband doesn’t always feel like going to work, but he still does it.  Just because I’m not on a time-clock doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have any accountability at home, either.  Which reminds me, it’s time to go start a load of laundry.  Ciao!

My sister-in-law has offered these great suggestions for nursing moms:

• A unique cover-up called the Nursing Apron.
• This delicious and reasonably priced herbal tea.

Thanks, Erin!

Kudos to the gals at CoffeeandDiapers  (2.27.07) for the recap of the Rule of 6.  Which I had never heard of, but I can see the value in passing on.  I’ve been there before - you’ve got this little baby/toddler in your arms and it’s only 9:00 in the morning and you start thinking, “what the heck am I supposed to do with him all day?!”  Here’s the answer.

In other news, I got to go tanning today.  Ten tanning sessions… my St. Valentine’s Day gift from a hubby who just keeps getting better at gift-giving as the years go by.  I don’t think I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, but there’s just nothing like 15 minutes without the kiddos, laying in a warm, quiet tanning bed in the middle of winter.  Thanks, dear!

My first child taught me how to give of myself.  24/7, to put the needs of someone else above my own.

My second child taught me to trust in God’s wisdom.  After 2 years of devoting myself to my first-born, God gifted us with another child… and how on earth was I supposed to “split” myself between them?  The first week, it seemed impossible.  My heart broke just a little bit.  But very soon I began to learn how beautiful brotherhood could be.  I learned to trust that with each child God wants to give us, He will also supply strength, knowledge, and joy.

My third child has taught me how to smile.  As long as he’s on his reflux medication, he’s all smiles, all the time.  Maybe 200 times each day, and even during the night, he looks in my eyes and smiles this huge, toothless, nothing-held-back grin.  I can’t help but smile back!  He’s breaking down my melancholic, ever-serious temperament and showing me how fun it can be to smile.  This weekend my husband was heading out the door and when I said “goodbye!”, I flashed a big smile - without even thinking about it - and it took him by surprise. 

I’ve never been good at smiling.  I’ve always been too “serious.”  I mean, right now, children are starving to death somewhere in the world.  Why should I be smiling?  When I lived with Mother Teresa’s sisters, I frequently spent time reading her writings.  Mother wrote a lot about the importance of smiling, and I always struggled with that teaching.  (The sisters didn’t!!  They were certainly some of the happiest women I’ve EVER met!) 

In her acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother mentioned smiling.  “You need to make an effort to know your poor,” she said.  They are strangers, but if you will take the time to smile at them, then love can begin to work.  “Let’s be willing to smile at one another.  Yes, a smile is the beginning of love.  And once we begin to love one another, the desire to do something more naturally follows.”

Once, a group of 14 college professors were visiting Mother in Calcutta.  Before they left, they asked her to leave them with a final piece of advice.  She said, “Smile at each other.  Take some time for each other in your families.  Smile.”  And one of them joked about how it can be difficult to smile at your spouse.  He teased Mother, “Are you married?”  And she said, “Yes, and sometimes I find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be so demanding!”

I have a beautiful image to include with this post, but I can’t figure out how to load it.  Was extremely simple to load jpgs with blogger… anyway, it shows two hands cupping together a mound of dirt, and growing out of the dirt, a tiny seedling.

A while back, I joined the Arbor Day Foundation and received 11 free saplings in the mail.  Unfortunately, they arrived about the same time as our 3rd child, and subsequently got tossed into the garage, where I hoped they would stay cold enough to survive until I got around to heeling them in somewhere.  Although the package clearly and repeatedly says, “open immediately!  plant immediately!” it was at least 2 weeks before I even remembered they were out there.  When I finally got around to opening the package, how disheartening to see nothing but 11 small, skinny sticks with a few little root hairs.  They were either dormant or dead.  Not expecting much, I planted all of them into one big pot, used some quality potting soil, and kept them watered well for 2 more weeks.  My husband liked to joke, “what nice sticks we’re growing!”

Imagine my amazement, then, when one day I noticed a tiny red bud leaf on one of the “sticks”!  And since that day, numerous leaves have grown on 7 others, and I have repotted them to continue growing until spring.  Amazing.  These seemingly dead “sticks” might someday be 30 feet tall, providing shade for even my very tall husband, and home to all sorts of little creatures. 

Recently I was listening to a talk by Johnnette Benkovic.  She used the word “dormant” to describe the faith of a baptized person who is not living a Christian life.  Immediately I thought of my little trees, and finally had the image I’ve been searching for to understand better the nature of faith.  I’ve long believed that faith is a gift from God.  And we believe that we receive this gift at the moment of baptism.  Yet, we all know people who were baptized but are clearly not living lives of faith.  There were long periods of my own life where it seemed all but impossible to believe in the existence of anything supernatural.  If faith is a gift, then why the struggle?  Because faith is alive, like my saplings, and must be nurtured in order to grow.  When we see a baptized person not living like a Christian, it is because his faith is dormant.  Faith grows in the soil of prayer (our own and that of others,) and with the “water” of the sacraments and the Scriptures.

I love nurturing plants, but infinitely more important than that is nurturing the faith of my children.  The growth of their faith isn’t clearly as evident as in my plants… how nice if we could somehow “measure” their spiritual progress!  Aren’t we so much more complicated than that, however.  Nurturing is what parents do.  With every act of discipline and every act of kindness, with every minute of wrestling and storytelling and diaper changing, we are nurturing our little ones, and praying that God will grow our little saints.