Core Truths

I am going to keep tonight’s post short and sweet and still well worth your time. See, I am currently on a winter trip with my hubby and our five kids.  What you should know about this trip is it is in the winter…and we traveled north…to the cold.  What you should also know is that I really hate the cold.  I hate winter actually.  There aren’t that many things that I know for sure just aren’t for me, but the winter and the cold are for sure not for me. But here I am.  Thankfully, it snowed and snowed here last week and now it is actually relatively mild…so that’s good.  We did drive up a mountain yesterday to find snow…that was good for the family.  Once our four-year-old discovered snow is very cold and wet (and quite miserable) when it melts, he needed someone to sit with him in the warm car while the others played…which was also very good. What you should also know is to get here we drove 15 hours in our small SUV with all seven of us c...

It takes little explaining on my part to tell you this is a busy time of year, a busy season, a busy week, and a busy day.  We are on the brink of Christmas morning…even closer to Christmas Eve when many families begin to celebrate.   My current situation is wrapping paper strewn across my bed, bows and ribbons are littered across my comforter, bags from stores are tucked in corners of my room each stuffed with price tags and plastic wrap.  From one end of my room to the other are remnants of wrapping paper and tape, bits and pieces, cut off and left behind.  In the next room is my family, immediate and extended, all together, the football game on TV,  the little kids playing dress up, others are making little necklaces.  Dinner is cooking on the stove. There’s so much happening and still so much left to do.  It is easy to be anxious, to worry if everything will get done in time, to worry if everyone is taken care of, to worry if I bought ever...

Oh, the holidays.  A time to be happy, and together, and giving.  A time to be thoughtful, and grateful, and cheerful.  It also tends to be a time of stress and worry.  A time to be short-tempered and irritated.  A time to be worked up and overworked.  But I really do not think that it has to be that way.  Trust me, I have spent plenty of holidays in a bad mood, but I have realized that most of that is my own doing and I can easily undo that or do it another way.   I have compiled a little “Dos and Don’ts” list for the holidays.  If decking the halls leaves you feeling like you are going to deck the next person that asks you something, this may be for you.  Since I am a person that practices what I preach, these are things that I have either learned to let go, things I have learned to do or stop doing, or things I am working on this year through constant self-reminders and some strong self-talk! DO: —Do smile at the sales asso...

This week has been one of the hardest weeks. It’s been more than hard, but right now, that seems to be the only word I can come up with to describe it.  It has been one filled with much grief and sadness, and one where we have had to learn to trust the reckless love of God even when we do not understand. Like the rest of the country, we woke Saturday morning to the news of the death of former president George H.W. Bush.  I immediately began to read the most recent articles, written only hours before, which highlighted the remarkable life of the humble public servant.   Like the rest of our friends, neighbors, and school community, we woke on Monday morning to the news of a car accident very nearby in the very early morning with a single fatality.  As our kids woke for school, we shared the news with them and we all said a silent prayer for whomever would have been involved.  As the morning went on, more details of the unfortunate accident emerged, inclu...

Sometimes I am just frazzled! I mean, I am all about “let it go” and “just be patient,” and I truly believe those things, and I do practice what I preach.  But sometimes….   Like last Thursday night.  Hubby was out of town, I had all five kids to myself, and they were all rowled up!  We had frozen pizza for dinner yet the kitchen was still a disaster.  We had our four-year-old’s birthday party here at our house nearly a week earlier, and the house still looked like the party-goers had just left.  The little kids wanted to sleep in my bed since hubby was gone, which was fine, but then they cried forever before going to sleep saying “It’s scary in here!” The teenagers were all on their phones and were laughing at memes and listening to the latest rap songs.  It’s cool that they were all getting along, but then again, it was super annoying…because they were just so loud!  The 12-year-old was still getting over a cold.  I was glad she was fe...

Be Patient.  We hear it, we say it.  We tell it to others, we even tell it to ourselves.   Be patient.  But what does that mean?  How do we do it?  And how do we know we’ve been patient long enough? Like many of you, I was asking my family to practice patience this week while we were cooking Thanksgiving day.  My goodness, they were so ready to eat and we weren’t quite finished cooking yet!  But here they would come, their pitiful little faces, asking if it was ready.  And when I kept telling them, “No, not yet,” then they started snooping around, looking for anything that was cooked.  Then they started asking if they could just have a snack!  A snack? After all this, no way! You think I’m going to let days and weeks of planning go down the drain so you can have a few chicken nuggets or a corn dog? I don’t think so! I love my family, and I had worked really hard to make their day as special and delicious as I possibly c...

Be Thankful. Want to know how to get more out of life? Be thankful.  Want to know a secret to happiness? Be thankful. Want to really enjoy this holiday season? Be thankful. This is definitely something I am working on, and something that I have to constantly remind myself to do, but like all other things, I am a work in progress.   I think sometimes it can be easy to worry about what we don’t have or what we didn’t do, but I think everything can change when we instead focus on what we do have and what we can do! So this year, instead of complaining about mopping floors and cleaning toilets as we prepare for our family to arrive this week, instead I will think about how blessed we are there are people in this world who choose to spend their time with us, and I will be thankful. I will not fret and become frustrated with the crowds when I am wrapping up my grocery shopping, instead I will think about how fortunate we are to be grocery shopping in the first place...

“For better or worse, in sickness and in health…” Our marriage vows.  So much said and not said in these few words.  One of the fun things about marriage is learning more about your husband or wife as the years go on.  Things they like and don’t like and all their little fun facts and quirks. Things that maybe seemed like small interests at one point that gradually develop into…well, more than you thought! I guess I should have seen it coming.  I can identify first signs all the way back to before we were even engaged. Heck. We weren’t even dating at the time.  Then over the years this interest of his just got bigger and bigger, more and more.  It’s funny because it’s really only noticeable for about eight weeks out of the year.  The other 10 months it’s like our little secret…boxes stacked in the garage and in closets…tubs in the attic and slid under our bed.  A little secret that is no secret the day he flips the switch. Yes, my husband...

I’ve got three words for you….Keep.  It.  Real.  I am going to take my own advice and keep it real with you now. For the first time since I’ve started blogging, I have hit a writer’s block.  I mean, I have ideas and I have things to say, but they’re just not all coming together.  I start and then I stop.  I write and then I don’t write.  I like it and then I hate it. See, I usually write all during the week, spend some more time on it on Sunday, and then post.  It’s so much fun!  But this week just didn’t allow time for all that writing.  My week started off helping set up a haunted hallway one day and being rear ended another.  The end of the week was wrapped up with all of the kids being out of school for teacher in-service.  That one day somehow threw off everything else.  And surprise, turns out it was already Halloween this week.  I mean, I knew it was coming, and for the most part we had everything all ...