Did You Miss Me?

Where have I been all of this time, you are probably wondering.  Well let’s see…months of town celebrations with our business and family reunions on both sides of the family, youth conference and girl’s camp and two nephews’ weddings and a brother in law’s to boot.  A little boy’s baptism, can you believe my Sam is so old, oh and sending a boy off to college, can you believe I am so old.  Soccer games and two weeks of canning all along with back to school gigs at BYU for those same two weeks.

I have felt the guilt that I should be doing a lot of things.  I should have kept up the garden and the flower beds better this summer, for that matter I should have mowed the lawn, good grief it looks like a jungle out there.  I should have kept up with the house and did more projects with my girls and played ball with my little boy and oh, yeah, I should have blogged more.  Oh, the guilt has been there and as I finished washing dishes and mopping floors this afternoon it has been tugging at me that I should get back to writing.  So here I am.  I don’t know if you have missed me, but I sure have missed you.  From all over the world you read, I know, cause I check my audience page to see.  Almost every country now except for China and North Korea, oh and Syria, Iran and Iraq.  That’s a lot of places and it sure has been a lot of fun to see where all of you come from.  I wonder…do all of you live the same kind of blissful normal ordinary life that I live that keeps you wonderfully happily insanely busy and exhausted in the most wonderful way all of the time like I do?

This week things have slowed for a bit.  The kids had a half day of school today so the happy sounds of children came a little earlier today.  Sam asked me this morning, “you were sad when we went back to school, weren’t you.  I could hear it in your voice when we left.”  Of course I was, but boy was I ready for the normal routine to start again.

Motherhood continues to be the one thing that brings me the most joy but seems to be the one thing I just haven’t gotten to be a pro at yet.  Every child is so different and just when you think you’ve got them down they change and grow a little bigger and have a little more grown up of problems, and gosh darn it I’m still trying to figure out my own problems yet.

I do however feel like I am becoming close to pro in some other things.  I am really good at washing floors and scrubbing down those sticky granite counters, I’ve almost got the fly problem under control, and oh, yes, my food storage is almost back to full capacity only two years after living off of it solely for 18 months.  Yes, almost no one is a better food deal shopper than me.  Two years to fill up completely demolished food storage for 8 people all the while still feeding those 8 people on around $400.00 a month.  And I am here to tell you, we eat really well too!  I’m a pretty great cook.  Not bad I must say.

So I guess I could either gloat over how great I am on those few things or I could focus on how lousy I am on the others, but in reality I think I am like everyone else.  Stumbling and failing and learning and soaring all at the same time, and oh yeah, that fly problem, maybe I’ve not got that quite as under control as I thought.  The same stupid fly has been buzzing my head now for the last few minutes.

I’ve said this in days past and I told my awesome Laurel’s this yesterday at church, God loves us and he didn’t put us on this earth to fail.  He wants us back.  So, knowing this I think I will gloat a little over the things that I can do and the other failures well maybe I will pick one to feel guilty enough about to improve and grow and the others can wait on the back burner until I become pro at the first one.  Until then I won’t feel guilty or like I am hopeless, like that stupid fly that keeps buzzing my head, I will get to them, and I will perfect them in a normal time with normal setbacks along the way, because God wants me home and he’s gonna help me improve and get back to him.  And oh, yeah, that fly… I just clapped the darn thing between my fingers and he is lying quite peacefully dead on my bedroom floor.  Check that one off of my list of failures.  See I’m improving as we speak!