Writing In Prose

Ah, what a week.   It's been a doozy.   My husband worked this week about an hour and 15 minutes from our home installing a kitchen.   To save on gas money, he spent two nights at my aunts house.   Which, of course, left me for 3 days with the kids all to myself.   By Thursday, I was at the end of my rope.   On top of which, my husband thought was going to be a short day in which he didn't get home until 11 PM.   I think the expectation of him being home earlier on top of three days of fighting, complaining, crying, whining, etc just got to me.  

Sometimes, I tend to hide out in my hard times, not wanting to "bother" anyone.   Hence the reason I am able to write about this now.   I feel better today and now that we're on Christmas break, I hope the next few weeks will go better than usual.  

I been overcome by feelings of failure lately.   Like I am doing irreparable damage to my kids in my emotional roller coaster, lack of self discipline and lack of consistency.   I also feel so alone.... like every other mother out there has got it together.

So my husband and I ended up having a "spirited" conversation yesterday about everything that's been going on.   Neither one of us has a true gift of motivational speaking so it takes some working through to pick out the nuggets of good information that are put forth.   But he did have some nuggets.   One of the main ones was to start thinking in prose.   And I thought, well I already do that considering prose is the ordinary form of spoken or written language.   Then I realized, he wants me to think in pros.   Verses cons, of course. 

I've been very stuck on the negative lately.   No money for Christmas, my husband is working all the time, the kids are fighting, the kids are asking me a hundred, no a thousand questions, school isn't going like I expected, etc.   I forget to look at all the good things I have.   God has met our bills since I quit, I have been able to spend quality time with each of my children, I can play and read and chill with them, my house is cleaner (sometimes), I'm doing what God called me to do.   I've been living like the Israelites in the desert wanting to go back to slavery in Egypt, blaming Moses for all the pain and suffering.   When I focus on the negative I get irritable and just all around down.   It makes this mothering process a burden instead of the joy God intended it to be.  

I want to live in faith that we are continuing to do what God has for us.   I want to be blessed by my children and not burdened.   I want to enjoy the time while they are little, cause it won't be here forever.  

So a special thanks to my husband for putting up with this wall of "stuff" I lay out there and for getting through to my heart and giving me a better perspective.   You truly are a gift from God to me and I love ya tons.  

To any other mother out there that feels at the end of her rope... you're not alone.   I cried three separate times on Thursday.   I made dinner, served it to my kids and locked myself in my room.   I love them SO MUCH and I didn't even want to eat dinner with them, just so I could have a few minutes of quiet to myself.   I think I'm safe in saying, we've all been there and this too shall pass.  

Psalm 127:3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.

High highs and low lows

What a couple of weeks.   As you can tell from the title it's been a real roller coaster ride.   First I'll start with the highs.   I wasn't going to post this until the end of the month, but considering the second part of this post, I'll share my good news.    For 2010, we made a good effort to pay down some debt.   Unfortunately when we got to the end of 2010, I had no idea how much we had paid off.   I would have had to dig through a lot of paperwork to figure out what all of our debts were at the beginning of 2010.   Additionally, we acquired new debt in 2010 after purchasing a car, so it definitely off-set the balance.   Near the end of 2010 is when we really headed in the direction of me quitting in 2011 so the journey got really serious.   Last December I took a tally of ALL of our debt.  It was BIG.   But now, I fortunately can see the progress we've been making.  

I was really excited about determining where we ended up this year, so I couldn't wait until the end of the month.   So here's the bottom line... From 12/28 last year, to early December this year, we paid off over $15K on debts.   That's principal balance!!!   I'm ecstatic!   Who knew?  Granted, now that I've quit, we anticipate that the pace will slow down considerably and we still have years ahead of us to get completely out of debt.   But I felt pretty good about the progress we made this year.   Just goes to show what we can do when we put our mind to it.... and have God's blessing of course!!!

So onto the lows...  I guess I'll just get right to the point.   Well maybe not... my husband has been working at a local computer shop for about 15 months.    Business has been slow.   My husband's old boss decided to sell the business to one of the employees.   Ownership changed Oct. 1 of this year.   Because business was slow, my husband's schedule had been part time to full time and then back to part time.   He is currently working 2 days a week.   Because he was only working 2 days a week, he's been picking up tons of construction work. 

Side story... since the construction has been picking up.   My husband has considered going full bore into business.   We've been praying about what to do.   My husband went on a hunting trip recently and had lots of time to pray and seek the Lord sitting in a tree.   He told me he didn't feel like he was supposed to stay in computers.    This is a little crazy for me, because about a year and a half ago we had a discussion about where to go and decided computers was probably a good avenue.   So here we are having a similar conversation again and going in a completely different direction.  I truly left it in the Lord's hands.   My husband is the head of our house and I want to follow his leading, but I also needed to know from God which way to go. 

So to the point... my husband got let go from the computer shop.   The new owner recognized that only being there 2 days a week, this job was not as important to my husband as it was before.   He also recognized that he could not pay my husband in the salary range we need to support our family to bring him back full time.   So of course I'm bummed to lose the income from this job... especially since it was guaranteed income compared to the ups and downs of construction work.
So that's my story.   Always a new adventure.   It's going to be an exciting ride.