bsmiles and sunny days

It's a curious situation that I find myself in today... The little girls are in Emporia.  The big girls are in Richmond.  Dale and the boys are at the Legends, and the babies are napping.  I am alone. All alone. As the door closed behind the boys, I found myself in a little bit of a dilemma.  Sitting down on the floor with Moses, my phone sucked me in to the wretched Facebook time suck.  It was only for a few minutes, but when I realized my situation, I got to work!  Picked stuff up, wiped stuff off, cleaned stuff up, put the baby to bed, hopped in the shower, and boom.  Here we are. I adore my family.  I live for them. However,  It's just it's a rare moment that I find myself not in high demand.  No hustle.  No bustle. No cooking.  No cleaning. No questions, no snacks, no drinks, no diapers. No lists.  No search for missing shoes.  No diplomacy. It's just me, all alone with my thoughts, savoring a moment of blissful quiet. My busy life is a happy one, even when it'

Every time I talk to someone that I know only on a casual basis they say, "So how are you?"  My classic response is, "We are good!  Just busy.  Always busy..."  I hate always busy.  I do! Let's be clear about something.  My life can't be not busy.  I have two teenagers, two adolescents, two grade schoolers, a toddler, and a breastfeeding baby.  As of today we have 12 pets.  I am responsible for feeding nine other people three times a day which is twenty-seven meals a day.  That equals like five hundred dishes.  Plus there are a thousand loads of laundry to do, and about a million questions to answer... every day.  Not to mention the diapers, the baths, and the cleaning.  That's just what happens inside these four walls! I don't prepare all those meals, or wash all those dishes, or do all that laundry.  You know I'm dramatic.  I still have to manage the chaos even if I'm not solely responsible for it! I am a homebody.  If I could just stay her

It feels so much better to DO STUFF. The past months, I  mean year, I have been sort of living in survival mode ... doing laundry because I have to ... cleaning up but not really cleaning ... making meals, but not great ones... at the end of the day sitting with Dale playing games on my phone for hours. I have been blowing through the days just trying to get through them.  There are the occasional good days, of course.  Not that each day wasn't a good one, but my... performance as the manager of all things domestic was not good most days.  Now the baby is sleeping hours and hours now.  The preschoolers are entertaining each other.  The girls are doing a lot more cooking.  I am finally getting all the balls in the air again!  Hahahaha.... don't judge me.  It was an analogy to juggling, and you knew it! SO anyways... the very mention of not really reading my Bible was enough to compel me to get my Bible out.  I think about this all the time. Living life with a Biblical worldview

Today I took the kids to the Baptist church here in town for, potentially, our last Sunday. It made my heart sick. I grew up in the church that raised me. By that I mean the people there visited my mom in the hospital after my birth. They attended my birthday parties growing up. The kids that were in the nursery with me were also in youth group with me. It felt like home. To this day after attending churches for almost 20 years, I have yet to experience anything comparable. Fremont Calvary Temple was close, but that was a long time ago. It grieves me to think that my children won't have the same experience. They've not known a church family, not in the way that I did anyway.  The mentor chaplain warned us that we would have a difficult time fitting in at a church because of Dale's work. His schedule doesn't accommodate typical church attendance, so we have to go on our own. The kind of work he does goes unseen, and therefore it goes unacknowledged. It's not that he

HEEEEEEEYYYY GIRLS! I am starting to feel alive again.  Seriously.  I go so under after I have a baby.  Like, I cleaned my kitchen this week.  It was dirty.  It took hours and days, and I still haven't wiped out all the cabinets.  But I want to, see, that's the difference.  I scrubbed the floor on my hands and knees and cleaned the windows with last year's hand prints on them. It's so much better in there.  You should come over. I am getting creative again.  The drive to create something is taking over.  I actually bought some stuff to redo at the thrift store today.  They are just lampshades, but I am doing something that is not baby or child related, which is like coming up for a breath after AAAALLLLL THEEEESSEE  MONTHS! I miss writing.  I think about writing every day.  I bemoan the fact that I haven't written anything in months almost everyday, sometimes out loud, sometimes not. And hey, here I am!  Writing!! I think about reading my Bible all day long.  I grab