At That Age

I am sure this happens for every woman at a different age or at least most of us women. The day where you actually need to put make up on to look and feel alive. I remember my mom talking about this when I was growing up and I had absolutely no idea what she meant.

I also remember for my 14^th birthday that my mom gave me a really nice Mary Kay compact of makeup. I knew she probably meant it as a special ‘welcome to womanhood’ present. But it was lost on me. I just didn’t have a whole lot of interest. I wore the basics but that’s it. Thankfully, my mom also taught me that natural beauty is the best so to always try to make it look like you don’t have any make up on. But that confused me too, why even put it on then?

I have girlfriends that love make up and are fascinated with it and they look like perfectly painted porcelain dolls. I just would never have the patience for that. I like it nice and simple. In fact, my cleaning regime can only have 3 steps or I just can’t handle it. Quick and easy is my motto in life.

In the past year, I have started experiencing the dark puffy circles under my eyes and have very much needed to start using some special crème and under eye make-up. I also found out that they make this stuff you can apply before your make up to keep it on longer and it actually works!

When I get up and look in the mirror, it kind of scares me. Is that really me? It doesn’t look like me! I love what I heard Cindy Crawford say years ago on an interview. “I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford”. Well, that’s reassuring. I have a whole new appreciation and understanding for that statement now.

It’s inevitable that the days you put on make- up to leave the house, you see no one you know. But the days you run out real fast to the grocery store or Target without a dab of make- up on, you run into people that you rarely ever see! They probably think to themselves, ‘Boy has she let herself go’! No, it just takes a little more time and effort to look good these days.

For a few women out there, they are make -up free and will remain that way their whole lives. I salute you and your liberation from it all. But for me, I mimic my mom in saying, “I just don’t feel or look alive until I put my face on”.

I guess, I am at that age.

Reframe, Retrain and Renew

I can make my husband sound amazing to you. I can list all of his best qualities, sweetest attributes and greatest characteristics. It would probably make a lot of women jealous and you might think, ‘I wish my husband did that or said that or was that way’. But then I can turn right around and tell you the negative things about my husband and I can make him sound awful. I can confide his bad habits, weaknesses and faults. And a lot of women might think, ‘Thank God I am not married to him, I don’t know how she deals with that or I am so glad my husband isn’t that way’. But you know what? He can turn around and do the same exact thing in regards to me.

This is also true for my own opinion of my husband at home. When I focus on all the positive things about him, I think, ‘I am so glad I married him’. I am warm towards him and he responds with warmth back to me. But when I focus on the negative stuff about him, I think, ‘Why was it again that I married him?’ and I treat him accordingly to my feelings and he wonders what is wrong with me!

Now, let me share something sweet and annoying about my husband all at the same time. He is very positive. He gives people a lot of grace and offers them the benefit of the doubt which can irritate this realist that he is married to. But I tell you what, it is great to be married to him because I can have a bad day and he just chalks it up to, she must not be having a good day.

He always thinks the best of me and says the best about me which causes me to bring forth my best. I want to do the same for him.

I want to learn how to reframe my thinking. Whenever I see a negative, I want to thank God for the flip side of that negative to make it a positive. So, I can constantly be thinking the best about my husband. For instance, if I get upset that he is working late again and missed a family dinner. I can stop right there and re- train my brain to think, ‘Thank you God that I have a husband who is a hard worker and thank you God that he provides for our family’. Or if he doesn’t want to order dessert or drinks when we are out to eat, instead of getting upset about it, I can think, “Thank you God that I will not consume as many calories while dining out.” Or how about “Thank you God for the ability to even go out to eat at all”!

Isn’t this exactly what the Bible is talking about in Philippians 4:8?

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy- think about such things.”

And in Romans 12:2

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Please God, help me to reframe my thoughts, re-train my brain and renew my mind about my husband so I am constantly thinking the best about him

Serve God

I have expressed in previous blogs that my heart’s desire my whole life has been to do ministry. All I have ever wanted to do since I was young was to serve God with all my heart. I would love to adopt a lot of kids and host a bunch of foster kids through my home and write books and travel on the speaker network to encourage women to seek God every day for their homes, families and lives.

At this point, I would just love to be able to help in the ministry for the RNC coming to town in Tampa, be a women’s small group leader at church, be on the speaker team at church and be a leader in the married’s small group with my husband. But we don't have any extra time in our packed full schedule with small children right now for any of that. I have big dreams and aspirations to be used by God in large ways to reach a huge amount of people for Him. I want to have an influence in this world for the kingdom of Heaven and to make a mark on history.

But you know what I spend most of my days doing? Dishes, meal preparation, grocery shopping, cleaning toilets, getting on my hands and knees to clean messes off the floor after every meal time, laundry, wiping bottoms and noses, washing hands and feet. Not glamorous.

But neither was the ministry of Jesus. Isn’t that almost exactly what Jesus spent His days doing? Serving the poor, needy, sick and destitute. In fact, His public ministry was only 3 years long and He was the Son of God!

“Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes Me; and whoever welcomes Me welcomes the One who sent Me. For he who is least among you all- he is the greatest.” Luke 9:48

I am doing the work of God every day in my home. I am serving my kids and my husband just like Jesus would. I am making a difference for this next generation. I am influencing my kids all the time. Whether that is serving them with an attitude of joy or resentment. They will know Jesus by my love through my actions.

The other day, I sat my 3 and a half yr. old daughter down in a chair and I was seated on the ground wiping the bottom of her dirty feet with a wet wipe. I told her to say “Thank you Mom, for washing my feet.” She responded with, “ Thank you Mom for washing my feet just like Jesus washed those people’s feet.”

This is the greatest and biggest ministry of my lifetime. My home is where I can put into practice my spiritual act of worship.

This is my calling and this is how I will serve God all the days of my life.

Gone are the Days of Laying Out

Trying to get a tan has taken on a whole new meaning as a mom. I have never been so white in my whole stinkin’ life! I remember being pregnant with my first child during the summer months and I would sport my bikini with pride and lay out on the floatation devices in our pool. I was on bed rest for 3 months so I thought relaxing in the water definitely fit into those restrictions.

That’s the last time I truly laid out in the past 4 years. Wait, except for my annual trip away with my husband alone and the annual ladies church retreat at the beach, so it does happen twice a year now.

Then my 2^nd child was born in the beginning of the summer so I didn’t feel like I could take a newborn out in the sun by myself while I chased an almost two year old around. Plus I was tired and summer in Florida is brutal. You are either drenched with sweat or rain, not fun especially with hauling two kids in and out of the car. Besides, you try to get everything done outside by about 10:30 am in the morning or  the humidity will suffocate you.

Also, in Florida we have these nifty screens that are built to go over your pool to keep all of the bugs, insects and other creepy crawly animals out and yes, there is always a story every year of how an alligator found his way from a neighborhood pond into one of our backyard pools or garage or front door step or just walking down the street. But anyways, the new screens have built in SPF to keep the sun out as well. It is great for the kids but bad for trying to get a tan while swimming with your kids.

Some of my more adventurous friends will go to the beach by themselves with two kids. That will not  be me until my youngest is at least 3 yrs. old. Way to stressful and way too much to carry.

 I do feel strong enough to venture out with both kids to the zoo, spray parks and regular parks. But there is no laying out. It’s more like running around in the sun while you try to catch some balanced rays on your body. But most likely, one side will get it and the other won’t or the top side will get it and not the bottom side. There is no tanning oil and reading materials while I sip on a tasty cold drink and maybe catch a few zzz’s. Oh no, It is all about sun screen, juice boxes, snacks, swim diapers, water shoes, and potty trips.

And forget about the cute bikinis. They might fall off or show my c-section scar so I guess its either a one piece swimming suit or tank tops and shorts. You know what that means, tan lines and a white stomach. Remember in college when the popular bumper sticker was, ‘Happiness is no tan lines’. What do they know anyways?

I will settle for tan lines if that means I have a tan! Maybe this year that will happen and then again, maybe not. Maybe I will have to wait until my kids are old enough to play in the water by themselves with no real threat or danger.

But for now, gone are the days of laying out.

Vacation

My husband and I try to get away just the two of us for a few days every year. His company used to take us on all expensed paid vacations and put us up at the Ritz Carlton in a different tropical paradise once a year but that was before the recession and before kids. There is no place like the Ritz.

Seriously, like we really needed a vacation before kids. What did we do with our time anyways when we were home? Anything we wanted to do, that’s what!

Now it’s a whole different ball game. It takes a lot of planning and preparing to go out of town. First, you have to take care of the kids and get them all situated and then you can worry about packing for yourselves. Which usually happens at the last minute and I usually forget some basic necessities like pajamas. Well, maybe that is not so much of a problem.

My husband and I just got to go away for our 6^th anniversary. It seems like our wedding was just a year or two ago. Then we watch our video and we look like kids except I think it’s having the kids that has aged us!

Anyways, I digress. Our time away was amazing. I mean, we slept in, ate in bed, laid out at the pool. We got to work out and play tennis together. We had maid service who cleaned up after us. We got to read and I got to blog. We watched movies, we did not prepare any meals. There was some serious rest, relaxation and romance going on. It’s scary to think how much I could have slept with those black out curtains and no children calling my name. We just go and go and go and don’t realize how tired we are until we stop and then our bodies respond by completely letting down.

Um, why don’t we do this more often? Money, kids, time, responsibilities, jobs. Oh ya, all of that. It’s called life and that’s why we need a vacation in the first place.

It is wonderful to come home to see those precious little faces that seemed to change in the few days we were gone, hear their voices scream mommy, feel their little arms around my neck and snuggle their bodies against my own. A renewed and fresh outlook on how blessed I am to be a mommy and be the one to care for my kids day in and day out.

Someday, our kids will grow up and move out. And it will just be the two of us again. That day will come sooner than we think. And we will have a lot more time to do all the things we want to do. Somehow, I think that we might actually miss all of this blessed chaos.

But for now, we will look forward to our annual trip alone together. Ahhhhh, vacation.

No Big Deal

With the first child, everything seems to be a major deal whether that is their first word or first step or first anything. It is monumental. Which goes the same for any little problems that might arise with sleeping or eating or physical developments especially with newborns. Poor little ones, they have so much pressure on them from us parents who want them so badly to be perfectly healthy and on pace with what the normal charts say.

We went through about a year or more where my oldest child just didn’t eat much. She liked crackers, bread and fruit, that’s all. But she was gaining weight and growing just fine. Good thing for her, I had her baby brother to care for at the time so I was just happy when she ate something.

I had some really good advice given to me from a mentor mom and she said to never label your children. She had a picky eater but she never called her that, she would just say, “That child knows what she likes and wants”. Thankfully, I followed this advice and you know what? My daughter grew out of her picky stage. Does she eat everything I put on her plate? No. But she eats a lot more balanced and healthy now.

I have to wonder if it is in part because I did not make a big deal out of it at the time. In fact, I tried the same approach when she went through her “I want to wear a dress everyday” phase and “I want 2 pony tails in my hair everyday”. I just went along with it and didn’t fight it. Some hills are just not worth dying on and these definitely qualify under that category. She outgrew those phases quickly.

I intend to use this approach for the rest of my parenting days. Even if we go through things later like “Mom, I want blue hair” or “Mom, I want to shave my head.” Come on peoples, hair grows back! Obviously, there will be limits and rules while they are under our roof. But how much of our kids antics are just trying to express their independence of us, yes even at age 2! And once they get to do that, it just becomes not a big deal anymore. Like not playing the sports we want them to play or taking those music lessons we want them to take.

I want to raise my children to be separate from me one day, to launch them out into society as strong, capable and wise young people. And how much of that can be cultivated just by letting them express their own uniqueness different and apart from me all while under the covering and protection of my own home.

How many less battles would go on in our homes even if they decide to paint their nails lime green or want to only wear a camouflage hat for a year.

As long it is nothing permanently damaging, maybe it’s really no big deal.

A Thankful Heart is a Happy Heart

This is a lesson we can learn from Madame Blueberry on Veggie Tales. She is so blue because she wants new things like her neighbors and friends have. The associates of the new Stuff Mart come to tell her that she can get happiness by buying lots more stuff. As she loads up several carts, they ask her if she wants to see the toaster ovens and…  

She answers, “I don’t think I need one”.

They say,” Of course you don’t need any of this, but you want it”. 

She has a revelation, “I want what that little boy and little girl have with one ball and one piece of pie and that is a happy heart”.

The associate responds, “Oh, we don’t sell those here”.

 When she takes all of her new stuff home and it is too much, her house cannot contain it and it falls off the tree and crashes into pieces. This is a cartoon people! But one with a powerful message even for us as adults. And then they sing a catchy tune at the end of the show of how a thankful heart is a happy heart.

How much of the consumption of our wants actually steal away our true happiness? Thankfulness for our needs provides everything our heart could ever want. Contentment with what we have is the key to unlock our happiness.

“Godliness plus contentment is great gain.” 1 Timothy 6:6

We usually don’t know what we have until we don’t have it anymore. I don’t want to be guilty of ungratefulness so God has to start taking things away to get my heart right. Things like health, family, food, shelter, friends, church, vehicles, beds, and many more blessings. As I write this, I realize some readers might not have all of these right now in their lives. Isn’t it when something is taken away, it heightens our ability to see what really matters. When we don’t have everything, we can appreciate the beauty of what we do have.

I don’t want to teach my kids how to live in this consumer driven lifestyle and allow a bunch of stuff to be a substitute of real happiness. I feel like taking away everything we own and starting over. Giving it to people who really need it. And learning to appreciate all the plenty we have filling our homes to overflowing. In fact, the fuller my closet gets of my beloved clothes, the more discontent grows inside of me.

The truth is my wants and needs blur together and often times, I have a hard time telling them apart. I have all I need and not everyone even has that. When I witness the homeless and needy in my own community, I am sickened with the greediness that threatens to rule my life. I am very close to getting rid of everything. I am rethinking the entire way we do life at this point. At what point is enough so that my house doesn’t fall down and crash?

God, please show my how I can teach my kids that a thankful heart is a happy heart.

Not My Girlfriend

We hear it said a lot at weddings, “I found my best friend of whom I will marry and love the rest of the days of my life”. And the blissful couple kiss and are whisked away in a car to live happily ever after.

And then reality happens. Bills, kids, house projects, moves, job changes, heart changes. And a lot of times we feel like we lose our best friend somewhere in the middle of all that mess. Those long late night conversations don’t happen much anymore and it becomes actual work to try to communicate.

We might start complaining about our husbands to our girlfriends. We might think, “Well, they understand me. Why doesn’t my husband get it?” Because he will never have the mind of a woman!

Our husbands are never going to think like a woman. I told one of my mentors one time that I wish my husband could just look at me and correctly assess my thoughts, needs and feelings. She laughed and told me that even after 45 years of marriage, her husband still could not do that! God did not make them to do this. This is what our girlfriends do.

He can be sweet, sensitive, kind, fun, loving, supportive, a great life partner and friend. But he will never be our girlfriend. He will probably never enjoy the frilly things and notice the relational details like we do.

Once we stop expecting them to understand and respond to us like our girlfriends do, the happier our marriages will be.

I know there are some couples out there who might buck the norm on this but that’s just like anything in life. We can’t generalize except to say God designed men to be men and not women. That simple.

My man is a wonderful husband, father, lover, provider, protector, encourager, partner, and friend.

But He is not my girlfriend.

Intentional Parenting

We all know the baby stage is harder than anyone could ever have prepared us for. But then they get to that one year old stage and they are just so darn adorable, we forget all about the bad stuff and try for another baby! Then they reach the terrible two’s or three’s where there is a lot of no’s and temper tantrums. Once again, we are pulling our hair out as we try to keep our child from breaking, throwing and destroying everything in our home. But then something happens between 3 and 4 years old. They become little people with their own little thoughts that they can express now. And you look at them and wonder, where did they learn that? Or where did they come up with that from?

The real parenting begins. How to train them up in the way they should go, how to shape and mold their little hearts and minds, how to equip them with cognitive thinking abilities to make good decisions on their own without us, how to appropriately socialize them to be able to get along and share and give to others, how to teach them to properly respect authority and how to tame their strong wills without crushing their personalities in the process. This is what my friend termed intentional parenting.

It would be easier to just try to make it through to the time they go to school. Yet, anything in life that is worth doing is worth doing well. And anything in life that is going to make a difference is going to take some good old fashioned hard work. Where we have to dig deep within ourselves and pull out some undiscovered diligence and strength. We can either choose to put our parenting on automatic and coast downhill or we can drive up the mountains on the road of inconvenience.

We have all seen children of various ages acting totally wild and inappropriately and thought, where are their parents? I never want that to be my children. We have also seen kids who exemplify exactly what we want our kids to turn out to be and we think what did their parents do to get their kids to be like that?

I encourage you to go ask those parents. There is no manual and there are no pat answers for each child but there is a lot to be said for wise counsel and advice. Especially if they have had more than one kid, they know each child is different.

There is a young man who is college age and who leads worship at our church and he is awesome. All of us moms at church want our sons to turn out like him. So, I asked his mom what she did. She said she spent a lot of time praying on her knees and spanked him a lot when he was real young.

Both of those things require a lot of extra time, attention, effort and energy. But you know what? I am willing to do it. We have to live with the end goal in mind. Slack off now and pay later or work our booties off now and enjoy the rewards later.

I was made for this. I feel like it is a warzone out there and I am a mother warrior who is going to train up my little brood to stand for everything that is good and godly out there.

It is a choice each mother has to make on a daily basis. If we have kids, we have to parent anyways.

We might as well choose intentional parenting.

In The Trash

As a teenager, I decided to not read any of the fashion or tabloid magazines and especially not waste any money on buying them. The only time I divulged into those pages was when I went to the hair salon for my hair appointment. I would read the People Magazine because my mom taught me that was the only credible one to actually believe and I would flip through the hair magazines. I was always changing my short hair style so I loved getting ideas.

I think this helped me tremendously in life back then and still today. I put enough pressure on myself to look a certain way without staring at perfectly polished and air brushed body images to put in my mind to compare myself to.

Not to mention, the filth they write about it in those fashion magazines leaves me feeling dirty. Occasionally, I have flipped through one while getting my toes done and I feel disgusted afterwards. Like my mind has been corrupted, my spirit assaulted, my heart muddied.

I am probably more sensitive to this stuff because I have not allowed it in for so long. And you know what? Once you start a habit, it’s easy to continue. It is not difficult for me to not pick up those magazines. Even if I think, I just want to see what the style is this season. Then my mind is fixed on everything I don’t have on the Must Have Lists for the season! I can look around the stores to get that information!

The old cliche is so true, garbage in, garbage out. It’s like feeding yourself doughnuts and ice cream every day and wondering why you have so much extra fluff around your waist! So if we feed our mind these unrealistic expectations of how we should look and read the ungodly advice on how our marriages should be doing, it’s a no wonder that we are going to be unhappy with ourselves and our husbands. Or even when we fixate on how a certain movie star looks perfect and says her love life is perfect and has all the money in the world to buy anything she has ever wanted.

It leaves us with a deep sense of dissatisfaction in our lives. It breeds discontentment. It is not what we should be gorging on. We should be filling our minds and hearts with the Word of God. We should be concerned with the things of God and consumed with doing the will of God.

Those magazines represent everything I am not, everything I should not want to be. Why the allure, the attraction, the intrigue? Ahhhh, it’s as old as time.

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world- the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does- comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”      1 John 2:15-17

Those magazines should be put right where they belong, in the trash.

Cheating My Family

I love to get things done. My husband says I am the most efficient person he has ever met, not thrifty, but efficient. I am very task oriented and I fear that sometimes I can make my family feel like they are something else to be checked off my to do list. Yes, I am a list person. The kind who writes things down after I did them to add them to my list just so I can have the utter satisfaction of crossing it off. I hear there are others of you out there who share in this “disease” with me.

We have the daily chore list that consists of laundry, cooking, cleaning, errands, groceries, etc. And the daily hopeful list of taking a shower, working out, quiet time with God, reading, watching a show, whatever.

Then we have an on- going list of extra projects around the house that need to be done. Things like ordering pictures, putting them in picture albums and changing pictures out to update the frames in the house and at husband’s office, re- organizing the home office and the garage, painting son’s wooden chair, packing away last season’s kids clothes, and you know how it never ends.

But then there are the out of the house commitments that need to be attended to as well. Meet with this girlfriend for coffee to talk, bring this one a meal, pray for that one, go to this women’s bible study and that married bible study, go to that park play date, go to this mother’s group, go to gymnastics class, serve at this volunteer organization, go to ladies nite.

Not to mention my passion right now is blogging. My husband says he has been replaced by a blog. That’s probably not a good sign. (Ahem, trying to do it at naptime by putting off the daily chore list.)

My family deserves the best of me and sometimes they get the leftovers. I give away all my energy to others for other things. Instead, my family needs to be my #1 priority with everything else trailing behind them. Where do they really rank in my agenda and to do lists?

Although the other things are good things, what if I forego everything else in life right now to just focus on them? Get rid of all other responsibilities but to them? Would my life be out of whack and out of balance? Is balance really achievable? Is what I am doing now effective?

In my attempts to help others, serve God and not lose my own sense of self, am I jeopardizing my only opportunity to be the best mom and wife I can be? Will I regret my time loss with them later in life?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. But God does. If you have figured it out, please let me know. But I have a feeling it looks different for all of us.

For me, I have had to realize that those extra projects will always be there and it really does not matter if they get done this week or this month or this year! They are not life and death.

I don’t want to be so bored left with nothing to do but ironing (I use Wrinkle Free Downy anyways!) and I don’t want to be so overwhelmed  by too much extra- curricular activities outside of the home. I want to be a whole mom with much to offer my family.

One thing I never want to be accused of is cheating my family out of the mom and wife they deserve.

Tired

Before you have kids, I don’t think anyone can appreciate the true meaning of being tired. How does one really operate on a few hours of broken sleep every day, day after day. I mean I just couldn’t comprehend how anyone could function. Surely, they must be exaggerating.

I consider myself blessed with good sleepers. I followed the Baby Wise principles and both my babies slept through the night pretty early. Which is all relative because everyone has a different definition of sleeping through the night and of what age early is, right? And just because they were good sleepers, does not mean I did not experience the burning sensation behind my eyeballs for months and the total and utter reliance on caffeine to make it through the day.

Now, my kids are 3 and a half yrs old and 21 months old and we all have been sleeping through the night for quite some time except for the occasional cry out in the middle of the night for a blanket or to go to the bathroom.  I say all that to say, how is it I am still tired? Most nights, I get my blessed 8 hours of beauty rest and usually fit in a short 15 min. power nap every day and I am still tired! I have bags under my eyes to prove it.

I heard that you never sleep the same again after you become a parent. I am starting to see why. It is a 24/7 job with little breaks and no paid vacations. It takes all of you, all of your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual energy all day, every day. It is draining, demanding and down right dirty at times.

I don’t see any reprieve over the next 18 years or more. I hear the older they get, the later you stay up talking with them or praying for them if they are out for the night. What the heck did I sign up for? A life long sentence of little sleep?

No one can fully warn you about parenthood or else no one would do it. I wouldn’t have believed anyone anyways. To give all of myself away on a daily basis, to lay my life down for them, to live my life for them. To love them with an unconditional, unlimited and uncontrollable love. Starting to sound a little like someone else I know.

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for others.”    1 John 3:16 paraphrased

If being a parent makes me more like Jesus and lets me understand his love that has no limits in a greater capacity, then I will gladly remain this way the rest of my life. Tired.