More "things"...

Usually when I start out to write on my blog, it's because I thought of something to say. This time, not so much. I just have a feeling.

This moment is a good one. My dear fencing hubby is away, being his fencer self, almost certainly at this very moment dressed in medieval garb and (hopefully) sitting in front of a fire. (It's very wet and rainy today, and he's been cold up there at the campground.) Last summer, he went away to do this for about a week and a half, and the saying "I was a MESS" doesn't even begin to cover the true mess I was. It was a time of painfully (oh, how I hurt!) searching out the answer to the question of just whom - or Whom - I was relying on, putting my trust in, getting my strength from. Answer: It was Hub. I was so, so wrong. And poor Hub! What pressure.

This weekend is shorter, obviously, than a week and a half, but he's done other weekends and I've been more of a mess than I am right now. I'm good. It was a partially lousy day - I can't even begin to describe the whining that I heard, the disobedience, the discontent, the arguing and fussing and fighting - but I'm still good. (If I had a sound clip of choir boys holding a sustained note, I'd insert it here.)

My oldest actually slept in till about 8-something, so the (earlier) morning was quieter with the three littler ones. Then we managed to get grocery shopping done (me and the three smallest; my oldest is currently on crutches for an ouchie foot so she and her ice kicked it on Gram's bed), even though the back door on our new-to-us van decided not to close and so we carpooled with Papa's grocery trip. It was all good.

There were moments of fussing and yelling (this time on my part)...but I take that back. I didn't yell. Oh, I was serious and stern, for sure, but I haven't really yelled in a long time. Months, in fact. (It's something I'm working on.) And when I hit upon a moment where I thought, "Surely, my kids are going to reply to my next 'just a second' with a very appropriate 'but you're ALWAYS on the computer!'," I managed to stop and turn the chair and look them square in the eye with all my attention. No real huge moments of mommy guilt. (Choir boys again.)

And then there were all those pairs of wet underwear. Going pee in the potty just. simply. eludes. my 4 1/2 year old boy. (Someone PLEASE tell me they have the same problem. There are some days I just seriously want to cry for being out of ideas.) I think maybe I'm not accompanying him to the potty enough, I'm being too lazy, I'm not staying consistent with a discipline when he so obviously pees himself out of laziness (he was IN THE BATHROOM, for crying out loud! the potty's RIGHT THERE!!!), I'm too harsh, I'm too soft, on and on and on.................ARRRGGGHHHH!!!! His preschool teachers even feel sorry for me.

But here I am. It's only 9:19; I can still make a decent bedtime (because last night was an epic fail). I have heard sweet hubby's voice this evening, I have chocolate ice cream waiting for me in the freezer, I have a freshly stocked fridge again (it got sketchy there for a while, but praise God! He is faithful), my nearly-2yo boy has slept through the last 4 or 5 nights in a row and I can go to bed with a slightly inflated sense of hope that it might happen again (but I'm not stupid; 100% hope would be silly at this point), and I have all my lovely, new-found...joys? to entertain my thoughts. Hobbies? Interests? That sounds boring. They're just ideas. But they're ideas that make me happy to think about. I've named some before, but I realized some escaped my "Things I Like" list....
~ my developing farmhouse kitchen, even just the one in my head, but I get excited because I do actually have pieces of it in real life!
~ my search for a really inexpensive cabin to take my kids to in August during Hub's next week-and-a-half fencing event, so we can have a little downtime of our own...escape the fishbowl living, if only temporarily.
~ reading mom blogs. I have friends that could share with me thousands of the blogs they read - but they wouldn't be mine, they'd be borrowed. Y'know? And God has brought me - just in my farmhousey searching! - to several wonderful moms that are writing about their farmhousey lives, and I KNOW that God has brought them to me, because all but once they've turned out to like Jesus pretty well, too! And that makes all the difference.
~ my current read, a historical fiction novel about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her romance wth Robert Browning. An easy read, not to heavy on the language side, and I'm more than halfway through, which is inspiring.

Oh, there must be something else, but I'm not thinking of it now. But what I did come across tonight was the brand-spankin'-new webpage of a dear woman from church who does photography. She takes beautiful pictures, captures children as they are, without "blur" and "sepia"...they're just kids, and even in their sloppiness they look beautiful. The very last picture I saw was her family's boots all lined up and the thought struck me..."I want to take pictures like that." And not just pictures, but PICTURES.

What?? Me?? Well, sure, I love taking pictures. I thought about being a photographer once. (My godmother even bought me a camera bag for college graduation, I think. I majored in television, incidentally, a far cry from the art program.) And I am set up to take pictures for our church's VBS program this year, which I am extremely excited about. I may not be the only one doing so, but the Woman In Charge said I could, which makes my doing it Very Important. And we have a wicked cool camera around here...somewhere...that I now have added motivation to find. But photography in general? That's an ambition that I thought long-since died. Well, maybe just pictures of my kids...we'll see. :)