Counting My Blessings

It's been a rough 48 hours.  The kind that make you want to go and rethink your life, so I am rethinking it....I'm trying to find the good in all of it. It's not always so easy.

Yesterday morning, we awoke to find that the dog had gotten out of her crate in the laundry room and must have eaten something that didn't agree with her.  The floor looked as if it had been painted with poop.  It was all over the sorted laundry, had run under the appliances, was splattered on the walls.  **But as I scrubbed the floor, I forced myself to remember a time when we didn't have a laundry room, we didn't have a surplus of clothes that could sit on the floor in piles, we didn't have new appliances that move easily, and I sent up a prayer of gratitude for all that we have.  I also paused a moment to thank God for my husband who remembered to close the laundry room door so that I wasn't scrubbing the entire house.

Later in the morning, my two eldest boys came and found me.  They were wearing guilty expressions as they confessed to "breaking that thing on the banister on the stairs."  I heaved a sigh and followed them to discover that they had staged an epic light sabre battle and crashed through one of the spindles on the staircase.   **I looked at the worried expressions on the faces of my boys and was so grateful for the honesty that brought them straight to me with the truth of what had happened.  We've worked on telling the truth even when it might get them in trouble and it seems to be bearing fruit.  I'm so pleased that they trust me enough to tell me the things they know I won't like.  I'm also profoundly grateful to live in a house that's big enough to accommodate our large family, the stairs are a part of that.  That night, I thanked God for rambunctious boys with healthy bodies and active imaginations.  We could be dealing with so much worse than a broken spindle.

That afternoon, my 2 year old woke up, pulled off his diaper and painted the walls of his bedrooms with the contents of it.  I was pretty tired of looking for gratitude by this point, but found it pretty easily in my kind neighbor who loaned me her carpet shampooer and was nice enough to let me walk away before she started laughing.

Today was more of the same kind of chaos, all following a poop theme.  It's been pretty disgusting lately, but I find that I have more patience for it all.  A month or so ago, I decided to always look for the good and thank God for it.  Some days I have to ask him to point the good out to me, but I'm getting pretty adept at finding it.  It's also a kind of intellectual honesty as a parent.  I expect my children to obey me with a happy heart even when I tell them to do things they don't particularly want to do.  How can I ask of them what I don't do myself?

I find that my attitude toward life and those around me has begun to slowly change and that my focus has started to shift from the bad to the wonderful things God has put in my life.