Thursday, September 05, 2013

When the day threatens to overtake you ...


An alternate title today could be Slow Day Behind the Scenes as this happened last week on Slow Day! And, I'm definitely not saying it only happens on Slow Day or every week.

How flexible can a mama be in one day? Some days are good practice at finding out. When child one is up before 6am and child two is up at 815am and child 3 is up somewhere in the middle - it makes for a needing-to-be-flexible start to the day and is only worsened when child 1 and 3 awake are beginning to argue and irritate each other and we haven't even had breakfast.

When we are running behind our norm like this, I can feel my stress level rising - we have breakfast to eat and chores to do and school to complete and, and, and. During chores, I took a deep breath and just asked God for direction - I did not want to forfeit this day and certainly not at the very beginning. The idea came to just pause - go for a walk, collect leaves, look for beauty. I asked for shoes on and grabbed my camera.



The fresh air and beauty of creation were refreshing and helped us to start over so to speak. We came home and got right to our art project inspired by this.

It felt like our day had been redeemed, we continued on to school and creative play and sweet creating of a stoplight and car for their sweet brother - the joy on his face!

We are reading this at lunch and all of us look forward to it each day - I read with crazy accents and the giggles are a delight! The gift of laughter was a special gift on this day that felt redeemed from struggle in the morning.

I will be honest and say that afternoon things went downhill again - I mean even the best behaved children cooped up in a doctor exam room at the eye doctor for two hours will start to get squirrley. And, they did -

Then, the headache inducing evening of trying to figure out my blog design and why things had gone haywire only to spend all evening "fixing it" to find that my fixing has lost the previous design likely forever. Sigh.


Thank goodness for a mama to call at night when my head hurts so bad it feels like it will split open and for the gift of sleep and a chance to begin again the next day. I think it is on my heart to share this as I don't want to give the impression that Slow Days are perfect and text book orderly and perfectly orchestrated, nor any other day for that matter.

Lessons I took from this day -

* go for a walk, look for beauty, get some fresh air and a change of view
* laugh together
* create together
* be thankful for something {or more than one something!}
* call your mom
* don't give the day up easily, don't surrender early ~ pray and act on what God brings to mind to redeem the day