hey stranger

It’s Saturday. My husband is in the basement gathering up all of our recyclables, my “bigguns” are speeding around on their plasma cars, and sweet Benjamin is sleeping soundly upstairs. Where does that leave me? With a moment or two to update the blog. My long-neglected, poor, pitiful blog. In all of the craziness of the last 6-9 months, two things have taken major hits—my hair color and the Burp Cloth. I intend to make amends for both this afternoon.

Why so crazy? Well, because God answers prayers. Five years ago, I pleaded with God to allow me to have more children. He answered that prayer, and I’m now stepping over kiddos. They are everywhere. Then I asked God to bless me with a part-time job—something from home—that would take some of the burden off of my husband. Again, God answered my prayer, and I soon found myself working 50+ hours a week from my kitchen table.

It’s been an adjustment, and I’m constantly—constantly—reevaluating my priorities. Not that I’m not sure what they are—or what they should be. I’ve just learned that it doesn’t take much to knock things off balance and that there are certain things I have to vigilantly protect. I’m also learning to let go of my perfectionism. It’s about time, right? I mean, c’mon, I’m not very good at being perfect. Downright lousy at it, honestly. So why not hang it up and adopt a new standard – goodenoughism. I’m pretty good at good enough.

Something else I’ve been thinking of hanging up lately is this notion of our dream home. We are blessed – no doubt about it. But it’s too easy to look around our home and focus on all the imperfections and to compare our stuff to other people’s stuff. And then I go nuts. I make lists. I plan trips to Lowes and HomeGoods. I start stalking my favorite home décor websites. And I waste colossal amounts of time. What if rather than focusing on our dream home, I focused on our dream life instead. It’s SO liberating, and it has changed my perspective from discontentment and wanting to contentment and gratitude. I am thousands of dollars away from our dream home. But, our dream life…I think we might just be living it right now. And how very, very sad for the dream life to go unnoticed while in pursuit of the dream home.

Other changes are in the works, but I’ve got maybe 5 more minutes of quiet, so this will have to suffice for now. Moving on….