Seven Quick Takes vol. 88

Joining Jen, who's actual book I can now hold in my actual hands! Woot!

{one}

Oh boy. This week. Challenging.

I keep waiting for this whole mom-to-five-kids thing to get easier and, yeah, not easier yet. The week has culminated in today which has been a marathon of yelling and arguing and disciplining. All of which take up so. much. time. By noon I hadn't had time to eat a thing, tried to save our carpet after Nora spilled my coffee which involved a lot of scrubbing, and made a hearty vow that all the toys will be packed up to be given away after the kids are in bed tonight. 

I'm also really fighting the urge to live in this bad mood for the rest of the day and make everyone else's day a misery. Because that would fix everything, clearly!

{two}

Sometimes I stop myself on these bad days and think about what my actual goals are and if maybe I'm just lining myself up with unrealistic expectations. The thing is I'm not trying to attain some level of "perfect motherhood" because I know that's ridiculous and there is no such thing. I would like to calmly deal with issues and I would like issues to not take all day to deal with and I would like things to be easy. 

I need to do a better job dealing with things calmly as I am prone to anger as my go-to emotion.

I would like things to be solved quickly because I love efficiency, loathe time-wasting because I like to get stuff done as quickly as possible so I can lounge on the couch while eating bonbons. Personality thing here, mostly. 

But it's the wanting things to be easy thing that makes me think. Because why is it so engrained in us that things be easy? Is it human nature? Is it personal inclination? Is it the culture/society we've grown up in? I assume it's a sweet, complicated combo of all three. But why do I want things to be easy? Why is that my most driving motivation? I mean I can't even remember a time where I didn't have this as my main motivation for most everything. Obviously, I'm striving for holiness, to be close to God. BUT I want it to be easy. Seriously. Why do I think this way? There is absolutely no evidence in the history of Christianity that being close to God = easy life. Nothing. It's not the truth. It's not even the truth is you want to have an interesting life. Think of one interesting person who practiced no faith yet had an inspiring life. Was it all easy? No chance. It drives me bonkers that somehow my mind and heart are geared to this and I can't overcome this pesky desire for easiness. Oh right, it's that personality quirk that I want everything in a timely manner!

{three}

This week was one of such boyish parenting dramas it's almost comical. 

A cat at my parent's house had kittens a couple weeks ago and the kittens have lived in the barn since then. I let the older kids out there by themselves which of course, is a recipe for disaster because Luke can't be left alone anywhere for more than five minutes without figuring out a way to destroy something, because it's his superpower apparently. But when I looked out the window to check what they were up to it was Dom who was walking towards the house holding a dead mouse up in the air by the tail. 

If I wasn't so busy shrieking in terror as I ran out the door I woulda instagrammed the crap out of it. 

I then made him wash his hands 1.5 million times.

{four}

Dom's response when I asked him what on God's green earth could possibly possess someone to want to touch a horrible dead mouse why he thought he should wave a dead mouse in the air by it's tail, he said "I just thought you'd wanna see it because it's head was bitten off." 

Boys.

{five}

The next day, the same barn, Luke and Dom decided to turn on the hose and aimlessly spray the entire inside of the barn with water. This brilliant thought occurred to them in the approximately five minutes they were at my parents house before Gemma and I caught up with them. They also completely soaked each other. On a day where it was 4 degrees Celsius outside. 

They're no longer allowed near the barn.

{six}

By now you're probably asking out loud why I let my children run wild. It's partly because I believe in unsupervised play, partly because I think they should have unstructured time outdoors, and a huge, heaping part because I would like 5 minutes of bloody quiet. And frankly, if I'm not going to let my kids play outside by themselves when we live in the country in the middle of nowhere what is the point of living in the middle of nowhere?

So maybe they're too young/too mischievous for unsupervised play? But it is so exhausting supervising them 24/7. I mean, there's nothing life-threatening around, they're not in danger, but ohhh the trouble they seem to find in seconds. It's a double edged sword. 

{seven}

I did not mean for these quick takes to take such a sharp nosedive into Whineyville. It was more meant to come across as various tales of the week. So pardon my sass and negativity. 

Here's a highlight of my week!

My copy of Something Other Than God finally arrived and I've been reading it in every spare minute. It's so far so wonderful, and I'm really marvelling at how well Jen has written it. Because if you think about yourself and how you've come to understand things in life from an intellectual standpoint, has that been thrilling? Has it been entertaining? Now, a spiritual conversion of any kind is fascinating and more important than regular intellectual development in my opinion, but crafting an exciting, readable story that is mostly based on intellectual investigation seems a towering feat in my mind. And that's exactly what Jen has done. But I'll save my opinion till I'm finished! 

Hope you all have a blessed Mother's Day weekend, you're in my prayers, especially moms who continue to mourn their precious children.

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