Enjoying Family

We had a family day last week and very much enjoyed having a day with Drew home.  We opted to not join my family for breakfast and instead enjoyed a rather lazy morning with just us.  Its been a rather long couple of weeks, with temperaments being similar to the weather, which has jumped from sun to rain to snow.  Not just the kids, but I'm afraid mine as well.

This holiday Monday though, was sunshine and warmth both in weather and in moods.  In my experience February is not a warm month and in order to make a walk pleasant, it demands extra thick coats, hats and scarves.  Drew quite obviously decided to do the lets-just-go-outside-and-check method, which in this case was more accurate.  Basically me and the girls were completely overdressed and the boys quite comfortable.

Maddie's attempt to practice her new found walking skills ended up with a face plant, the weight of her snowsuit pulling her down. It happened in rather slow motion with me being even slower to react, then to Drew's horror I burst out laughing.  Thankfully the weight of the snowsuit also provided a rather padded fall and she safely enjoyed the rest of the view from the stroller.

Maddie has now entered the toddler years as she's decided that crawling is a thing of the past and walking is really the only thing to do.  It has made life jump from busy to hectic.  As now on library days I can be found scurrying after her, rather overwhelmed.  She tends to not only pull everything off shelves but has a fascination with every single extension cord in sight....and tries to break for the exist as soon as my attention is on one of the other two.

The older two have been back and forth between being best friends and enemies.  This day they were best friends.  The bond between brother and sister is growing, at home they bicker and drive each other completely nuts, when we're out they look after each other, protective, to the onlooker it would seem that they are in perfect harmony with on another.  This day I enjoyed it, pushing aside all the recent memories of fighting and yelling. 

Last week started with this day being so wonderful, only for the rest of the week to end in a downward spiral.  Being at home with little ones, the good days and the bad days roll together.  The days that one decides that sleeping is just not necessary anymore and another decides that potty training one day is awesome and the next day has no use for it.  When I look at these pictures I'm reminded how easy it is to find contentment on the good days and how much harder on the bad, when sleep deprivation is very real.

Motherhood to me is a constant balancing act.  With one day being on top of everything and the next feeling as though I am drowning in undone tasks, in which all the things that I was on top of the day before have simply resurfaced.  Nothing in the home remains, with every load of laundry complete there is another waiting.  Drawers that are so carefully organized only take one set of little hands rifling for a certain shirt to reintroduce the original chaos.  Kitchens lose their clean shine after every meal.

The hard thing of being at home is never getting a job complete.  Its easy to get lost in the daily routines, when the days of the week blend together, to lose focus.

And then a day like this happens.  As we sat at the top of a hill and overlooked the trains below, the excitement of a little boy who declared to the world that "he's going to drive one of THOSE someday". The joy in the not-so-little ones as they raced us down a path and found more excitement in the gravel under their feet and not so much in the buildings around them.  Their joy in the squirrel that dashed past them after they waved at the homeless man across the street, seeing him as he is, a man to be waved at, not ignored.  

In my arrogance I think that I'm teaching my children, and yet in reality there are days that they teach me so much more.  They teach me to find the beauty in the world around me and not to rush through life.  They teach me to forgive and to forget and what it means to love.  They act with a child-like faith, and it is beautiful.

When the days get long and my patience is wearing thin, I'm slowly learning to ignore the mess around me and read the story, build the tower, crank the music and just dance.  To stop and let them remind me what is important.