Running the Race

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Life isn’t about finishing fast, but about running with endurance.  Sprinters can run short distances very quickly, but marathoners can consistently run long distances without faltering.  My life lately has been a marathon.

It’s been busy, with homeschooling merging with business and daily life.  How’s all this going?  Very well.  My daughter’s thrilled that we started multiplication just before Thanksgiving and she likes how the work is getting more challenging now.  Business is growing by leaps and bounds lately.  And daily life…?  In the words of a good friend of mine, “It is what it is.”  There are more good times than bad, but it all comes together into one very interesting life.

Today life got even more interesting.  Our baby got sick yesterday (Thanksgiving day), but despite the high fever and stuffy nose, she rarely stopped.  She was like the Energizer Bunny with boogers – she kept going and going and going.  Yet, I could look at her eyes and know she wasn’t feeling good.  She’s still sick, up in bed with a healthy dose of Motrin and some juice.  Our older daughter claimed she was tired this afternoon when we returned home from my parents’ house; long story short, she’s sick now, too.  So, for the weekend, the Academy for Exceptional Children is the Pediatric Clinic of Exceptional Children.

In the midst of this busyness, I started feeling the urge to create something with my hands that would last longer than a bar of soap.  I made two pairs of braided barrettes for my older daughter – pink and purple, and red and green (accented with a gold star button).  I made pirate-themed bags to hold the soaps I created for my private label account, a project that required me dusting off my “how to use a sewing machine” skills.  And finally, I picked my knitting back up again.  My mother-in-law taught me how to knit last Christmas – my husband’s aunt Maria and she are master knitters – but I hadn’t touched my needles since last January, knitting a few rows then ripping them out because they weren’t perfect.  I’d like for what I’m working on to be a washcloth, but it’s not perfect.  I wonder if I can just call it shabby chic?

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Day Trippin’

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Some people wonder how in the world I have time to homeschool and run my business.  I’d like to jokingly say, “I don’t sleep,” but the reality is, I do have to sleep to perform at my best, and with a lovely Fall something-or-other taking up space inside my head (cold, sinus infection, whatever), sleep is mandatory.  What makes it slightly more difficult is, I perform at my very best in the mornings, between wake-up and 1:00 in the afternoon.  I don’t comfortably make soap at night very often, because I’m usually too tired to feel like I can handle the lye safely.

Yesterday presented one of those moments of, “How do I balance these?”  I had a meeting with Elissa, a lovely new private label customer whose salon – Salon E –  happens to be in Kinston, over an hour away.  In order to ensure I made the meeting in time, I gave us an hour-and-a-half to get there.  So, figure with the time it took me to get dressed and glammed, the drive time (with a rare cruise through the McDonald’s drive-thru), our meeting time and the return trip, our homeschool afternoon was toasted.

We breezed through the morning’s lessons, got dressed and hit the road.  As we drove farther and farther north, the weather got better and better, with bright sunlight breaking through the dense clouds.  We explored land we hadn’t seen before and once I got my daughter out of her book and encouraged her to look out the window, she saw things she’d never seen before, such as fields of cotton.  She asked if cotton candy was made by adding sugar and color to cotton.  I told her what we use cotton for, things such as clothes, q-tips and cotton balls.

After an hour-long meeting, Elissa and I settled her order and the girls and I headed home.  We had another nice drive, enjoying the sights, including a house in Pink Hill that was totally decked out for Halloween.  I showed the girls the rest of the sights on NC 11, then we came home and I planned my next soaps.  Now just to have a few hours in a morning and a clean kitchen.  That would be bliss!

About This Blog

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All of us, men and women, need regular doses of encouragement and support.  We need someone to look at what we’re doing well and say, “You are great at that!”  So often, we receive a shopping list of “areas of improvement,” either from someone else – like bosses – or in our own minds, usually in someone else’s voice.  Rarely do we hear what our areas of greatness are.

That’s what this blog is for.  While titled for Moms and geared toward them primarily, certainly we know that Dads often need words of encouragement, too.  Ladies, when’s the last time you told your husband or significant other, “You’re a fantastic dad!” or “I’m lucky to have you in my life, because you’re wonderful at ______”?

Not only will this blog offer words of encouragement and insight, I’ll also be inviting you into my life.  What does my life look like?  I’m a wife, mother, small business owner and a homeschool teacher.  I’m behind by two loads of laundry, my bedroom has clothes scattered everywhere, there are dishes in the sink and I’ve got purple circles under my eyes today.  In short, while I’m doing a lot, I’m hardly doing it perfectly.  And you know what?  That’s OK, because I’m created to be used as God wants to use me, not as people think I should be.  My children know they’re loved, they’re going to have delicious leftovers for dinner and at least one load of laundry will be done by the time I turn my light out tonight.

I’ll be honest.  I have days where I think I fail as a mother.  Do you ever feel like that?  I bet you do once in a while.  How do you get out of that?  What helps me is when someone besides my husband tells me, “You’re a great mom!”  I’ve got friends to lean on and I enjoy reading well thought-out articles written by some down-to-earth parenting experts who are parents themselves.  I’ll post links to those articles from time to time.   I will try daily to remind you, “You’re a good parent,” because we really do need to hear that on a regular basis.

If there are any topics you wish for me to cover, please let me know.  I’ll admit, I don’t know a whole lot about parenting teens, as my two are 7 years and 14 months; if you’d like to guest post, absolutely let me know that, too!  We’re all on this parenting journey together.  Let’s have some fun with it!