Livin' the Dream: July 2012

Lately I've been feeling overwhelmed.... I'm at the point where I know I need to do something different, but it's like standing at the bottom of Mt. Everest looking up... I'm sure you can't even see the peak through the clouds. I wake up exhausted just thinking about the day ahead of me, and I go to bed with the never-ending heavy feeling that I didn't get anything done.

Do you remember my organizing projects at the beginning of this year? I do better with a lot of things, but I still just have too much stuff. Junk. Crap. I'm overwhelmed by THINGS. I keep thinking that if I could just get some time alone, I could go through the "stuff" and get rid of half of it. The "office" is so bad that you can barely open the door, let alone get to the things we usually need most on the opposite side of the room. I NEED that room to be functional. We need somewhere to put the crib- somewhere not in Clara's room. The sink is always full of dirty dishes. The carpets always need vacuumed. The toilets really need a pumice stone taken to them at least every month, but they're lucky to get it twice a year (gross. I know! Curse Twin Falls' hard water!) ...Anyway. I didn't want to go on about housework. It's just one of those things that hangs over my head. One of those never-ending things. One of those things that I am so bad at.

I don't leave the house because I can't even get both children to the door of my mother's house alone. I see other mom's make jam and cultivate gardens and wash dishes and sew projects and play with their children. I can sometimes edit a picture while feeding Maylee while Clara climbs the kitchen counters. Even my own husband can manage to tidy up the living room and get a load of dishes done with both girls home in the hour I'm gone grocery shopping. I feel like I'm missing the "mom gene" or something like that... I'm a rare female that has ZERO skills for multi-tasking. I can't even talk and cook at the same time. Okay, I can't cook even if I'm not talking, but still...

The past three days have been... draining. Clara has not napped or slept well, contributing to the most tantrums I have ever seen from her. The only positive interaction we've had is when I'm reading to her, trying so desperately to get her to sleep. She's also done very well going on the potty multiple times a day... But that always turns into another wrestling match to get her out of the bathroom where she just wants to play in the sink, dirty every toothbrush in the cup and dump water on the floor. It rarely ends on a happy note, despite doing the "potty dance" and a promise of chocolate Sixlet afterwards. She can open regular door handles now. She can unlatch the kitchen drawer latches. She can climb the washing machine to reach the medicines and other treasures above it. She can still climb the shelves and safety gates and piano and kitchen counters and couches and dressers. I still am at a loss at how to motivate/prevent her from doing all the things that land her in time out twenty times a day. I still find myself getting so angry every time (as in 9 times out of 10) I will finally get Maylee to fall asleep and Clara decides she's going to cry/scream about some little thing she's not getting, or she decides that's the perfect time for her to "howd her" (and screams when I don't want her to), or when I try and coax her out of the room Maylee is asleep in (and screams yet again), or she decides to do something crazy like climb the counters to try and reach the knives and I am compelled to put May down, resulting in two crying girls...

Sometimes I wonder if I make issues bigger than they are. Maybe everyone else deals with these things (probably ten times worse than what I do) and that's just the way it is... You just deal with them. Maybe it's just me.

I told Dennis yesterday that I feel like I'm good at everything but the things that really matter. I am a crap housewife and a crap mother. I was bad at Government class, swimming and batting in softball. Every other sport I tried, or class I took I felt confident and even if I wasn't the best, I was never bad at it. Those three things that I was truly bad at stressed me out majorly and I just didn't enjoy. Maybe I'm just having a hard time because motherhood isn't something that comes easy for me, like almost everything else in life has been. It has been the cause of more stress, tears and (subsequently) more joy than anything else I've ever done. It requires work, serious thought, constant effort, and pure love. I always feel like such a failure with something if I don't master it right away. Something inside of me tells me that I will never get to a "mastery" level with motherhood. I'm not even sure if I will ever get to the point where I don't feel bad at it anymore, but I really really really am determined to work harder at it. If this is the most important thing I'll ever do, and the thing that I will devote the most time and effort to, I want to be good at it.

I need help. I need so much help. I don't even know where to start. I want my life, and my girls' lives, and my husband's life to be happy. I want to spend more time happy than mad. I want to spend more time happy than frustrated. I want to spend more time happy than overwhelmed. It's funny how that word has become more emphasized in my mind the more I think about what I need to do differently. Happy. As much time as I spend on the computer (something that contributes to my happiness, but it's one of those things I have to be very careful that it doesn't take up too much time) I decided I need to spend more time on the LDS church website. I clicked on the "Happiness in family" tab. I think that tab is there just for me. I have a lot of studying to do. A lot of prayers to pray. A lot of topics to research and implement...

Happiness in Family Life
is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”

I hope I don't sound whiny. Or maybe if I can get it all out on here Dennis won't have to listen to me go on and on, keeping him awake at night. Writing is therapeutic for me. It helps me organize my crazy trains of thought. But every time I write out my frustrations like this, I read back through it and think, "gosh girl, you make it sound like your life is so dramatic" when in reality, it's not. Life's good. We're all healthy. We have everything we need. We have the gospel in our lives. We don't have all of the big crap (I'm sorry I've used that word so much in this post. That's my way of being rebellious. Haha) that causes so much heartbreak in the rest of the world. We have family. We have love... I just need to... need to... I don't know yet but what I do know is that Maylee is hungry and Clara is going to look like a 99-year-old woman for how wrinkly she is when she comes out of the bathtub!

I'm pretty sure this was the first 4th of July since I've known Dennis (so 5 years ago! Geesh how time has flown!) that we didn't spend at the Hollister breakfast... So we had to make sure we'd at least have a yummy breakfast to try and compensate. Mom had some fun setting it all up...

Yes, we eat cupcakes for breakfast!

After breakfast we played... And then napped on the lawn...

And the boys constructed the world's craziest home-made water slide....

See videos of the test runs here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnkDxwaxY0w&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4ZhLMk6Adc&feature=youtu.be

We headed back to Twin to watch the fireworks display from Canyon Ridge.

Family picture attempt #1...

Family picture attempt #8... And these were the best two! Oh well.

This is a little unrelated to Independence Day, but a couple of days ago I looked out the window at my daisies and noticed they had a crazy orange/yellow color cast, even though it was hours away from sunset. I walked outside to see this...