Hope you had a great week!
The kids and I worked hard reestablishing positive patterns (that’s a mouthful right there) so that our default is mercy and grace with ourselves. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, we spent a lot of time at home doing things like cooking dinner together. The kids also had time to just be. Yes, we went to different places and had fun but our default was just being at home together. Given that time to rest, we had the energy to have mercy and grace toward each other. Not always, but it was good to know that OVERALL, even when we slipped back into patterns of name calling or hitting, we were able to de-escalate the situation by having grace and mercy toward each other. For example, when Andy almost burned down the house.
I had just asked everyone to clean up so that we could go out and get ice cream since the kids had been home all day. Mitya got ready quickly (he loves his ice cream), but the older two were still in the middle of their science project. Somehow, they managed to spill the contents of a test tube, so now they had to clean up a bigger mess. As they walked the tissues and paper towels over, Andy managed to somehow let go of the tissues which flew to the three candles on the dinner table and started a little bonfire, so that when I walked to the dining room table there were multiple tissues on fire. I quickly put the fire out with a kitchen towel but the kids were thoroughly freaked out. I did not respond with my default response of yelling. I had some stern words but I just hugged them. I asked Andy what he thought a good consequence would be, and he said “not getting ice cream right now.” Yeah, buddy, for real. We cleaned up the house together and after some good conversation that didn’t involve any name calling, we took a little breather, and decided that we would get ice cream after all. The drive was beautiful and Sasha noticed the gorgeous sunset. Andy was already asleep.
I say this because I don’t typically have to put out actual fires. But it was good to see that when I did, our time together (I almost wrote quiet time but that’s a little different:) had made it so that yelling felt weird. We actually did have a quiet time at the ice cream place cuz I still have the pocket upper room devotional I got when the kids went to vacation bible school at Susan’s church (thanks, Susan!). All in all, thank God for a great week!
My parents currently are giving me a little Sabbath rest and thanks to them, I had time to write this post. Thank you, mama & papa! Very grateful for you.
Oh just heard the knock! They are Baaack! Time to decorate some piggy banks 😉🐷🐷🐷❤️