A happy home

How to discover the joy of being a stay-at-home mom.

I took Jack to story time at the library for the first time in his life this morning.  Poor youngest child – we were faithful attendees from birth to age five with each of the others.  I decided I had to commit to at least one thing per day that we do “just for him”, and although I consistently read to him and play with him on the floor, I determined that we needed to “get out” more so that his world consists of more than the four walls of our home (and the inside of my car – because, as the youngest of five, you can be sure he spends ample time in his car seat between 3 and 7 p.m.)

There’s a new library that just so happens to be on our end of town – 10 minutes closer than the downtown library we have always frequented, so we hit it up this morning.  Story time was all right, but surprisingly, the best part was after the stories had been read and the developmental toys spread throughout the room for the kids to sample.

I met a sweet Vietnamese lady and her 13-month old daughter who were new to the area and anxious to rub shoulders with others.  She talked incessantly, admitting that she felt isolated as a stay-at-home mother and was itching for opportunities to find satisfaction in that particular role.  She remarked that she couldn’t wait until they started to feel settled in their new situation (husband’s job, neighborhood, etc.) so that she could perhaps go back to work.

When she found out I was the mother of five, and that I had stayed home for over fourteen years, she was incredulous, wondering how I could do it.  I didn’t really have an answer for her.

In some ways I feel like the fact that I enjoy this gig so deeply is a result of dumb luck.  For starters, my mother had modeled it for me – and her performance was admirable.

My husband values my role in the home, (and his) so he makes an effort to be an active participant in family life and show consideration for the fact that I bear the brunt of the child-rearing.

I am a naturally structured person, so I craft routines that provide stability for everyone in the home.

I like being social but I can survive without a whole lot, so isolation is not something with which I struggle.

I belong to a church that values motherhood and provides a support system for those who stay at home.

In my early parenting years, we moved into a community where the majority of residents were in the same stage of life as us, so I had ample opportunity to befriend those around me.

I adore babies/toddlers/preschoolers and have no trouble coming up with ways to enjoy parenting “littles” (it’s the older kids I with whom I struggle).

I am pretty frugal and don’t feel that our lives would be greatly improved if I earned a living.

I’m not anywhere near a perfectionist and rarely beat myself up over the inevitable mishaps of parenting.

And last but certainly not least, I have a deep and abiding commitment to motherhood and a considerable drive perform it to the best of my ability.  I know fundamentally that there is no job in the world that is more important and that keeps me going.

Sometimes I feel like motherhood is my calling in life, as though each of my characteristics was carefully crafted so that I would tackle it head on and find immense satisfaction in it.  Does that mean I don’t have days where I have watched the clock for Tim to come home and provide backup?  No.  Have I never locked myself in a bathroom to give myself a few minutes of solitude?  Of course I have.  Has the pure exhaustion and countless demands of my kids never driven me to throw in the towel and lose my temper with them?  We all know the answer to that one.

Despite the fact that the favorable conditions of my life and innate personality traits support staying at home with my children, there are tweaks that almost anyone can make to find joy and satisfaction in it.  Certainly, there are those who would simply rather work outside the home.  That’s okay.  My train of thought comes from my interaction this morning with a person who had decided it best for her to stay home but who was struggling to determine how to make it work for her.

Here are my top tips for how to find the joy in being a stay-at-home mom:

  1.  Convince yourself that there is no better place for you to be.  Because it’s true!  Study literature that supports this premise, try to surround yourself with people who believe similarly and move forward in that belief.  Laundry and cooking and cleaning and child-rearing can be awfully mundane and thankless but they have to be done.  So do them to the best of your ability with the belief that they matter!  If you don’t believe me, try NOT doing those things for a week and see how depressing your life(and everyone else’s) is.
  2. Learn how to live with less.  If you are struggling to make ends meet, you will inevitably feel the pull of a job outside the home.  Shop at thrift stores, cook your meals from scratch, take advantage of all the freebies around town, try camping instead of more expensive vacation options (I guarantee the kids will like it better, anyway).  Stay within a budget and resist the urge to “keep up with the Joneses”.  When you keep life simple, you find that you don’t need a whole lot to be happy…the end result being that you are much happier!  Funny how that works.
  3. Spend time with other people.  Set up playdates with other parents, go places you would expect others with young children to frequent (library, parks, the zoo, etc.) and reach out to others around you.  Build a support system of friends – you will glean important parenting tips from them in addition to social interaction.
  4. Prioritize your spouse.  Make date night happen regularly so you have an excuse to get out of your sweats and feel like a person again.  The conversation will benefit both of you, your connection will grow, and, perhaps most importantly, you’ll get a much-needed break from your kids.
  5. Give yourself a break.  I mean this in two ways – first, cut yourself some slack and don’t imagine a pinterest-worthy existence for your children.  Decide what is most important, do those things and let everything else be a bonus.  And don’t beat yourself up when you screw up.  That’s what therapy is for.  😉  Secondly, carve out some time for self-care.  It could be a daily workout, curling up with a good book on a regular basis, taking a class, learning something new.  Whatever brings you joy.  Make it happen so that you’re not always running on empty.  Wise is the woman who knows that you cannot draw water from an empty well.  Take time for yourself so that you have more to offer those in your care.

I realize that staying at home with your children is not a one-size-fits-all position.  It demands the very best of us physically and emotionally.  I have been incredibly blessed to have a husband who supports me financially (and otherwise) so that I can do it with relative ease, so that the sacrifice does not seem so great.  As I conversed with my new friend this morning, I was renewed with a commitment to it.  I wanted to urge her with all the energy of my heart to stick with it, because it can be, and has been in my case, the most satisfying job in the world.   Look at this face and tell me it isn’t.

Millions of peaches.

August and September not only bring the first month of school but hundreds of backyard peaches.  We found out this year that our homeowner’s association no longer allows planting behind our property line because it’s not “firewise”.  Apparently, they did not see the gangly weeds that came right up to our property line prior to our planting of said peach trees.  Needless to say, this year’s harvest will likely be our last.  So we made the most of it.

Jack was my little helper for the first round.

A couple of weeks later, I avoided burnout by enlisting the rest of the crew.  We canned over fifty jars of peaches (after giving away dozens and dozens of them to friends and neighbors) and still had a few left over for four jars of jam.  Yum.

LDS-themed escape room.

For our combined youth activity at church during September, we crafted an escape room.  Our class (the Laurels) were in charge of planning the activity, but since I wanted the girls to be able to participate, they were limited in what they could actually contribute to constructing the escape room.

Constructing seven virtually identical escape rooms to accommodate over fifty youth took loads of time, not surprisingly.  I based the design on a download I obtained from Latter-day Breakout.  I tweaked it a bit to suit our purposes (and to save a bit of money) and am delighted to say that it turned out great!

Peeking in each room to see the kids interacting without the use of smart phones, digging into their scriptures and using their brains made me absolutely giddy.  I love these young men and women!  Each group made it out just shy of the allotted one hour time limit and, if I’m not mistake, they all had a good time.  Mission accomplished.

1st day of school. For mom too!

Fall of 2017 brought three different school start times for our kids.  I didn’t even get a picture of Anna because after sleeping in until at least 7:00 all summer long, I was unprepared for what waking up at 5:45 would do to me.  Ninth grade means early morning seminary for her and a 6:30 drive to the church.  Thank heaven it’s less than five minutes away.  I wish I could have caught the smile on her face on camera.  It’s going to be a good year for her.

Lily leaves at 7:30, which is no change from last year since she took a first period math class at the junior high (despite still being in 6th grade, which is elementary school here).  She was pretty chipper and looked fancy with the wavy hair she sported thanks to the braids I had put in her hair the night before.

 

Rachel and Eve leave an hour later and were equally excited for the school year to begin.  I am so grateful for kids who love learning and for local schools and teachers who facilitate that love.  I dropped them off for their first day and hopped in the car to head down to Utah for my “first day of school” at BYU’s Education Week.  I hit “eclipse traffic” on the way down – all the Utah peeps who headed up to eastern Idaho to get into the path of totality waited a day to return home and I got to greet them when the freeways merged.  It took me an hour to go 10 miles – I felt like I was in California or something.  Here’s the view outside my back window:

No matter, I had a fantastic audiobook and I was alone.  All alone!  Who would have guessed that such freedom would be so exhilarating to me?  Ditching my kids on their first day of school, no less.

 

I spent my first day at Education Week literally running across campus from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. sampling classes across a variety of topics of interest.  That night, my dear friend from my mission joined me and we dabbled in more classes, ate delicious asian food (reminiscent of our days in Taiwan), and fed each other good advice and encouragement.  It was soul-filling.  Every last bit of it.

2017 Total Solar Eclipse – not to be missed.

Our family went up to the zone of totality in Stanley, Idaho to witness the Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely convinced that it would be worth the effort of dragging everyone out of bed at 4 in the morning to make sure we missed traffic and got an adequate viewing spot.  I thought to myself (and out loud), Boise will have 99.4% totality.  We can just watch it from our backyard in peace.  How different could that possibly be from a total solar eclipse?

Fortunately the drive to Stanley was rather uneventful(though the 4 a.m. wake up time was brutal).  The crowds that the media had warned about, virtually non-existent.  We parked in a field that had been designated for eclipse viewing that could have held thousands of cars.  There were fifty.  Maybe.  Apparently, our surrounding states were pretty non-plussed about the whole idea of a celestial event and didn’t bother to make their way to Idaho.  We could have slept in until 7:30 and made it to Stanley with time to spare.  Regardless, we enjoyed time with cousins and the surrounding views for the hours leading up to the eclipse.

Watching the moon slowly make its way into the path of the Sun through the safety of special glasses was exciting.  We marveled as it inched across the Sun and could see and feel changes in the amount of sunlight as it did so, so slow that they were almost imperceptible.  Still, the light of the Sun was powerful enough that, without our safety glasses, we could not actually view the solar eclipse.  Until that brilliant moment when the two were perfectly aligned and we could remove the glasses and witness a singular event that we will never forget.  It was absolutely incredible.

Tim experienced a solar eclipse as a missionary in Colombia years ago.  On the Sunday thereafter, he teased the local members of the church there for scrambling to the podium during fast and testimony meeting to bear their “testimonies” concerning the eclipse.  Having viewed totality myself, I completely get it now.  There are so many spiritual parallels in life’s events, notably the ones that God provides through nature.

Here’s what was so remarkable to me about this experience.  I had never paused to contemplate the effect the light of the Sun has on the earth.  It was mind-boggling to me that the Sun’s light is SO powerful that even when 99.6, or, 99.7 right up to 99.9 percent of it was covered, the light was still blinding to behold with the naked eye.  The eclipse lasted less than 2 ½ minutes, during which time the entire horizon 360 degrees around looked like dusk.  We stared and stared, soaking it all in, knowing that time was short, and, sure enough, at the very instant the moon was no longer perfectly aligned with the Sun, its light burst out suddenly and we all had to turn away to avoid eye damage.

The Sun, or the Light of the World is a symbol for a very important figure in the plan of salvation.  Jesus Christ is the Light of the World, and, much like the Sun, his power and influence can drive out all darkness.  Even when the encroaching darkness obscures 99.9 percent of His light, it can still penetrate the earth in a way that is blinding to behold.  The world can sometimes feel like a dark place.  Contention, pain, suffering, hate, fear, confusion and sadness are very real to the human experience and can inch into our lives so slowly we may not even notice how much “light” they obscure.  How grateful I am to know that light will always drive out the darkness.  Our Savior Jesus Christ is the source of all light, and as we look to Him, pain is eased, burdens are lifted, and confusion is dispelled.  Instead we find hope, and truth and peace.

Summer visits with the cousins.

Boise is not really “on the way” to anywhere special.  Consequently, we LOVE anytime family or friends make an effort to join us in our neck of the woods.  This summer, Tim’s sister and her family joined us for a few days in August.  We made sure they got to dabble in an authentic Boise experience.

We of course floated the Boise River, made the short trek to one of the best views in the city at Camel’s Back park, played in the fountain at Ann Morrison park and caught a play at the Idaho Shakespeare festival.  We rounded out the weekend with a trip to Stanley for the solar eclipse.  Not bad for a quick weekend trip.

 

While the kids were away, the rest of us play.

We drove down to Utah a couple of times to take the kids to various summer camps at BYU.  Much as I tried to get all my ducks in a row, we could only schedule two of the girls at the same time so after spending a week there while Lily attended a dance camp, we ended up right back there after a week at home for Rachel’s chemistry camp and Anna’s Remix Vocal Academy.

Having thrown all our money into these summer enrichment programs, the rest of us enjoyed a bit of free fun at the splash pad, swimming in the duck pond with the cousins(not really a duck pond, but since we shared it with them that’s what my kids affectionately called it), experiencing a bit of pioneer history, and visiting with family and friends.  Utah’s great that way.  Plenty of free fun.

Summer survival.

I always look forward to summer.  I get all starry-eyed just dreaming about having my kids all to myself, working on projects together, horsing around in between, exploring the town, building relationships and learning new things…

Well, we ALL know that’s not typically how it plays out.  Within a few days(it was within a few hours last year), the kids don’t know what to do with all their spare time so they start bickering with one another, begging mom for screen time, or to play another round of Battleship(with mom, and no one to look after the baby) or if they can invite a friend over (again), or to go grab Happy Hour slushies at Sonic for the nth time that week.

It’s all we can do to keep our sanity.  Everyone has their tips and tricks.  Not all of them work for everyone.  But here are a few tips for summer survival that work for me and my family:

  1.  Expect your kids to get up at a regular time.  There’s nothing that makes kids feel more like slugs (and act like them) than not maintaining some sort of sleep schedule.  It’s lights out by 9:30 at our house, even though it’s still light outside until 10:30.   Then they’re up for breakfast by 8:00 in the morning.  This is late enough that they get ample sleep and I still wake up well before them and fit in a workout, shower and breakfast prep(and occasionally more).
  2. Screen time is contingent upon meeting certain requirements.  Ours include morning chores, piano practice, outside/exercise time, scripture study and prayer, personal study time to prevent “summer slide”, and service to others.  Even after all of that is done, they must still wait until at least 1:30 to indulge in screen time.  Which they do.  For about two hours… so that I can get some peace and quiet around here. Click here for printable (and editable) “Have you…” form
  3. Work some sort of structure into your week to keep it fun.  We have “Make it Monday”, “Take it outside Tuesday”, “Work Wednesday”, “Thinking Thursday”, and “Friend Friday”.  The focus for each day ensures that we schedule something every day that falls into the category for that day.  For instance, baking on Monday, a hike on Tuesday, an extra home project or service on Wednesday, an educational outing or project on Thursday and a special outing or play date with friends on Friday.  That doesn’t mean that they can only play with friends on Friday, or that we only get outside on Tuesday; just gives us a guideline so we are keeping ourselves busy and fulfilled.  To top it off, I made a list of ideas of things to do, ways to serve, etc. as a guide for the not-so-littles.
  4. Teach your kids skills while you have them home.  My kids can count on sewing at least one thing with mom and planning, shopping for and preparing dinner for two weeks apiece during the summer.  We put this on the schedule as well, naturally.
  5. Refrain from signing your kids up for countless activities.  We mistakenly think this will keep them engaged and out of our hair.  I have found it cuts into our day and runs us all ragged.  Not to mention, it’s costly.  Three of my four girls were able to sign up for a single 3-5 day summer camp of their choice, two of which coincide so all that chauffeuring is benefiting more than just one child.  There’s something to be said for the “lazy days of summer” (after they’ve gotten their “to-dos” done, of course).
  6. Don’t be afraid to let your kids be bored. It does not make you a bad mom to not provide round-the-clock stimulation for your kids.  When my kid complains she’s bored, my first reply is, “Great! That means you get to use that awesome brain of yours to think of something to do.”  If she complains again, the reply changes to, “Well, I’ve got plenty of ideas…” and out rolls a list of chores.  My kids don’t proclaim boredom anymore.

No summer is perfect.  I’ve been at this for years and finally figured out what worked for us about three summers ago. With a healthy balance of structure, idle time, and flexibility (and VACATION!) any family can enjoy the summer of their dreams.

Camping at Ponderosa State Park

We’d been camping for six days by the time we ended up in McCall at Ponderosa State Park and were more than glad it was the last time we’d be setting up our tent.  We’d heard good things about Ponderosa State Park and it certainly met our expectations.  Our site was huge and the bathrooms were pretty stellar (our standards were probably compromised by a week in the sticks but still, give me some warm water on my filthy bod and I’m happy).  Probably our favorite feature of this campground were the walking paths.  Close proximity to a beautiful lake and a decent swimming beach were more than worth the sticker price of staying here.  If our kids hadn’t gotten into a gigantic argument on our second night in(sorry neighbors), putting themselves at great risk and forcing us to head home early we would have explored more.  Lucky for us, McCall is only a couple of hours away so we will be back for sure.  With a cane with which to discipline our unruly children.  😉

A day of pretending.

We’re too cheap to buy a boat.  Strike that.  We’re too practical to buy a depreciating asset on one income.  That, and half our family is particularly prone to skin cancer so spending days on end out on the water just doesn’t have a ton of appeal.

Still, because we are cheap in everyday life, it gives us the opportunity to splurge on vacation.  So renting a boat while camping at Ponderosa State Park seemed like a fair plan.  We got to pretend we all have olive skin and mad wakeboarding skills for a day in exchange for sunburns and swallowed water.  It was fun.

We learned that our kids were wusses inherited their father’s aversion to risk and preferred leisurely tube rides and swimming in the lake.  Lucky for us, we got to turn the keys in at the end of the day and drive boat-free to a restaurant for a delicious dinner on the town.