Remember This {rainy day creativity}

Continuing the Remember This series...

Remember This {backseat dancer}

Remember This {cute stinkers}

Frequent crayon murals on my walls.

Chasing her older cousin around the house so that she can hear the wonderful shriek he produces when hit.

High pitched screams when not being given her way.

"No" being used in every other effort to speak.

My mother used to tell me that God makes the naughty kids extra cute so that they are allowed survive their childhood.

Remember This {homemade books}

Around here we do lots of coloring, painting, drawing. Call it art therapy...because when you live with 6 other crazy people you need all the therapy you can get...

Remember This {doing their hair}

I'm still trying to use my camera to capture the moments I want to remember and trying to use my Bible for some truth during the moments I'd rather forget.

For today's post, I want to remember these days that my girls are little enough to let me act out all of my pent-up, inner girliness on their hair. I know the day will come when they'll have strong hair style opinions, and I'll be left secretly cringing as they walk out of the house. There was certainly more than one outing that my mother had to be seen with a poofy-bangs mess of a daughter. (Though, after having her beauty advice ignored, she does get the last laugh since I have to endure the long-standing punishment of having my hair choices immortalized in the family photo album.)

But for now, I get to treat my girls like my old Barbies with their manes subject to the whims of my hair desires.

Remember {little perched chefs}

Remember This {attentive dolls}

Forget This {the other moments}

Before I share any more "Remember This" posts, I want to get real with you. For every beautiful moment in my day that I want to remember, there's another moment I wish I could forget- the kids fighting, me unfairly correcting one of them, a screaming baby, an unkind word from kid to kid, another unkind word from me, a bathroom whose cleaning is long overdue, me getting angry.

And there is a woman that is standing on my shoulder judging me. She's perfect. And I find I compare myself to her over and over and over again.

You see, I made her. She's a figment of my imaginings and a collection of best qualities in all the women I know. 

She's a little bit of my friend whose house always looks like the cleaning lady just left,

and my friend who makes almost everything her family uses,

a little of my friend who always has a fun activity for her kids,

and some of my friend who shows hospitality to almost every person she's ever met,

a bit of my friend who has such mad decorating skills that her home belongs in a magazine,

and my friend who hand-makes every card and gift,

a little of my friend who has such encouraging things to say to everyone,

and some of my friend who seems to spend the bulk of her day playing on the floor with her kids,

a bit of my friend who budgets like an accountant,

and touch of my friend who can garden like nobody's business,

and a lot of my friend who speaks unfailingly kind to her children.

And she haunts me.

I just can't be her, and again my Bible comes to my rescue. 

"With the mighty deeds of the Lord God I will come; I will remind them of your righteousness, yours alone." (Ps.71:16)

My kids don't have a perfect mom, and they know it. But if there was a perfect mom, there wouldn't be a need for Jesus. And I am called to use my failings to remind my children and myself of the Lord's righteousness, His alone. He is the only one who never failed, and I lay in bed many a night so overwhelmed with gratefulness that when God the Father looks at me, He sees Jesus...regardless of the day I had or the moments I would like to forget.

Remember This {storytime}

Last week as my older kids played outside and I made dinner, Ava sat in a laundry basket full of clothes with her trusty baby doll opposite her. She patted the doll's back, talked softly to her, and spooned invisible food into her mouth. Overwhelmed with gratefulness, I had another one of my "remember this" moments. I rush around too often and am trying to learn to stop and just soak it all in. When I'm packing my child up for college, when I'm sitting around looking at my empty house, I hope that all these moments come flooding into my mind. I didn't grab the camera for fear that one diversion might ruin that near perfect moment. But I do want to try to make an effort to capture those moments in my day that will one day make me smile and nod, "I remember that."

So for today my "remember this" moment is storytime: