My, oh my, two posts in the same week! Who am I and what have I done with my slacker self? Don't worry, I'm sure this new found brain surge of creativity will die out soon enough. Let's ride this train as long as it will take us. So here goes another one.... :)
This post is dedicated to all those people who can use the restroom in peace and if they do get that peace it is without fear that something disastrous is occurring throughout the house. I'll get to that in a moment.
Let's close our eyes and imagine a house full of children. Happy, well dressed, clean teethed, mohawked children. Yeah, that's right, in my dreams my kids would be rockin' the hawk. Don't judge. The kids would be playing in a toy room full of well organized toys, none of which came from the dollar store or McDonald's. How I despise McDonald's toys. This toy room is fantastic because as soon as the children are done with a toy, the toy grows legs (if it did not already have such limbs), and walks itself back to it's colorfully labeled box. If I did have to clean anything, it would stay spotless for the whole week. That's a little ridiculous, let's just shoot for an hour, because that, in itself, would be a miracle in my house. Ok, let's open those eyes before I fall asleep.
So, as you can guess, this comes no where close to resembling reality. While 1/3 of my kids are usually mohawked, 2/3 might have brushed their teeth, and I'm pretty sure all 3 are happy (except for when they are screaming over a recent injury, which happens often) the rest seems like such a distant dream, like back when I slept. Dreams come true, I wholeheartedly believe this, but sometimes one must wait a very, very, very long time. In the meantime I organize, and reorganize to get my family of 5 and my household of 8 to fit into our home. I surface clean, because a I leave one room semi-spotless the little rascals are following behind messing everything up again leaving very little time to get to the deep cleaning. And often times, throughout my house, one can hear me asking the question "Really? Really?" or declaring my favorite phrase lately "aye-yi-yi!" to some munchkin who feels like putting his own personal spin on the look of a room.
This leads me to my fantastic potty break this morning. I'll leave some details to be assumed but let's just say I was actually done within the first minute of my visit to the loo but chose to sit an additional 2 or 3 minutes to finish playing a game on my phone. I had two kids in school and only one roaming around the house at the time. And this was my moment of quiet time. I chose to assume my two year old was behaving perfectly even though he was quiet as a mouse. Yeah, I know better, but I really wanted to finish that game (sigh).
As I come into the kitchen I am exposed to my lemons of the day, figuratively. Levi, little sweetheart that he is, who loves to do all the big kid things, has filled his cup with water from the refrigerator door...multiple times...and has dumped water and ice all over my kitchen floor. "Really? Really?" fly from my mouth. I'm a huge proponent of a child cleaning up after himself to negatively reinforce the fantastic thing he just did. So I grabbed the rag towels we always seem to need for monstrous messes and quickly realized that we don't have enough for this Godzilla and there is no way Levi can clean this one up. Levi's job quickly turned to picking up the ice cubes and mine was to soak up the water.
As I'm on my hands and knees, mumbling under my breath, frustration of never being able to catch up, let alone get ahead, going through my very being, I had an orange juice moment. I'm staring at this floor that is quit frankly disgusting recalling how many times in the last few days I have walked over it and stated (in my head, or course....why would I want someone to hold me accountable!) that this floor was in grave need of a mopping.
God spoke to me then. Well, I'm not much of a "I hear God speak clearly" person. I think God pokes holes through the fog of thoughts and muddle of activity going on in my brain and allows certain ideas or words to become clear. This is what became clear, He is God and can use anything as an opportunity.
Really, God? Did you really just use my sons mischief as a way to get me down on my hands and knees to clean this floor? Probably not. But with the right attitude, the one with vision seen through the Lord's lens, and with His help any lemon can be made into orange juice. Why orange juice? Well, anyone can turn lemons into lemonade. Only God can turn them into orange juice.
Hope God gives you some orange juice moments this week,
Cat
Loved it! I can't wait for my orange juice moments. Thanks for sharing Cat.
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