I was a better mom before I had kids.  Much better, in fact.  This is mostly due to the fact that my theoretical children weren’t able to talk, think for themselves, or make poor choices…details that, amusingly enough, seemed unimportant at the time.  The summer after my freshman year of college, I baby-sat four kids, ages 4-8, while their parents went on vacation with the rest of their children for two weeks.  I can remember being actually horrified at how sticky and messy their kitchen floor was.  I promptly scrubbed it on the first day, thinking, “Now, seriously…how hard was that?”  (I know…I, too, would like to have some words with my nineteen year old self.)  As the weeks wore on, however, that floor got dirtier and stickier and, as any parent can imagine, I had far more pressing issues being a “single parent” than worrying about the cleanliness of the floor.  It was a good lesson for my naive childless self to learn, and I went home after the two weeks utterly exhausted.  I remember telling my mom that I had no idea how this woman even had clean clothes for her kids to wear, let alone time to worry about her floor.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m married with our first child.  While the first four or five months were exhausting, our first was a relatively easy baby, and we got into a routine fairly easily.  Fast forward five six more years, and our four kids now range in age from one to six and a half.  Life is full, blessed, and frankly, quite insane a good chunk of the time.

Like many of you, I feel as though we barely survived our five (six?!) month winter, and the caged animal-like energy of my kids proves they agree.  As the winter wore on (and on, and on…), our standards were tested and revised over and over.  Without the ability to regularly expend some of their absurd levels of energy, the kids were zanier than usual, much more easily provoked by siblings, and just in general more mischievous.  As the lady in charge of bundling them and fighting with their car seats to leave the house three or four days a week, I deeply sympathized with them.  Regular readers of this blog know that our family moved six months ago, an event that has proven to have ramifications so epic I’m not sure I’ll ever feel ahead of the game again.  The biggest “crazy-maker” has been having our four year old in preschool at our church’s school, which we lived a mile from.  We homeschool our oldest, but in August we decided to enroll her brother two days a week, four hours a day, in preschool to get him out of the house and allow me some extra time with the oldest.  At the time, it seemed brilliant and an obvious win.  And then we moved half an hour away in October.  Any sane parent would have pulled their kid and either found a new preschool or forgone it altogether.  For a number of reasons, we decided to leave him in and just make the trek, with the other three kiddos and I running errands and invading every library in the county during the four hours he attends.  To say it has been nuts would be an understatement.  To say my house looks like a bomb went off most days would be a bit more accurate.

I have always been a perfectionist, a trait that apparently the good Lord wants me to ditch completely, given our current circumstances.  I am also a list-maker, someone who thrives off of productivity, and decently particular about how I like things done.  I am an idealist at heart, with the sky being the limit.  However, if motherhood is teaching me anything, it is that realism is a much more desirable trait in a mom.  While I may have a pinterest-inspired idea of what I would like my living room to look like, in reality, it’s frequently Lego Land, K’nex Central, Duploville, and occasionally all three simultaneously.  It has only been recently that I’ve began to realize (I’m apparently a slow learner in this department!) that when these items are no longer lurking all over my living room, it will be because my kids have all moved out.  And that is a statement that I can hardly type without tearing up a bit.  And while I may long for the day when I’ll do laundry once a week instead of daily, I know that when that day comes I’ll miss the days of swimming in clothes.  (Okay, so I definitely won’t miss the laundry…but I’ll certainly miss the people who make it!)  And while I of course know that my kids won’t ever say, “Gosh, I’m so glad mom had such a great laundry system when we were growing up!”, I do hope they’ll say, “Remember when Mom used to…”  Finding a balance between the laundry and the legos, the work and the play, is something I am constantly working on.  I always hope that I won’t be an empty nester who says, “I wish I would have ________ with my kids more.”

A friend recently pinned a meme with the phrase, “Great parenting lies somewhere between ‘Don’t do that’ and ‘Ah, what the hell.’”  I laughed, and then was struck by how true that is.  With four little ones, I so desperately want to feel in control and not consumed by the chaos that is breakfast, for example, that it’s very easy to want to micromanage their every move, simply as an attempt to minimize that chaos — a vain attempt, but a valiant one, nonetheless.  And then, of course, there are days when I truly think, “Why on earth do I even bother?”  But then I will have a day where I don’t bother and remember (quickly) why I do, even when it seems to be one step forward, two steps back.  Without at least trying to keep some semblance of order, we quickly descend into absolute chaos, which is of course much worse than managed chaos!  Knowing that the stage my kids are in is constantly changing makes it a little easier to embrace it, even amidst the chaos.  However, I also think keeping an ideal tucked away in the back of your head as something to be working towards, and even going so far as to write a family mission or list of goals, is important as well.  Without a roadmap of where we’d like to be, we’ll certainly never get there.

So for now, I’ll keep having ideals, but I think I’ll keep those ideals much more realistic than they used to be!

photo credit: woodleywonderworks via photopin cc