Enjoy!

Enjoy!

I love adding "enjoy!" at the end of a recipe. Like a little reminder that after you've preheated the oven, added all the ingredients, mixed  and  baked as instructed and cleaned up the kitchen don't forgot to ENJOY whatever it is you made. 

But I've been forgetting. 

We've been married 10 years now. 

5 kids. Put in time building our lives. Sacrificed for my husband's career. I've learned lots about functioning with little to no sleep. We've learned how to divide tasks and household chores and how to constantly be negotiating and coordinating weekly schedules, that get ever more complex. 

And we've got lots left to learn. I'm sure. 

But I'm also at a point where if I don't start tasting and Enjoying our family life, I might turn around and realize that what all the little old ladies say about "they grow up so fast!"  
"Before you know it" is true! 

Do you ever spend so much time cooking a meal, smelling it as you slabs away, that by the time you get it in the table you've lost your whole appetite? 

I don't want that to happen to these busy years of our family life. 

Over Christmas, I read the book "What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty. So good! 

The man character, Alice, suffers a head injury and can't remember the last 10 years of her life. The last thing she remembers is being pregnant with their first child, madly in love with her husband, close with her sister... But wakes up the mother of three, on the brink of divorce and not really close to anyone she remembers being close to. 

It was a fascinating read, thinking about how little decisions and habits overtime make up our lives and who we become. 

Am I, by my small, daily, hourly, moment to moment choices building the life I dream of? 

Am I spending time with and building memories with the people I love?

Or am I getting caught up in daily  tasks and being busy for busy' sake? 

There are just so many choices as women. Everyday trying to decide the best course of action. Precious slices of time we (or at least I) agonize over how to put to best use. Even now as I type this, sitting in a rocker beside Hadley's crib, listening to her sleepy breaths alternate with Enoch's snuffly ones in his car seat at my feet, I'm debating. Should I nap!?!? If I don't now they'll wake up and I'll regret it! But you've wanted to start blogging again, and when else can you possibly do it?!? You wanted to back post about Enoch being born first, that's why this "New Years" post is being composed in the 3rd week in January! 

Dishes are calling, laundry needs put through, in a few ridiculously short hours the boys will need picked up from school to begin the whirlwind of piano and dinner and bedtimes. 

It's also the same. It's hard. Hard to take it all in and see these years for what they really are. 

Endless days turned into fleeting years. 

And I need to start enjoying them. But not as a mandate. "Oh man! Look at you! not relishing that 16th diaper change of the day! Shame on you! You'll miss this when they're in collage!" 

Cuz let's face it--I won't. I won't miss never sleeping, rarely showering, or always having bodily fluids smeared somewhere on every piece of clothing I own. 

But I'll miss my kids believing I have all the answers. I'll miss they little voices and easy laughs. I'll miss swimming  in the potential of the humans they are yet to become. The little baby teeth of their personalities not yet getting pushed out by bigger more awkward versions of themselves that they'll have to painstakingly grow into. 

It's exhausting to be the center of someone's world. To be the coordinator of their whole existence. The balm to every hurt, the only arms that will soothe the upsets and quell the tears. 

But when else do you truly get to be someone's all. 

Which is tricky when as a person you need more. 

Which is also what I want to appreciate and Enjoy more. The beautiful and interesting people in my life. The friends who make me laugh and forget for even a little while about permission slips and lunches to pack and just let me be silly. For the moms who welcome me and my kids into their kitchens and stuff us with muffin while we causally talk about a comfortable mixture of the profound and the trivial. For my friend on the phone while we provide therapy for each other and talk through decisions and dilemmas while we make dinner, the absolute chaos of both ends of the line not even phasing us.

Oh and my husband too! Who seems to get slotted in at the end of the exhausting day - "Oh hi! I remember you! The person I love more than anything in the world and like best of all. Really should find some time to enjoy you too!" 

 Enjoy! The people in my life, that make it a life worth living. 

I love the line in my patriarchal blessing that says Heavenly Father "desires that you enjoy life in the future and that you make the right decisions in your life as you live further for the blessings that are there for you." 

Such blessings. They are already THERE! They are there for me I just need to see them! I need to notice them. I need to appreciate them. I need to enjoy this rich, beautiful, messy life that is mine. 

The tedious, the hard, the stressful won't cease to exist. But they won't define my existence because choosing to "enjoy" is my response, it's mine to determine, mine to control.

And so I resolve (like we do in a new year... Or three weeks in) to enjoy my out of control life. 

And now. I will nap. Probably not f
or long. But I enjoyed writing this. So... Enjoy! 

You might also enjoy past years' words (back when I chose one for each member of my family, until I had so many stinkin kids@ ;)

http://bretzke.blogspot.ca/2012/01/my-new-goal-words-for-2012.html
http://bretzke.blogspot.ca/2011/06/goalsthe-never-ending-saga.html