Keep on Trying.

This morning kicked my trash, which totally surprised me because I did my best to have it go smoothly. We set out our church clothes the night before, got the house all cleaned the day before, got up early this morning, got Uly in his church clothes, fed and down for a nap, got the boys breakfast and started into their church clothes, got Bryan off to his morning church meetings, and I started to get myself ready.

So in an ideal reality one would think we would have been sitting in our church pew 5 minutes early, looking all handsome, smiles on our faces, and with healthy food in our full bellies.

Instead, baby kept waking up, pooped, and then peed all over his church clothes and just wanted to be held and cry. Almost 4 year old decided he did not want to put the clothes we picked out yesterday on and did not want to pick out different ones, decided he could not brush his teeth alone, forgot how to pick out and put on his own socks and was just an all around grouch who ended up being thrown into multiple time outs. 6 year old was actually quite helpful, thank you thank you thank you!!! 29 year old sleep deprived, hormonal, chubby mommy, who really is just trying her darnedest to keep it peacefully together over here for everyone, ended up half dressed while rocking the baby in the rocking chair, face covered in tears and caked with wet makeup (that she had finished putting on moments before, and for the first time in weeks), yelling out to all around her that they must continue on with the plans without her because she has been defeated and must retreat for a while, but then while in retreat she is overcome with guilt for not being able to keep it all together happily and be a good example to her kids even when life doesn't go as planned. Whew, I am out of breath just typing that.

There are times in family life when we do our best to plan, prepare, and follow a routine expecting everything to go smoothly. And then despite our best efforts, nothing goes the way we tried so hard for it to go and we don't handle it the way we wish we would. There are time we try hard and it all goes well. There are times when things go crappy and we wish we had planned earlier so that they would have gone better. Heck, there are times when we do no planning or preparing and things end up the best ever.

Good grief I do not have the answer. I do not think there is one. Sometimes things go well, sometimes they don't. Sometimes we cry hard for seemingly silly reasons, sometimes we handle it like a champ. We can try to pinpoint why things went south, learn from our mistakes, and try to not let it happen again. But sometimes things are just out of our control, we won't handle situations with poise and grace, and we will feel like crap for a while about it. We just have to roll with it, try and do our best, try and be calm, try to have a better attitude. I guess my point is we just need to keep on trying, because we really can't control much more in life other than ourselves. We have to show up. We have to keep on trying to do our best every day even when we wish our best was better than it is.