Thursday, May 14, 2015

Count Your Blessings

One of my favorite songs is Count Your Blessings from White Christmas.  

When I was younger and had trouble falling asleep I would actually try to "count my blessings instead of sheep."   It was very rewarding and I would always end up lumping a bunch of things together as I got more and more sleepy. ;)  

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It all started this morning with a stolen sleep-in day.  As my alarm went off I started trying to figure out ways to stay in bed just a little longer.  Melody woke up and Micah went and got her.  Right when I was about to get up with her, she snuggled in.  I told Micah, I needed to go get the big girls and he said they were still asleep, I didn't argue much.  As I lay there I was deciding we didn't really need to do Math today (we started home school this week by the way!), then I decided maybe we should get the pool out today and just have some fun.  Before I knew it Abby was knocking on the door and it was almost 8:30 (an hour and a half after I was going to get up).  So I told her to get some clothes on and I would be there in a minute. A few seconds later she came in again saying there was some water on the floor in the kitchen.  Racking my sleepy brain over what she could possibly be talking about and why she had gone down to the kitchen all I could think of was the tiny leak we had in our ceiling.  That's when all the things that could possibly go wrong went through my head. "Oh no! The leak is getting bigger and now we are going to have to replace the ceiling and that is going to cost thousands of dollars and we aren't going to be able to pay the layer (for adoptions, blog coming at missioncambodia.blogspot.com) and, and, and....."  So I got up prepared for either a miscommunication from our six year old (like that ever happens! :P) or the worst.  

As soon as I opened the door I could hear water running.  

This is what I came down to....

If you can't tell, that is about an inch of water throughout our whole ground floor!


After a little inspection we found out that it was our brand new water filter that had a hose come loose.  Easy fix! Whew!



Isn't it wonderful!  We can now have clean water without having to carry big jugs from down the street and I can wash my veggies right in the sink without spilling water everywhere!  Yay!  Micah put the hose back on and we decided that we just needed to watch it and make sure we turn off the valve at night.

So, to make lemonade out of our lemons.....


 The girls got to have some fun in the water before breakfast. :)


As I was sweeping that inch of water out the door and drying it up I was counting my blessings.  
1. Tile floors are so easy to clean!
2. We didn't have anything electrical or important on the floor to get ruined.
3. The leak in the ceiling is still just an minor annoyance.
4. The girls got to play in water and I didn't have to fill the pool.
5. Water in Cambodia is very cheap.
6. My school morning wasn't ruined because I had already planned on doing something different today.

So, next time something in your life goes wrong, remember to count your blessings.  It makes that thing that happened not seem quite as bad. :)

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Mom Arms and Toothpaste

I didn't notice until just the other day but I have a case of awkward mom arms.  All day and even sometimes during the night a moms arms and hands are busy with something.  Whether it be holding a child, cleaning something up, or really anything else my arms are almost always busy.  At church a couple weeks ago my grandma was holding Melody and the big girls were in Sunday school. I had nothing to do but listen to the sermon. I realized quickly that I didn't know what to do with my arms.  Straight down to the side wasn't comfortable, hands folded seemed weird,  arm up on the pew was awkward too. That's when it hit me that I had awkward mom arms!  What do you do with them in that rare moment when there is nothing to do with them? I tell you what I did.  I grabbed Melody's milk cup and held it to "make sure it didn't leak". :p

Okay so since this post really didn't have any meaning other than just a slightly weird realization I thought I would add in a cleaning tip for you!  :)
Since we have returned to Cambodia we have been cleaning and fixing everything in our house to get it back to livable.  The door in the girls room had some scribbles of permanent marker from a previous owner and I had remembered seeing on Pinterest that toothpaste would take it off.  At first I thought it was a Pinterest flop. I was scrubbing and scrubbing and the marker was just barely coming so I decided to just cover it all in toothpaste and come back to it later plus really wasn't invested in spending too much time on this task because it wasn't needed to get our house back in working order.  To my amazement it barely took any scrubbing at all!  By the time I got all the toothpaste off the door the marker had come with it! So there you go.... Toothpaste for the win!