It Changed My Life

I don’t use the term, “It changed my life,” often, but I learned a lot when I went through foster care training, and I would like to share some of that with others.  Most of all, I learned to enjoy every moment that I have with these amazing children that God has already blessed me with.  Monday I had the perfect day at home with my children, and I can only give credit to the emotional roller coaster ride that was foster care core training.  I began my day with a to-do list, like I often do:

To-Do Planner

Also, like usual, many items on the list were not completed.  The difference between this day and others, is that the reasons for things not being done were worth it.  One of those reasons was an amazing amount of clear, blue skies, and something else that we don’t see a lot of in the Pacific Northwest this time of year, sun.  This particular busy Monday, we spent the morning reading about how children from different areas of the world get their water from.  As the day went on, and the sun began to shine, I began to get around to some household chores.  One of my ecstatic children interrupted my mental thought process in order to exclaim that they had found a toad in the road, and were bringing it home.  As I gave all of the reasons that we could not keep a toad, they went off to fetch it.  I decided this was the time to do the daily laundry, and I couldn’t help but utter out a cry as I turned around to be greeted by a gigantic toad in an old plastic icecream container filled with water. I demanded that the toad be brought outside before it jumped out at me, and then was able to coax my children into believing that “Trevor” would be happier in the wild.

A toad that was really a bull frog

The long list of to-do items still awaited my attention as I sat outside and casually weeded the strawberry bed when we decided that we should take advantage of the beautiful weather and take a bike ride.  I am not ashamed to say that I recently bought an adult tricycle so that I could ride around town with my kids, and use the big basket in back in order to go to the store, or the library.  We rode to the pharmacy and picked up N’s heart medicine, rode to the park and played, and also stopped at the library to pick up our holds.  Even though we were just riding bikes downtown, this was more fun than I had had in awhile.

 Bike ride

After all was said and done, and the sun went down for the day, I still had the cleaning and organizing that was yet to do.  As I was trying to gather up my energy, and motivation in order to tackle the homeschool room, El came up to me with her little six year old face, and asked me to play a game with her.  What was I to do?  

Playing games with my girl

The moral of the story is that we all have to-do lists, whether we write them down, or they just arrive in our thoughts and keep us up at night.  But what we have to remember is to bask in the fall sunshine while it lasts, and to adore the sweet faces that look up to us, and just want us to be present, and there for them.