Let Me Tell You Where My Children's Tongues Have Been

The husband has flown the coop.  Mark is in Edmonton right now with his family.  They went to a hockey game last night and he is spending the day there today and will be back home tomorrow.  If I'm honest I could sit here and right a post ranting about how left out and lonely I feel, but it's really not so bad.  And I hate being a downer, so no rant today!

Instead I will ramble on about nonsense so I can avoid the productive tasks that I should be doing, like cleaning out our pets' cages and cleaning out the deep freezer so that my fridge freezer doesn't pop open at the least provocation.

Or I could even unpack more boxes in the hopes that my printer power cord will be found because as of this minute, it is still missing.  I never realized before I lost it how important it is to my life.  I'm starting to feel a little panicky about it.  Because, I mean, it's been three weeks I think since we've been here and it still hasn't surfaced.  That can't be a good sign.

Yesterday was a beautiful day.  In the sun it was just plain hot!  I love spring.  It's such a happy feeling when things warm up.  Yes, it is supposed to snow again (so I've heard) but I console myself with the fact that the snow usually melts by afternoon.  And my kids love to eat snow, so that makes them happy.

Actually, let me tell you about my snow-eating kids.  They love snow so much that they will eat it from anywhere: the ground, from the bottoms of their boots, from cars.  They eat clean snow and muddy snow, they don't discriminate.  I cannot get them to stop licking cars that have snow on them.  Or even cars that are just wet.  Lick, lick, lick.

Maybe I should ask my Mom-in-law if Mark had a penchant for licking cars when he was younger because I sure don't remember doing that.

It Was Supposed to be About Him, But It's All About Me Instead

Tonight it is pressed on my heart how important it is to be encouragements to our husbands.  And this is an area I feel that I'm not the greatest at.  (Ok, so I don't think I have many areas that I'm good at.)  But it's one I want to get better at.

I think my problem is that I am so emotionally driven that if he is upset or frustrated at something, I just pick it up and run until it's suddenly all about me and how I'm stressed because he's stressed and why can't he just understand and be nice and not get mad?  Why?  Oh wait, there I go again!

I'm realizing that it comes from being very self-centred.  I constantly think of how hard I feel my life is, how stressed I am.  His stresses are far removed from me.  It's usually things or people at work, and I have a hard time picturing it sometimes, since I don't see it first hand.  If I don't experience it, it doesn't exist, right?

But it does exist!  His life isn't perfect either.  Yesterday he worked from 6:30 am until 2:30 am.  And then had to go to work at 7 am again this morning.  I complain when I go to bed later than 11 and get up sooner than 7.

So he was a little short-tempered this morning, which was really understandable since he only had about 3 hours of sleep.  He anticipated being at odds with his boss all day.  I wanted to encourage him somehow to act Christ-like, to not get frustrated.  But I didn't think it was something he wanted to hear, so I didn't say anything.  And besides, I had only gotten maybe 4ish hours of sleep so I wasn't much better than him.

But the day turned out all right for him, so far.  I talked to him in the late morning and he was mostly cheerful sounding.  So I was very thankful for that because I had been praying that his day would go smoothly.  Hopefully it still is.  He still is at work, but he won't have to stay quite as late tonight since they have another guy to come and spell him off.  I'm very glad because I have such a hard time sleeping when he's not here, and especially when he's working.  I'm always imagining horrific accidents.

There I go, making it all about me again.  Gotta work on that.