We drew these at church. Annelise drew and I colored them in and labeled them. :)

At the dinner table, I felt an urge to tell Josh and the kids how much I appreciated them.

Me: I just want to tell all of you how much I love you. You all make me really happy.

Carson: You all make me sometimes really sad.

I don’t even know what to say about this.

Sometimes as a parent you work and work really hard to teach your kids good things, and then they do or say something and you wonder, “Isn’t anything I’m saying sinking in?” Like when we sit down with our kids for a few minutes to have an important discussion about proper behavior at Thanksgiving dinner and they keep repeating, “But when can I have a treat?”

But then sometimes as a parent your kids do or say something that makes you say, “They really are getting it!” They’ll give the sweetest answers about the true meaning of Christmas, or they’ll brush their teeth on their own, or they’ll give you a hug and tell you they love you or suggest a nice thing to do for someone else. Then it feels so good to know that somehow it’s sinking in, that somehow you’re not messing up this parenting thing entirely.

And then sometimes as a parent, your kids do or say something that just amazes you, and you think “Where did that come from?” (I guess this can happen in the negative sense too, but luckily this blog post is about the positive form.) For example, this conversation happened at tithing settlement last week:

Bishop: How are the Lymans doing?

Carson: We’re doing good!

Bishop: Oh, really? I want to hear more. What makes the Lymans so good?

Carson: Because we talk to each other a lot.

(At this point Josh and I are looking at each other behind the Bishop’s back, smiling and trying not to be too obvious as we give each other high fives.)

Bishop: Oh, yeah? That is good. What do you talk about?

Carson: Um, paying tithing.

Bishop: Oh!

Carson: And being kind.

(At this point Josh and I are just kind of flabbergasted. Bishop probably thought we had really prepped Carson for this interview. But inside we were wondering, “Where did he get that from? Do we really talk about tithing all that much? … We have talked about it before, haven’t we…?”)

Today I decided to graph out the cleaning cycle that usually takes place in our home. As evidenced above, there is a happy place – a level of cleanliness that makes me feel in control, happy, and on top of life. I like things pretty clean, so the happy place includes minimal clutter, clean floors, no piled-up laundry, and beds made. In general. You’ll notice that normal fluctuations happen – laundry piles happen, the floor gets sticky, some clutter builds up. Sometimes we even play with a box of Cheerios and a bunch of cups and bowls on the living room floor. That can make a pretty big mess. But all of that, if checked within a day, is just part of normal life with two young kids. It’s relatively easy to get back on top of things.

However, if a period of two days passes with no cleaning attempts made, either if life is busy or someone is sick or things just get a little out of hand, we soon reach what we call “critical mess.” This state is characterized by clutter piled up on the counters, cantaloupe chunks under the kitchen table, dirty dishes filling (and spilling over) the sink, laundry piles on beds and/or floors, and legos taking up any otherwise clean carpet space.

It takes a period of 3 to 4 hours of me alone in the house blasting my cleaning music to get us back to my happy place.

But I don’t always get 3 to 4 hours alone in the house right away. Sometimes we have to hang out in critical mess for a while. During this time, we can make attempts to climb out – the dishes can finally get done, the living room floor can get cleaned up, we might even be able to vacuum a room. But without those 3 to 4 hours, we’ll eventually fall back into critical mess. It should also be stated that these little attempts to climb out of critical mess are mentally very difficult and require a lot of psyching myself up. Periods of procrastination by doing things like reading, writing blog posts, or designing useless infographics are common.

Guess which state my house is in right now?