Learning Curve

I've learned a lot the last two years and nine months of marriage. Admittedly, it was a sink or swim experience at times, but since the learning curve has been on my mind recently, I thought I'd share. Not so much so that you can glean from my wisdom as that you can laugh at my inexperience--which is always more fun!

• After years of fighting with the fitted sheet, I have finally learned the trick to folding them to where they actually look folded. All credit goes to my amazing mother-in-love. One question: WHAT TOOK HER SO LONG TO TELL ME THE SECRET?!?! Obviously I was incapable of figuring this out on my own.
• As soon as you finish mopping the floor, someone will track in dirt. It will be either a) your adorable toddler, b) your slightly annoying but semi-lovable pooch, or c) your wonderful husband who is trying valiantly to provide you with green grass in the middle of a quasi-desert. 
• Mondays always constitute craziness. The house is a wreck from the weekend, and everyone in the house is grumpy that "Dad" isn't home. Do something fun fast before the Monday sucks the life out of you.
• A load of laundry a day keeps me from having to do twenty gazillion loads in a row by the time I finally get to it. It's a small price to pay for sanity.
• My plans for Saturday morning family breakfast pan out much better when I tell my husband about them on Friday night instead of Saturday morning. Somehow it took me two years to figure this out. I blame the pregnancy brain.
• Dogs like to eat cat poop. This was one of those informational things that I shouldn't have had to learn as a housewife. The easiest way to get the excess litter off the love seat where said dog likes to eat said cat poop is to just vacuum the couch. That I understand learning now. But someone should've warned me about the cat poop consumption earlier. I feel like it's one of those things you should learn around the time you find out that you can't drink a whole gallon of milk in one sitting but you can cook salmon in a dishwasher.
• Liking a clean house and being good at cleaning house are not the same thing. Sadly. Liking a clean house and having enough money to hire a maid are also not the same thing. This is additionally sad.
• Taking a nap when your son is taking a nap is more restful in the long run than sitting on the couch and watching something mind numbingly idiotic on hulu. But knowing this in my mind does not always equate the physical energy to walk from the couch to the bedroom.
• Coffee makes everything better. This is a truth universally acknowledged.
• If there is no coffee, fresh flowers also work.
• You can always choose which household tasks to leave until later. Cleaning the bathroom is not one of them.
• In the long run, a happy kid and a happy husband are always more important than a clean house. Resign yourself to an occasional sink full of dishes in exchange for an afternoon of legos or an evening of Numb3rs on the couch. If you don't, you'll finish the dishes to the dulcet tones of a screaming toddler which will make you too grumpy to be nice about the legos or Numb3rs (incredibly). 
• Your husband wants you to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to his sports team. Resist the urge. Eventually, he will recruit to his team both of your sons (even the unborn one), the dog, and the cat; remember that he needs a devil's advocate. It's good for him. Even if he doesn't realize it. (Josh's comment as he watches the Cowboy's game: When are you going to bed?)

I can think of more to add to the list, but this is getting long, and I've also learned (completely unrelated to marriage and motherhood) that nobody reads the whole way through really long posts. Or the serious ones. Or if they do read them, they don't comment on them. And what is the point of blogging without comments? Then it just becomes pure narcissism! Oh wait, maybe it already is... Oops?

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul./And sings the tune/Without the words,/and never stops at all. 

Emily Dickinson

I've been thinking about hope a lot lately. I've found that it comes in many different forms, and it doesn't always look the way I think it will, but that's starting at the end instead of the beginning of my thoughts about hope. I suppose that "hope" is not an unusual topic to think about as a pregnant woman. I have a special kind of hope growing inside, making itself evident in some ways but not in others. Every kick and wiggle reinforces the desire that is growing inside me just as surely as the baby is. With my last pregnancy almost every hope was centered around the Man somehow being able to video in for the birth--and he was. With this pregnancy, I've been hoping for a pair of healthy feet, and according to the doctor's assessment of our ultrasound, that's exactly what we're getting.

Our hopes don't always end up in such neat packages though. There are, of course, the bigger hopes, the ones that we spend years waiting for, but I think most of what I'm talking about are the small hopes: the hope that Littles will sleep past seven (he won't), the hope that the dog won't rip my arm out trying to get to a jackrabbit (he won't), the hope that the Man will make it home for dinner (it's a 50/50 chance). It's hopes like these that, in some small way, make or break us. Do we stop hoping--and working--for change because we are frequently confronted by disappointment? Do we find ourselves blinded to hope fulfilled in the face of hope disheartened?

I'm not necessarily here with the answers, just with thoughts. I've been thinking a lot about 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." For some reason, I feel that these verses are the key to hope. Not that we don't hope for those little things that may or may not occur (or the big things that may take years in the coming), but that we keep our hopes within the perspective of forever with Christ. I guess this is just a lot of rambling to say that, like everything else in life, hope is only beautiful when seen in relation to Christ.