Caught this on Twitter

I saw this reposted on Twitter today and was tremendously encouraged about being a mother. It's strange that being a Christian mother is hard enough - comparing ourselves to the next door neighbour who works full time and has children but it's almost beyond sense to compare ourselves to each other - something I'm completely guilty of - when we should be merely loving God, loving our husbands and loving our children.

This article is by Stephen Altrogge who is a pastor of a Sovereign Grace Church in the USA.

Here's the link:
http://www.theblazingcenter.com/2012/10/dear-moms-jesus-wants-you-to-chill-out.html

And here's the actual article (if you couldn't be bothered to click):

FACT: If your children can’t read by age four there is a 95% chance they will end up homeless and on drugs.

FACT: If your children eat any processed food there is an 85% chance they will contract a rare, most likely incurable disease, by age 12.

FACT: If  you’re not up at dawn reading the Bible to your children, you are most likely a pagan caught in the clutches of witchcraft.

FACT: If your children watch more than 10 minutes of television a day there is 75% chance they will end up in a violent street gang by age 17.

Obviously, the “facts” listed above are not true (at least, I don’t think they are). But, I’ve noticed that the Internet has made it much easier for people, and moms in particular, to compare themselves to each other. Now, just to be clear, this is not a post against “mom blogs”, or whatever they’re called. If you write a mom blog, that’s cool with me. This is a post to encourage the moms who tend to freak out and feel like complete failures when they read the mom blogs and mom Facebook posts.

Moms, Jesus wants you to chill out about being a mom. You don’t have to make homemade bread to be a faithful mom. You don’t have to sew you children’s clothing to be a faithful mom. You don’t have to coupon, buy all organic produce, keep a journal, scrapbook, plant a garden, or make your own babyfood to be a faithful mom. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but they’re also not in your biblical job description.

Your job description is as follows:

• Love God. This simply means finding some time during the day to meet with the Lord. It doesn’t have to be before all the kids are awake. It doesn’t have to be in the pre-dawn stillness. Your job is to love God. How you make that happen can look a million different ways.

• Love your husband (unless you’re a single mom, of course). Your second job is to love and serve your husband. Husbands are to do the same for their wives, but that’s for a different post. If your husband really likes homemade bread, maybe you could make it for him. But don’t make homemade bread simply because you see other moms posting pictures of their homemade bread on Facebook.

• Love your kids. Your calling as mom is to love your kids and teach them to follow the Lord. They don’t need to know Latin by age six. If they do, more power to you. But that’s a bonus, not part of the job description. Your job is simply to love your kids with all your exhausted heart, and to teach them to love Jesus. That’s a high calling. Don’t go throwing in other, extraneous things to make your life more difficult. If you want to teach your kids to sew, great. But don’t be crushed by guilt if your kids aren’t making stylish blazers by the age of 10.

Moms, Jesus want you to rest in him. He wants you to chill out. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. Don’t compare yourself to other moms. Don’t try to be something God hasn’t called you to be. If the mom blogs are making you feel guilty, stop reading them. Be faithful to what he has truly called you to do, and know that he is pleased with you. When your kids are resting, don’t feel guilty about watching an episode of “Lost”, or whatever your favorite show may happen to be.

Love God, love your husband, love your kids. Keep it simple and chill out.

On not keeping up...

Life is marching ahead too swiftly! I suppose it's that 'mother-of-young-children' stage I've heard of for so many years. I remember sitting in conferences and hearing the speaker say "of course this may not happen if you have young children" or "this may look a little different if you're a mother of young children" and I always thought to myself (ignorantly and ungraciously!) 'what a cop-out'. Of course now that I am a mother of young children I have been swiftly set in my place. Here are some examples of my current life circumstances:
- Humming small people tunes. I said "I have Humpty Dumpty in my head" at the dinner table last night to which Emma responded with a laugh, saying "Mummy, I have a spider on my head". I tried to explain but from what I remember it simply ended in me telling her to keep eating dinner without my laughing too much.
- Limited adult interaction. So much so that I find myself chatting to any moving adult in a shopping centre/shopping centre car park/shop/playground...and yes, even the postie - we have a female postie with a Russian accent. I saw my neighbour the other day, she was merely out to check her mailbox and we found ourselves talking for a good while, with both of us repeating "I'm sure that my boy is finished with his nap and wants to get out of his cot now" followed by further talk on educational standards in our local kindergartens.
- Not sleeping through the night even though my children are no longer babies. William coughs, wakes, cries or loses his dummy/paci, wakes, cries, or bangs his head, wakes, cries and while settling him I hear Emma stirring and waking from a bad dream - in the last bad dream she cut her thumb...?
- Lack of sleep resulting in tiredness.
- Tiredness resulting in the 'tired-mum' look. Caught an unflattering glimpse of myself today when I pulled out my phone camera and it was pointing to me instead of the kids - quite the fright I did receive!
The culmination of it all is that I don't really blog that much . . . (and have what feels like frustratingly limited brain capacity). But I suppose that's a good thing (the not blogging, not the small brain thing) - if I did my children may not have as many cuddles in their lives.

Picture time!

William is now in a big boy bed.

He has fallen out once but I happened to be walking in to check on him and caught him.

He did however wake up with a bruise across his eyelid yesterday morning. It explained what went 'bump' in the night.

 Our big girl is learning to READ! She loves it, I love it and it makes for some sweet Emma/Mummy time each day. Her word list currently includes: man, can, pan, ran, bee, see, the, Sam, bat, cat, hat, mat and possibly more but I'm getting tired.

 This was taken on Father's Day in September we took an afternoon walk after church.

 Swimming lessons. She has had 4 lessons and her hair has been fully wet ONCE.... but she is becoming braver and putting her face in more which is promising. 

 We have a fun walk through the "jungle" on the way home and see all sorts of imaginary animals. It's really a lot of fun.

(Will still smiles with his eyes closed)

 Speaking of Will - he got a tat! well, let's just say daddy pulled out the permanent marker at dinner one night...and then had the privilege of bathing our children all by himself. ha.

Making masks one afternoon. They didn't last long, most of our crafts don't unless I hide them and really there's no point in that because they're often made so poorly that they'll fall apart on their own anyway, so I take  pictures. I think subliminally I take the photos to make myself feel like I'm a good mum because the paper crafts, as helpfully time consuming as they are, make a big mess to clean up and inevitably end in one child crying at a destroyed work of art. But at the end of the hour I know somewhere in there we had FUN. At the same time. I have a good life.