why messy and wonderful?

Our littlest wonderful mess maker.

My blog name needed to change for quite some time now.  Adoption has changed our lives in more ways than one and I’m really not in my “world surrounded by men” anymore.  I have been deliberately hiding from my blog for many reasons, but the change and overhaul was one of them.

Joya's adjustment into our family has been a moving target of what we might be dealing with next.  With each new challenge, we wonder if it is caused by the trauma of adoption or if it is merely a part of her two year-old life.  Should we handle it by doing "A" or "B" and which one won't traumatize her even more???  It's been messy.

But, when she counts off each family member by name every morning and reaches her arms out with a smile several times a day with the words, " I HOOOLLLD MAMA!" - wonderful doesn't even begin to describe it.  When we watch our fifth child take up skiing just like the other four have, with squeals of joy and a desire to go faster, our hearts overflow with how wonderful and worthwhile all of the mess is.

Tonight's dinner was breakfast burritos, served one at a time because our house was a complex machine of people coming and going tonight.  My meal prep and service was messy tonight.

But when they sat down to eat it, everyone loved dinner, and that is wonderful.

Our boys spent their coveted Christmas break passing the flu from one brother to the next, not coordinating well enough to all get through it at the same time.  We looked like a sick mess, but they all loved to snuggle close and watch lots of DVDs, day after day, and that was wonderful.

Down and out over Christmas break

The sickness was only compounded by the fact that our 40 year old furnace finally leaned too closely to, “Hey I might just leak enough carbon monoxide in the night to kill you all,” so we made the executive decision to shut it off and live without heat until we could get a new one installed.   We must install it in a new location in the house in order to actually conform to building codes.  This all happened while our outside temps in this mountain ski town dipped down to negative numbers.  Warm blankets and cold noses!!!

So now, we have walls ripped apart and floor plans being drawn for an unexpected and expensive project.  We are wearing fleeces and running space heaters.  There is a layer of messy construction dust almost everywhere I turn.

But soon it will be done.  We’ll be warm.  We have saved money for the unexpected, and it will be wonderful.

Our house is constantly noisy and it is never completely picked up.  By the time we finally update the outdated avocado green carpeting and 1970’s bathrooms in our house, the “new” kitchen we remodeled nearly six years ago will be outdated.

The papers on my desk scream, “PAY ME!  FILE ME!  READ ME!”

Parenting our brood is a nearly humorous trial and error experiment cycle as we weigh and measure each child’s needs, temperament, good and bad deeds, love language, and hormone level. Then we try to match all that adequately against our best prayerful guess of what is needed AND muster the energy to execute the plan.

My head hits the pillow at night yearning for a couple of extra hours to supernaturally sneak in to my REM cycle, yet the 6:30 a.m. alarm always feels too soon and too painful.  But during those hours, I’m wonderfully intertwined with My Beloved, who I love and respect more each day that I know him. 

We snooze when we can.

All that leads up to the fact that when I showed My Beloved my short list of truly inspiring and (I thought) fitting titles, it lead to a discussion about naming my blog something that reflects ME.  Not my kids, husband, passions, job, or interests.

So I asked him, who knows me best of all: “Who do you say I am then?”

He paused, looked down at the floor, then shrugged and sighed and said, “Messy and wonderful,” to which we both broke out into whole-hearted laughter.

To revisit in another post is the fact that ten years ago, that comment would have hurt my feelings and had me personally offended for being called messy.

But I am.  And our life is.

But it is so WONDERFUL.