Date DAY and Gaining Perspective on My Flylady Routines

Yesterday, Joey and I served on a panel for prospective adoptive parents to share our experiences about adopting children with special medical needs. The meeting was about an hour away from home, so Jacob and Tim were put in charge of the home fires — and the siblings being warmed by those fires — and Joey and I tootled off. Yes, we were actually tootling alone. Just the two of us.

Before the meeting, we went to a restaurant supply store to price bakery equipment. Then, we attended the adoption meeting and presented our experiences to the group WHILE being video-taped for people who could not attend. Yikes! I had kind of forgotten about the video-taping thing. I hope I didn’t look terribly goofy. We enjoyed visiting with some of the other presenters while we ate lunch afterward. Adoptive parents of children with special medical needs are so fun to get to know. Maybe that should have been our primary point: adopt a child with special medical needs and you will become a more fun person!

THEN came the realization that it wasn’t even yet two o’clock and we had already made plans with Jacob and Tim to be gone through the evening (so we could have our date night that we hadn’t had the night before since we had been birthday partying). That meant that we had EIGHT hours by ourselves. Oh, my! What to do?

First, we went to Wal-mart to see if they had embroidery transfer pencils so I could recommend them to potential customers on etsy. (They didn’t have any, by the way.) Then we went to Menard’s to look at flooring and wall paper for the bakery. (They DID have flooring and wall paper at Menard’s in case you were wondering.) Then we went to Hobby Lobby to see if they had any embroidery transfer pencils. (Nope. But Clara and Amelia googled embroidery pencils for me and found them readily available online.)

Those activities shaved about 1-1/2 hours off of our eight-hour date and we really didn’t have anything else to do in town, so we headed toward home. We went to Mom and Dad’s house and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” was on television. Joey hadn’t seen it, so we watched it and laughed and laughed while eating some omelets I whipped up. Then, oh, joy, Lawrence Welk was on. I so miss watching that since we don’t even pick up PBS on television, anymore. What fun! We then talked for the remainder of our date night and came home to a sparklingly clean kitchen and fed and bathed children who were watching “McLintock!” peacefully together, all thanks to Jacob and Tim.

This whole amazing day spent with Joey was an excellent perspective-builder for me. Sometimes it’s hard for a mom of many children to see the forest for the little trees that seem permanently attached to me. Being away from home, giving people information about adoption, talking to Joey for hours on end, eating meals with just the two of us, all contributed to my appreciation for why I do what I do. Sometimes I get caught up in the “doing” of my Flylady routines and forget the “why.” I have a lot to do at home because I have a lot of kids. I need Flylady because I have a lot of responsibilities to meet. And it’s a BLESSING to have these kids and these responsibilities. It’s a BLESSING to need Flylady routines. And it’s a BLESSING to have had such a nice break from both in order to gain a little perspective.

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Tags: Date Night