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Yesterday morning I was feeling overwhelmed by the stress of all the things in my life. Since nothing significant had changed from the day before I was a little puzzled at the change in feeling. By afternoon I realized that I was overwhelmed because I was getting sick. But in the morning I was stressed to the point of immobility.

Howard observed this and he sat me down at the kitchen counter with paper and pen. He told me to write down every single to-do item or stressful thought that came into my head. I sat and stared at the paper for 10 minutes while Howard repeatedly told me “Honey, start writing”. Finally I did. Some of it was a list, some were fragements of thoughts connected to other thoughts by arrows, but I got every stray stressful thought out of my head and onto paper. While I wrote I wasn’t allowed to judge. Every single stress got written down no matter how silly or unlikely it was.

Eventually my head was empty of new things to write and I was able to sort the stresses on my paper. Some could be resolved almost instantly with a phone call. Some were long term and therefore not to be tackled on an overwhelming day. Some sorted themselves out just by talking them over with Howard. There was a whole list of things detailing the parts of my life where I failed to live up to my own expectations. I was able to select one or two of those to work on right away and I could let the rest fall out of my head because I had them on paper. When I conquor my one or two failures I can go back to the paper, I don’t need to keep a running list in my head.

Being able to actually see my stress on paper was very theraputic. Being able to eliminate some of them and cross them out on the paper was even better. I don’t know if would work for everyone, but it certainly worked for me.

It’s been a very eventful series of days. We celebrated Howard’s birthday twice. Once with presents and a nice home made dinner and a second time when Howard’s wonderful sister brought us chinese take out and then babysat the kids while we went to see National Treasure. We had a nice dinner with Chalain, Chaliren, and Pi followed by a mayhem session in Metroid Prime Echos. Link has gotten good enough at the game that he can beat his daddy. All of that came on top of all the regular business of family maintinence.

Tomorrow I need to go and sign tax return papers so that I can get the tax return asap. The return is larger than I’d anticipated and will really make a difference in keeping ends together. Thursday is parent teacher conferences and …. I’m too tired to think of the rest of the stuff happening this week. It’s all on my calendar. I write it down there so that I don’t have to store it in my brain.

In short, I’m tired but happy. Things have been busy, but good.

It’s amazing how much better only 5 minutes with a Cheerful Howard can make me feel. I’m so lucky.

Agh! Patches just deleted Howard’s user file in Insaniquarium Deluxe. Now Howard has lost-game-grumpy on top of his this-project-is-taking-too long grumpy and is buried in his office working as hard as he can to meet his obligations and feed us all. I now have insufficient-supervision guilt which causes me to have a low tolerance for chaos and to be angry with all of the children. This is especially bad since I have three extra kids overnight. I want to fix things. I want to cry. And I feel stupid for getting so upset and stressed over such a little event. But it doesn’t feel little because I Failed Howard and I can’t make it all better.

And I’m mad because I was having such a nice day and now I’m not.

Gleek: “Mooooom! I peed on the kitchen floor!”
Patches: “Splash!” (with accompanying stomps)

Gleek’s primary teacher went out of town for the weekend and asked me to substitute. So today after a sacrament meeting wrestling Gleek and Patches into submission while Howard literally fell asleep at the end of the bench (LTUE and being sick hammered him hard), I took on The Sunbeam Class. Sunbeams is the age group 3-4 years old. In this case it was 5 little girls all adorably dressed in their sunday best. They look like innocent little angels, but when I tell you that Gleek fits right in with this group you should have an idea what I was in for.

The amusement began during sharing time when an adult began the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. Gleek loves this story. It is her favorite bible story, so when the teacher asked “Who knows why they put Daniel in the lion’s den?”, she skipped the hand raising and announced in her loudest voice “Because he prayed!” All the adults were impressed, and I was pleased that my child had shown such knowledge. But then she continued: “And then they threw him in the lions den! And the Fairy came and shut all the mouths and Daniel was safe. We don’t like lions. We should chop off their heads!” Oops. Looks like we need to clarify the difference between angels and fairies a little better.

Then the classes all split up into their separate rooms and I had to go solo with these five angelic looking little girls. They were gorgeous all with beautiful dresses and ringlets. Except for Gleek, she picked her own dress this morning and I chose not to argue. I’m lucky we managed to brush hair this morning let alone sit down for 20 minutes putting ringlets in her hair. So I guess I should say that there were 4 angels and one ragamuffin. You know that saying about books and covers? No sooner were we seated than a beautiful girl with long brown ringlets interrupted my sentence to inform me that fish live in the water and birds live in the sky. I thanked her for the information and attempted to continue my lesson, but then the angel with long blonde ringlets announced “Yeah! And Zombies live in the graveyard!” Hmm. I’m thinking daddy probably plays video games.

One lesson, one trip to the drinking fountain, one coloring project, and one potty trip later I still had 15 minutes of time left. These girls raced through each step as if there were no tomorrow. And I do mean raced, especially in the halls. 5 girls, 3 directions and I get to catch them all while wearing heels and attempting not to be irreverent in a church building. Since I had no intention of letting them all out of the room again until I could shove them into the hands of their parents, I needed to think of an activity. They seemed quite content to roll their pictures into tubes and use them for spotting pirates or having sword fights, but I thought something more group oriented would be better. So we played “Lion hunt”.

The “Lion Hunt” game is supposed to be rythmic and repetitive where you overcome obstacles to find a lion. Then you run back across all the obstacles to the safety of your own house. Not these girls. They can’t just swim the river. No. The river has to be full of crocodiles and snakes. And when we reach the “scary dark cave” none of them are scared. Instead they grab their flashlights and dash into the cave where they chop off the lion’s head and stomp on all the snakes that were there. Except for the baby snakes, they pick those up to take home because baby snakes are cute.

I can just imagine how these girls are going to answer the question: “So what did you learn at church today?” “There were pirates, and Lions and we chopped off their heads and stomped the snakes, and zombies live in graveyards!” Watch out Xena. Here come The Sunbeams.