The Shift

• It's Friday (yay!)
• The kids are out of school today and Monday (yay!)
• My husband and I have a date night planned tomorrow night (yay!)
• We have friends coming over on Sunday with their girls (yay!)
• I might take Monday off and do something fun with my family (yay!)
• I have a ton of chores to do while multitasking with work (boo!)

Hmmm. I was thinking today about how much I don't like doing laundry, sweeping & mopping our kitchen floor, cleaning our bathrooms, washing dishes, paying bills and sometimes even cooking the family meal. These things feel pretty normal to me, although I do love to vacuum, go figure. I am not a person who likes to look at things through grey glasses or with a negative attitude. In every other aspect of life, I focus on the solution - not the problem and tackle it with gusto and high energy. Hmmm. Time for a shift.

1. Laundry - when I am washing and folding my 9 year old daughter's cute little leggings and my 7 year old son's little jeans and boxer briefs and my husband's sweatshirts and work pants, I will focus on how grateful I am that my husband has a job requiring work pants, that I have these little people in my life to do laundry for and how great it feels to see them looking so nice in those clothes I laundered. I will focus on how much I will having children at home one day to do laundry for (even if getting over that is short in duration).
2. Sweeping & mopping - when I am tackling the kitchen and dining room floors, I will remember the sound of our dog's toenails as they tap and sometimes peel out on that very floor from excitement stirred by mealtime.
3. Bathroom duty - this will be tough because bathroom duty just BLOWS! However, I will focus on how great it feels to have a clean bathroom and I will take extra time to loo at the toothbrush holders in the bathroom. To see my son and daughter's toothbrushes in their monkey hanging from a tree toothbrush holder and to see my husband's and mine side by side, almost hand in hand in ours. I will remember how lucky I am to be part of a family, something larger than myself, in a place that I am loved.
4. Meal time - tonight I am making a family favorite German dinner and I won't stress out over how perfect it is. If I do what I have always done, it will taste as it always has tasted, delicious! During dinner, I won't let my mind wander to the dishes that will await me, instead I will sit back and enjoy the happiness and appreciation of my family.
5. Dishes - when it does come time to clean up, I will focus on how grateful I am to have an automatic dishwasher to handle the task instead of "rightie and leftie," been there, done that.
6. Paying the bills - rather than focusing on the perceived "bloodsuckers" who always want money from us, I will be ever so grateful that we can pay our bills. At least right now, we don't have to decide who to rob - Peter or Paul or whether we can live without garbage service or cable that month. I will focus on the sense of satisfaction I always get when having paid those bills, knowing that it has been handled and on that day I was a responsible grownup. :-)

In my world, everything is relative - no matter what it is. Maybe all of these things can be relative too. I know that I am not alone in being a "non fan" of these mundane things in life that we all have to do. We are an army of often unsung heroes who tackle these jobs daily, often without a word, without a complaint - just with acceptance. These tasks are never going to go away, even as much as I had hoped that when I reached adulthood, life really would be like an episode of the Jetsons.

I have always said, if you don't like your story change it (and stop whining about it). I have always applied this philosophy more to the "big picture" but why not miniaturize it to the smaller picture that is daily life? In the end - you can be the person who grins and bears it or who just smiles and does it. I prefer to be smiling.