In Everything Give Thanks . . .

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 1 Thess. 5:18.

This text has been one that I struggle with. In EVERYTHING give thanks! That means even on a terrible horrible no good, really bad day, we are to be thankful for all that terrible horrible stuff that's going on . . . I'm not there. There are days when I am most definitely NOT thankful, but with God's help, I'm working on it. . .

There are many things I LOVE about the house we're moving to. Mostly having to do with it having tons of land around it, even some woods and a creek and a pond . . . we're going to have so much fun exploring! And I'm thrilled that the kids can play outside whenever they want (as opposed to only when Mommy has time to sit outside with them). But I'll admit, the challenge of condensing everything we own into a much smaller house has been, well, challenging. But here are a few things I've already found to be thankful about in anticipation of the smaller house.

I think I've mentioned in passing that we use cloth wipes instead of toilet paper (most of the time). The laundry of it is no big deal for me, but one of those little annoyances in life has always been figuring out how to divide the wipes amongst the 3 bathrooms (powder room, girls' bathroom, master bath) so that they all get low at approximately the same time. It never happens, one bathroom always runs out first and we end up shuffling between the bathrooms for the last few days before I wash a load. Well, as I was folding wipes (which really just means laying them in a pile) a couple weeks ago, trying to figure out, as always, how to allocate them into the 3 piles, it hit me. At the new house there is ONE bathroom! No sorting required! All the TP wipes will go in one big pile and that pile will go in one bathroom and when it starts to run low, I know it's time to do another load. Easy peasy!!! That's something I'm thankful for about having only one bathroom.

And then I was thinking about schedules and such once we move. And I was telling myself that as soon as we get moved I need to pull out our daily/weekly/zone schedule & start following it faithfully again so the house never gets a chance to get to the point this one was when I started that system. And to get the girls back used to helping with chores consistently (with the time constraints & chaos of moving, their "chore" has been to entertain themselves while I spend most of every day packing, sorting, etc. but it means that we're back to where they whine if I do ask them to help w/ chores). Anyway . . . as I thought about that, I realized that different house means different zones, and was thinking I better tweak the zones I had to reflect the new house. And then I realized, smaller house = way easier zones!!! I haven't gone through & re-done all the specific chores, but just as I was thinking about it, I could easily come up with the zones, why? Because I like to do 8 zones (so everything gets deep cleaned once every 2 months) and the house has exactly 8 rooms, easy! I'm giddy over how easy it was to re-assign zones :)

So those are just two of the ways I've found recently to be thankful for challenges :)