On Being A Stay at Home Mama

Last year, Derek's mom gifted Shelby a Pre-K "jumbo workbook." Since there were so many new gifts at the time, we stored it away to be enjoyed later. Shelby stumbled upon the workbook a couple days ago, and we literally cannot pull her away from that thing. She LOVES it! She comes by it honestly though--my all-time favorite pasttime from childhood {other than playing Barbies for hours on end} is playing school with my sister. ;)  Whenever Shelby has a spare minute, she is spending it with her workbook. Anyhow, when Derek came home from work the other night, he walked into the kitchen to find Shelby showing me some of her completed workbook pages. After she showed me a page, I would "check" it for her and put a sticker at the top. She absolutely adores showing off her work to me! Derek about died laughing watching this exchange, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what he found so funny. He looked at me and said: "This is it! You've been winging this whole parenting thing for the past 4.5 years, but this is where you shine!" ;)  For those of you who may not know, I taught Kindergarten before staying home with Shelby, which is what his joke was referring to. :)

Derek's comment really got me thinking about how I am nearly FIVE years into this stay-at-homa mama gig. Five years?! How in the world did that happen? I can't even begin to put into words how much harder being a stay-at-home mom has been than I thought it would be. It is crazy hard, but crazy rewarding. The girls & I went to the pool today with Angela & Casey and their kiddos. In between yelling at kids to stop splashing each other and making sure no one drowned {going to the pool with 6 kids age 5 & under is no joke!}, Angela, Casey, & I were discussing how before having kids we would hear people say things about how parenthood was, but we couldn't appreciate it until we were in the thick of mothering young children. Motherhood is impossibly hard for 95% of the time and amazingly magical for the other 5%, and somehow that measly 5% is more than enough.

But hands-down the hardest part of being a stay-at-home mom for me has absolutely nothing to do with my kids. It's all in my head. Because reading the same children's books over and over and over again and playing "the sleep game" for the umpteenth time aren't exactly the most intellectually stimulating activities in the world, my mind has WAY too much time to wander, worry, and over-analyze every.little.thing. Am I pushing her too hard? Am I pushing her hard enough? Should I sign her up for soccer, or does she need more unstructured play time? I could literally go on and on, but I won't subject you to that kind of misery. As Derek always says when I express some of my craziest worries/concerns to him, it's not very fun to be inside my head sometimes. ;)

I read {THIS} post today, and it reminded me so much of how I feel about being a stay-at-home mama. But no matter how hard or long or trying my days at home with our girls are, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I'm so grateful to Derek for how hard he works {both at the hospital and at home} to make it all happen for us. "He has no idea how thankful I am to be in a front-row seat for our kids' lives, never missing a day, good or bad, and I'm in that seat because he put me there."