On being grateful.

Last week I had several days where I was in a "poor me, my life is so terrible" mood. For good reason, I thought.

And so the LONG story begins....

(FYI, while the story starts out very negative I felt that I had to take you, the reader, on my journey to completely make my point at the end. So bear with my "Negative Nelly" portion of the story.)

Last Thursday at 10:30 in the evening I went in to tuck in the kids before we headed to bed. When I grabbed Emmie's blanket it was wet. I turned on the light and there was puke everywhere. I mean everywhere. I don't know how many times she threw up, but she never cried. I felt terrible that she had been sleeping in her own vomit. She was shaking and cold. John and I both got to work. It was probably about an hour before she and her bed were finally clean and settled. But she was still sick and throwing up. So Emmie and I slept on the couch that night with a bowl and a rag close at hand. She had a long night. The next day, she was done with the throw up part of her illness and moved on to terrible diarrhea. She was sad and miserable. She just wanted held all day. (Which is the only kind of nice part of sick kids.)

Then on Friday, the real fun began. I was doing laundry, and lots of it, when suddenly there was water all over the laundry room floor. I pulled out the washer and dryer to clean it up and try to find the leak. When I noticed something odd. The wall behind the washer was bowed out. After some phone calls and some stress a friend came over and took a look at the wall for us. He confirmed the bad news. Our wall was completely squishy and had to come out. The water had gone through to the area near the heater in the garage and into our closet. There was also mold in our closet. We were very excited about that. We pulled up carpet, started fans, and he called his friend who came over on a Friday night to inspect the situation for us. He cut out part of our wall, removed insulation, took off base boards, and started some serious fans. There was mold all over the wall and base boards.

It's gross. We will have to relay carpet (thankfully not much), replace linoleum (that we just replaced a couple years ago), replace floor boards, base boards, and some wall.

In the midst of all this we were also trying to get the washer repaired and trying to figure out how there was water so high up the wall.

After $75 worth of work on our washer we finally realized the water issue was not with the washer but with the drainage hose off the washer. It was leaking at the top and bottom. Which was discouraging since we had just replaced that hose 2 months ago. It was installed properly, just a crappy hose. Thousands of dollars of damage because of a faulty hose. It stinks.

Our house is torn apart to this day. We had fans going for days. And we're just waiting now for the guy that's going to be doing the repairs to finish another job.

In the midst of this John got Emmie's illness. He was out for the count. I spent time running around town using other people's washer and dryer, getting ready for Ainsley's party, and just trying to keep things up and running. To sum things up, it was possibly one of the worst weeks of my life.

And that explains why I was in a poor me mood.

My list of reasons why people should feel sorry for me got pretty long. I was mostly depressed that more money was flying out the window. I don't know why money is always an issue for us. It seemed like we were finally getting somewhere and had money allocated and accounted for. And then the money was taken away from us, like it always is.

For example.........

****We've been trying to figure out how to afford a new car. We're just not sure how much longer John's car will be with us. In an instant, all the money we had saved for that was gone.

We have also been trying to save to buy ourselves out of our house. The task of saving $70,000 feels pretty daunting. I don't know that it will ever happen. I get a little angry when people tell me that they are stuck in their house too. I don't really care if you're stuck in your house if your family fits in it. It's to the point that if someone gives me a gift or offers me something my first thought is, "Do I have room for it?" If I don't we don't want it. We're here for the long haul. We feel trapped, we are more than squished, and we hate it. What I wouldn't give to be renting right now. I'd love to be renting a house instead of trying to live frugally in an attempt to save a gazillion dollars just to have the option of moving. And yet here I am replacing walls and floors in a house I'm coming to despise.

It's like there's some lesson I need to learn, and until I learn my lesson I'll have to feel strapped financially.

And then, I received my slap in the face.

I was watching part of conference while I was home from church with Emmie. I happened to be to the talk President Monson gave on being grateful. Hello! I couldn't have listened to this at a better time. As I listened to him talk about gratitude, and the general lack thereof, I realized that I needed to get over myself and just learn to be grateful.

I may not live in a spacious 1400 square foot house, and my family might have terrible luck with water being in places in our home where it shouldn't be, and we might drive old cars that our family doesn't really fit in, and I might be so desperate for space that I could scream. But the bottom line is that all these things really aren't that important in the grand scheme of things.

My list of blessings is long. And somehow easily forgotten. I have 3 beautiful children. I live in an amazing community. I have a healthy body. My family is healthy. We have a roof over our heads, a pretty nice roof compared to what most of the world lives in. No one in my family has ever had to go hungry. We have always had our needs met. We have always been blessed with odd jobs that have helped with these unexpected expenses. We both have great families. We have amazing friends. And the list goes on and on.

I am so quick to forget my blessings as I compare myself to others and what they have. And so now, in the midst of my little chaos, I'm trying my best to have a positive attitude. I'm grateful that we caught the leak when we did. The damage could have been so much worse had the leak gone on indefinitely.

Everyone is now healthy again.

Repairs will be made.

And life will go on.

Happily.