Life Happens

As you can see, life gets in the way of my very lofty plans to journal daily. But it's mostly for good reasons! I've had some very wonderful days with my girls. I'm the worst about letting a bad hour ruin an otherwise good day, so I've continued to work hard to shift my perspective and not do that. Yesterday was about as perfect as perfect can be. Any time there's winter weather, Steven has to stay overnight at a hotel. He had to stay two nights this time. So any "break" I get when he gets home is obviously gone during that time. I was prepared for yesterday to be tough, both because it was mostly an indoors/can't-go-anywhere day AND because he was gone for 48 hours. But the girls and I had such a great day! We watched some extra shows and The Star movie, snuggled and read books, they played makeup, really just every day stuff but I didn't let a tough 5 minutes here or there spoil the day. And bed time was EASY which is not often the case. It was exactly what my mama heart needed. Today Steven is still at work, it's still super gross outside and below freezing, and we're stuck inside again but.... so far, so good! We got our school done, our advent things done, and the girls are snuggled up with a Curious George Christmas movie. I've relaxed my rules around screen time a lot the past few days, which is fun for ALL of us. It makes me glad for my regular screen time rules, because this feels so out of ordinary and special. I'm working hard still on slowing down this advent and it's helped a lot. I still think about running out for a tree... but I remind myself how much they've loved playing with their Charlie Brown tree, and how much I've loved removing a situation where I'd need to redirect constantly. I'm enjoying simplifying gift getting, and focusing more on reading lots of great Christmas books with the girls, doing our advent wreath prayers, praying our new baby's rosary, and doing crafts together. The Jesse tree did not happen again this year, and I'm not even stressing it. Maybe next year! I hope your advent is as peaceful as ours is going so far!