Yesterday I worked on a new draft of a budget for our little family.  Budgeting has been an overwhelming challenge for me, but probably not for the reason you think.  I don’t have difficulty following a budget that covers all the basics (electricity, gas, insurance, etc.) every month even if there is little-to-no wiggle room, but when I have to start juggling bills I get paralyzed and don’t do well at all.  Since we’ve moved, we’re in a much better financial situation and as I drafted our budget I found that we’ll not only have enough to cover the basics consistently, but we’ll be able to actually SAVE money AND have something left over for incidentals.  That means I can buy my kids a boogie board for $10 without feeling guilty because it really should be going toward the ten bills that I haven’t paid yet because there’s not enough to go around.  YAY!

I can’t express what a relief it is to be going in the right direction financially.  I am grateful.

This morning I got a call from a nurse at Kaiser.  As I mentioned yesterday, I assumed it was a call with the exciting news that I’d failed my gestational diabetes screening and would have to take another test.  But this nurse, who said she had my lab results, began by saying she had good news!  All I could think was “What in the world?  What good news could they call about from the lab?”  She told me with enthusiastic delight that I do NOT have HIV!  I’m thinking “Ummmm…good.  Why did you think I might have HIV?”

Now, I am blessed to be in a situation where I’ve never been concerned about whether I have HIV.  It’s never even occurred to me that I might have HIV.  I don’t think I’ve ever been tested before.  It was a rather confusing surprise to have someone announce to me with excitement and even some relief in her voice that I don’t have HIV.

Then I recalled that I’d had a bunch of blood work done at my prenatal appointment, and that probably automatically included an HIV test.  She was going on about how I should be tested again in six months to be totally sure, but that this test was a good sign, and that I’m very lucky.  I couldn’t help but interrupt her to explain that I’d never thought I might have HIV and that it was part of a prenatal bloodwork panel the doctor had ordered for me.  She stopped, congratulated me on my pregnancy, and seemed a bit disappointed that I wasn’t as enthusiastically pleased as she about my test results.  I thanked her and said something like “I never thought I had it, but I guess it’s a good thing to know I don’t.”  She replied seriously, “Yes dear, it’s a very, very good thing that you don’t have HIV.”  And we pleasantly ended the phone call.

It made me think of what a hard job she must have, calling people who are worried about contracting such a horrible virus and informing them of their fate.  She probably sits on the phone trying to comfort people all day, with few encouraging facts to share with them.

It also made me think, a few minutes later, that I am blessed to not be worried about something like having HIV.  My complaints are all temporary, relatively fleeting things that I know will probably go away eventually and have good treatment options.  I am confident in my husband’s past, present, and future faithfulness to me and mine to him.  What is a little morning sickness and gestational diabetes (which come with the blessing of a baby in the end) to the alternative of HIV and some of the things that would put me at risk of having it?

It’s nice to get good news when you’re expecting bad news.  And it’s good to have another thing to be grateful for.

To all of you moms out there, happy Mother’s Day!  My mother is definitely one of the best mothers ever, and I dare anyone to try to top her efforts or results.   Really, try it, you’ll be happier for it.  My mom is a great teacher and nurturer without being smothering or pedantic.  It’s a tough line to walk, but she does it gracefully and I’m grateful for her example.  Thank you for all you do for me and my little family, Mom.

I’ve had an awesome, though atypical, Mother’s Day so far.  Usually Sunday mornings are full of me rushing around trying to get everyone else to rush around to get ready for church.  This morning was calm and relaxed with no rushing, yet we all got to church early–and completely dressed!  And I even had time/took the time to curl my hair, so I felt relatively pretty.

At church some kids and the EQ president helped me set up the Primary room, so I got to sit down in plenty of time for Sacrament Meeting with my family in the pew instead of in the hallway.  Although neither of my counselors were at church today, my secretary was at church after a few weeks of travel and was soooo wonderfully helpful.  Two kids actually begged me to let them give the talk and scripture (which coincidentally hadn’t been assigned in advance this week) and we’d asked a member of the bishopric weeks before to do Sharing Time, so all I had to do was conduct and patrol the halls.  My patrolling was fun because we had some exciting “emergencies” like a little boy with his foot harmlessly stuck under a chair that I got to un-stick.

Near the beginning of Primary, my husband came in to let me know that he was going with some of the rest of the EQ to go help a family in the stake whose house had been severely damaged in a tornado last night.  So, after Primary I headed home alone with the kids and called some of my sisters and my mother.  Then I got to go visit my Primary counselor who recently got home from the hospital and had a great time talking with her, despite the kids’ unsuccessful attempts to destroy her home.  Colin called me on the way home from that to say he’s on his way home.

It’s been a great day.  Not because of all the thoughtful gifts my husband and kids did or didn’t get me, and not because I’m a great mother, and not because everything fell into place the way I would have imagined it if I were designing the perfect Mother’s Day.  It’s been a great Mother’s Day because the Lord has blessed me with gratitude today.  I’m grateful for the silk flower corsages the young women and young men at church gave to all the women in the ward.  I’m grateful for the Mother’s Day handprints my kids made for me in Nursery today.  I’m grateful to have two good, healthy kids–a huge blessing that I’m more aware of since I’m often in the company of women who don’t have children at all.  I’m grateful that Colin did the dishes last night just to make me happy.  I’m grateful to have the kind of husband who will cheerfully leave a meeting to serve strangers far away doing the manual labor he normally dislikes so much.  I’m grateful to be healthy and strong and to be able to move around and do almost anything I want to do and to have had a full night of sleep last night in a safe place.  I’m thankful to have plenty of food in the house for our family.  I’m thankful to have a family that loves me and accepts me, flaws and all.  I’m thankful for my mother and her mother and my father’s mother.  And today is perfect.

It rains in the Spring.  I like rain because it smells good.  It makes everything feel clean and new.  It gives variety to my life.  I even like thunderstorms because it makes me humble and reminds me of the power of God.

Flowers!  The flowers start to come back and they smell good and help me to be cheerful.

Easter.  My birthday.  May parent’s birthdays.  Passover.

The sunshine comes back warm, but not too warm.  I always forget how much I missed the sunshine during the winter and it’s like a great surprise every year.

Green grass and leaves.

Strawberries!  I had strawberries for breakfast with a little whipped cream.  Who knew that two cups of strawberries has fewer grams of carbs than a cup of cereal?

Other spring fruits and veggies!  Asparagus, artichokes, apricots, avocados, and pineapple.  (I just found a list of fruits and vegetables by season–with pictures!!–here)

The farmer’s market starts up again and I can find good produce next month!

General Conference

Kites–I should bust out our kite and take the kids kite-flying with all the wind we’ve got right now.

Spring Cleaning.  I rarely actually do a whole huge Spring Cleaning, but I do get a little bug in my head helping me to get motivated to try to get things back in order.

Anticipation and planning of summer vacations.

Did I mention flowers and sunshine?  I really love those…

I wrote a seperate post here with a list of appropriate LDS music I could use and which are my favorite songs. 

For lesson ideas, I looked at the lds.org FHE manual under the topic "gratitude."  One of the lessons has you discuss Mosiah 2:19-24 and discuss ways to show gratitude to Heavenly Father and Jesus.  The story of the Ten Lepers (Luke 17) is also a good one when you're discussing gratitude.  You can find more great gratitude lesson ideas here: http://www.fastq.com/~jbpratt/lds/resources/gratitude.html and http://lds.families.com/blog/family-home-evening-thanksgiving.  I think that since my kids are small and we are going to a friends' for Thanksgiving, I'll explain some Thanksgiving dinner expectations and talk about how I'd like them to act while we're at someone else's house.

As for games and activities, I found this page on about.com that has some Thanksgiving game ideas: http://www.amazingmoms.com/htm/thanksgiving_games.htm.  I'd like to focus on giving thanks and being grateful, so there was one game in the list that stood out.  Here are the directions:

"Thankerchief"
Arrange the children/players in a circle. Pass around a "thankerchief" (handkerchief) around as everyone recites this poem:

Thankerchief, thankerchief, around you go – 
Where you'll stop, nobody knows.
But when you do, someone must say,
What they are thankful for this day.

The player holding the "thankerchief" when the poem ends, must 
say aloud, one thing for which they are thankful. This continues until 
everyone has had a turn.

On second thought, really little kids like mine may not be able to think of things they're thankful for and say them aloud.  So, maybe a game of Duck, Duck, Goose (or Duck, Duck, Turkey?) would be a better way to get them involved. 

Some other activities I found on theholidayzone.com that I liked were:

• A Thanksgiving Collage: cut out pictures of things you're thankful for from magazines and paste them on a poster
• Chain of Gratitude: write things you're thankful for on small strips of paper and loop them together with staples or tape to make a chain
• Thankful Tree: make a trunk out of brown paper, then write what you're thankful for on "leaves" (construction paper traces of your hand or leaves, or real leaves might work if you use a marker), then paste them on the trunk
• Thanksgiving Certificates: think of people you are thankful for and make award certificates or write thank you notes with things you're grateful for about them (you could send cute Thanksgiving e-cards from this site, but watch out because there are ads all over it)

For medium sized kids who are into jokes, here's a site with some very silly, but completely clean Thanksgiving riddles.  And if your kids are old enough to not eat the crayons, here's a site I like that has good, free Thanksgiving coloring pages to print.  Some of them are called "Bingo dauber pages," and if you wanted to I think you could make a game out of it by letting the kids color in or put a sticker on one empty dauber spot for each thing they say they're thankful for (or something like that). 

If you want an extended activity, watching the movie Pollyanna and then playing "The Glad Game" could be really fun.

For dessert, I think I'll do something like this relatively healthy pumpkin bread, only maybe in cupcake form so it doesn't take so long to cook and to help with portion control.

My lesson for the Beehives today is about the home environment. The idea is to teach them that keeping your home orderly and clean invites the Spirit to be in your home and that women staying home to raise children and keep their homes beautiful and clean is honorable work that God is pleased with. It's not mere drudgery and by having a cheerful attitude about our work we can bless our families.

I remember listening to this lesson when I was in Young Women as a young woman and I vividly recall the teacher ask us how we would feel if the Savior came to visit us at home that day without warning. Of course my room was a wreck and I believe I remember having had a fight with my mother that week about the subject of the cleanliness of my room (not an uncommon topic of discussion). It went something like: Mom: "You must keep your room clean. I'm sick of seeing this mess!" Me: "Well, then I'll close the door so you don't have to see it! It's my room and you shouldn't be in there anyway. I like it this way." Mom: "It's not your room. It's my room because it's my house. I let you use that room. As long as you live in this house, you'll keep your room clean!" You can probably imagine how it went from there. Eventually I would agree to clean it if she would help me. Of course one of my big problems with keeping my room clean was that I'd let it go until it was horrifying, then get overwhelmed and let it get even worse, then one weekend when I'd have nothing else to do and be sick of it I'd clean like crazy till it was "perfect." So, my mom would sit there with me, going through each dresser drawer and under my bed and in my closet until, hours later, we were satisfied or too exhausted to continue. My poor mother is so patient. I realize what a saint she is now that I'm older and have a house of my own to try to keep clean.

Anyway, back to young Bethany's beehive class. My teacher asked us if our homes were in a state to comfortably receive the Savior, or if we'd be embarrassed. I knew I would be embarrassed by my room and wanted to improve. It's taken me a lot of effort since then to improve, but I believe I have improved. I feel like my home is my stewardship, that I've been very blessed to be allowed to have a nice home with plenty of room and lots of stuff to mess it up with. I'm still not very good at cleaning or decorating or any of those skills I've been working on, but I'm getting better at it all the time.

As I've thought about this lesson I'm giving today, I realize that if the Savior were to come to my home today, He would see toys and clothes on the floor, books in disarray in the basement, a messy office, and dishes on the table from last night's dinner. But He would also know how much effort I've put in to getting it that good! I ran a full dishwasher last night, most of the laundry is clean and folded, the kids' bedroom and the guest room are picked up, there are clean towels and toilets in the bathroom. He would know and I would know that it's better and that I'm trying to be better still.

I had a couple of paradigm shifts that really helped me in my quest to improve myself in this way. One, I recognized that I don't have to work nearly as hard as my ancestors did to keep a clean, orderly house. I have a vacuum, dishwasher, clothes washer, dryer, and many other conveniences that make it hundreds of times faster to do what needs to be done. So, I earned to be grateful for the few tasks I have to do comparatively. Two, I found a web page called flylady.net which teaches that you don't have to do everything perfectly all at once to make your home a nice place to live. Just a few minutes a day working on the maintenance frees up time and psychological space to work on the time-consuming stuff that you never get to otherwise. It also taught me to just do a little something that will show me immediate results when I'm overwhelmed, and that helps motivate me to tackle more. And, I discovered that it's easier to do a little cleaning often (even when it's not very dirty!) than to do a lot of cleaning all at once when it's really dirty. It may seem obvious to you, but it was news to me! (Sorry Mom, I know you tried to tell me…) When my home is clean and orderly and when I'm cheerful about the work I'm able to do it's easier to feel the Spirit. It's also easier for me to serve others because I'm more worried about people than about all the things I need to do at home. I can think more clearly in orderly places, which is why the lesson brings up how clean the temple always is. Trying new things isn't really frightening when my home is in order, because there's space for one more thing on my plate. Making new friends is easier because I'm not embarrassed to have them over to my house on the spur of the moment when my house is clean (or at least closer to clean).

God likes things clean. He likes His house to be clean, His people to be clean, and His peoples' houses to be clean. It occurs to me that learning to clean your house can help you learn to become clean internally–to repent. We don't have to be perfect on our own all at once. Christ will sit with us in our room, just like my mom, and go through each drawer and under the bed and through the boxes in the closet. He'll help us get rid of the sweaters that don't fit anymore and the empty drinking-straw wrappers that somehow got in with the shoes. He'll teach us how to wash our sheets and maybe even paint the walls our favorite color. He never gets sick of helping us and he won't give up on us until it's done, if we're willing to keep working with him. He doesn't make us do it alone, but he insists that we do it if we are going to live in his Kingdom. Thanks for listening while I wrote myself through what this lesson means to me. I think it'll help me teach my sweet Beehives better.