Never Say Never

Today is a big day for me.  I said I'd never blog and here I am.  What prompted this blog was some uncomfortable feelings I was having recently.  As a stay-at-home mom whose children are nearly all in school during the day, I have a little bit of free time.  This is a new discovery to me as I have had children underfoot for the last 14 years of my life.  Now I have small portions of my day that are quiet and I can actually choose what to do with myself.  My husband works a full-time job and also maintains a brain full of vision and ideas about business ventures or inventions or home improvement projects.  I was inwardly lamenting the irony of my lack of something to occupy my free time and his wish for more free time in which to accomplish all his grand ideas.  I don't have the creative vision he does but I have a real desire to contribute to the world, or at least contribute to my family.  Don't get me wrong--I fully value my role as mother and wife.  I know I am doing the best thing with my life right now that I can in raising children and maintaining a strong marriage.  But I don't want to let those moments of unscheduled-ness turn into wasted time.  I could be making money to pay off our home or donate to worthy causes.  I could be volunteering in my community.  I could...I could...Then I realized how much I contribute to our household in reality.  Because I can relate to tangible things, something I can wrap my brain around, I began to mentally calculate how I save our family money.  In cooking from scratch, cutting my family's hair, riding my bike when I could drive etc. I "earn a paycheck."  It would be nice to see a check come in the mail, but instead I don't see money going out of the checking account to pay for some of the things that I can do myself.  That is when I began to appreciate how much I have to share with others about how to simplify our lives.  I live a charmed life.  I am truly blessed.  I don't deserve the bounty and the beauty that surround me.  So I do my best to take care of those blessings and then share them.  So I plan to blog about ways in which I've learned to simplify and beautify what God has given me.