Preaching to the choir

So, we're all a little cranky in my house these days. Who knows why? The Bear is terrible-two-ing all over the place, what with all the "no" and the repeating of the same sentence over and over and over again until she gets what she wants, and the kind-of-sort-of potty training (five days in a row she has gone in the potty), and the nightmares! She has nightmares! About dogs! and birds! and flowers!

Mouse is teething, and not really happy unless she has a finger in her mouth to chew on, drool pooling on her chin. The teething gives her this really nasty liquid diarrhea (TMI, sorry) that goes *everywhere* and stains *everything*. I've taken to only dressing her in onesies that already have orange stains up the back, so as not to ruin even more clothes. So gross. Plus, now that we're putting her in her crib at night, she's waking every 2-3 hours, instead of once a night. I'm really hoping that evens out soon.

Husband is back to shift work, which means he leaves after lunch and gets home at midnight, effectively skipping dinnertime, bathtime, and bedtime, the three most difficult things to accomplish with two kids under two. Plus, we don't get to spend our evenings together after the kids go to bed like we would if he were home, so we get grouchy at each other.

And I am just plain tired. The cumulative effects of almost three years without a full night's sleep are starting to tell. I feel like a moron most of the time, I can't even think straight, I'm grouchy and short-tempered, I rarely get a shower, and... ugh. Every single morning when I wake up, the very first thing I think to myself is, "oh, shit. not again."

Pleasant, right?

At any rate, this morning we were all somehow sitting together relatively peacefully at church, and the text for the sermon was from Romans 5. In part, it says that suffering leads to endurance, that endurance in turn leads to character, that character leads to hope, and that hope will not disappoint us. It just struck me as being singularly appropriate for where I am in my life right now. I think that anyone out there who has two children under the age of two would characterize their lives as "suffering"!* And I thought to myself, I can just barely see the glimmering of endurance on the horizon. I'm not there yet, but I can see that we will get there eventually, and that I will be able to "endure" a lot more of the daily crap that goes on around here, and the guilt and stress that come from holding down a full-time job and being a full-time mom, too. Hopefully I will be able to endure it with a better attitude than I have had lately. It would be nice! And as for character - I'm going to have character out the wazoo (if I make it though this alive)!

It's just a little eerie (but kind of cool, too) when the text for the day seems to be picked out just for you. Perhaps its a message...

Also? Today, for the first time, I made it though an entire service without exposing my chest! Talk about your milestones...


*Sure, in comparison to real, actual suffering, this may seem like a cake walk. There are millions of people in the world who live in active suffering every day, and I'm not trying to trivialize their lives. But I think that the stress and depression that I'm going through right now, and their effects on my family, can accurately be described as suffering, too.