that sometimes mean the most!
This week Jarrett is on the East coast for work. He's been gone since last Friday and while its normally a challenge to handle everything while he's gone, this time I was even more nervous about it.
Maybe its the hormones, maybe its just me. So when Jarrett's mom and dad offered to help me while he was going to be gone, I was so thankful.
The past 5 days that he's been gone have actually been manageable only because of them. This past weekend we had 3 baseball games (in less than 20 hours) and not only were they at all three of them to help me with the kids, but they took the boys all night Saturday evening and on Sunday, they took all three kids! Honestly, they took them from right after church until that night. They treated the kids to all the fun things Nana and Papa's do with their grandchildren including a movie and popcorn at the theater.
It was SO relaxing on Sunday to have the entire day to myself, and while I'm going to admit it felt very weird not to have three younger people to keep track of, I continued to remind myself, this was a day I could use for anything I wanted to do. I spent the day by going to the grocery store and by working on my sister's wedding invitations. It was amazing how many things I got done. And even though I was lonely, I enjoyed the day tremendously.
I'm so thankful for their help.
And if it couldn't have gotten any better, it actually did.
This morning when the kids and I got up and went to grab a clean bowl from the dishwasher we started the night before, all we found was stinky dirty dishes. I didn't have time to investigate it too much, I wrote it off to, well this is the one thing that had to break while dad was gone (seriously anytime he goes away there is always something that breaks). I tried to reset the system, it wouldn't work, so we resorted to hand washing a few bowls, leaving all the rest, just to get us by. As typical mornings go, we raced out the door 10 minutes late and left the house like a twister had blown through.
My father-in-law can fix anything so once I got to work, I texted him and asked him if he might have time to stop over to the house and look at our dishwasher. He of course said he'd be happy to. At work he called me to say he figured out it was a bad computer board and that we'd have to have it replaced.
After our conversation I thought, we'll that will probably be another couple hundred dollars to get that fixed and the darn thing isn't even 3 years old. Oh well, that's just how life goes.
And then I got home and found this....
You see that?! It may just look like a pile of dishes to you, but to me, it has been the highlight of my day. Those dishes that you see there are clean dishes. Not only did my father-in-law stop over and spend many hours trying to fix our dishwasher, he then spent even more hours researching how he can find the part to help save us some money. And on top of that he then washed our dirty dishes so we didn't have to come home to find dirty dishes!!!!!
Is that not the nicest thing ever? Seriously I got all teary-eyed when I put the pieces together that they were cleaned and that he had done it for me.
There are many things in life that mean a lot. These past 5 days, which I normally would have faced knowing they would be stressful and sometimes overwhelming have been so manageable because of the great help of Nana and Papa.
From the quiet and peaceful afternoon to the clean dishes sitting upon my counter, I'm oh so thankful for their help. While it may seem to them like what they did was small, to me it seemed oh so big and it really means the most.
Thanks so much for all of your help!
Until next time,
Angie
No comments:
Post a Comment