Friday, June 6th

 Last night I lost it.  Lost. It. It's been building for a few days, now, and today it all came to a head. The problem is this:

I am tired of not being enough.  I am tired of having my best efforts be not even close to what's required.  I am tired of feeling like it's eight against one every day.  I am tired of working myself to exhaustion, and never even making a dent in my To Do list.  I am just tired of it all.  So tired.

I had dinner in the Crock Pot first thing this morning, but I waited to serve dinner until Friedrich got home. I was still on my knees, just finishing with vacuuming the stairs, when Friedrich came in late, and said he wasn't hungry and was leaving again. Louisa had already left for a babysitting job without getting any dinner, and the Captain and Liesl were at the door, saying good-bye on their way to play practice.  Gretl, who is potty-training, picked that moment to have her second accident in twenty minutes.  And I lost it.

Today I spent hours vacuuming.  I vacuumed stairs and closets and bedrooms and hallways and a popcorn-covered family room.  But that means that I didn't clean the kitchen or do the dishes.  That means that I didn't do any laundry.  I didn't pull any weeds in the yard, or scrub the bath tub.

I wanted feed the whole family dinner together.  I have this hard-to-banish vision of the family sitting down at the table to eat dinner together that I try very hard to make a reality every day. But it just wasn't possible tonight.  And I was the only one who cared.

Gretl had done so well in potty training all day long (my Gretl is a little younger than the girl on the movie), until she left a giant puddle on the carpet with no warning at all.  She received a cold shower, new clothes, and encouragement to make it to the potty next time. But twenty minutes later, she did it again.  And in the same spot, too!  What in the world?!?

So to sum it all up, I was feeling pretty picked on.  And it hadn't completely gone away this morning, either.  I was still feeling like I had an impossible job to do, and no one cared, and there was definitely no one interested in helping out or making it any easier

I went to Walmart with my mom, and while she was shopping for groceries, I went to the Garden Center.  I love flowers, and my house has a ton of flower beds. They looked gorgeous in the spring when all the bulbs were blooming, but now the bulbs are done and my flower beds look awful.  Time to plant annuals, and fill them up with color!  However, there has been a small money problem, and I haven't been able to buy any flowers at all.  In an attempt at rebellion, I grabbed a cart and filled it up with all the flowers I wanted.  It was making feel better to imagine where I would put each kind of flower and how it would look, but in the end I just couldn't do it.  There just isn't the money, and I left my cart full of flowers standing the Gardent Center and walked away.

As you can imagine, that didn't help my feeling of being picked-on very much.  My mom must have noticed that I was pouting, and she asked me what I had been looking at.  I told her about my cart full of flowers, and she told me to go get it.  My mom doesn't have much money right now, either, but she bought my flowers for me!  She bought the whole cart full of flowers, and I was so excited. 

I am so thankful to the Lord for sending a sign that someone was still on my side.  Someone still cares about me and what I want.  And, of course, I know that my family loves me and appreciates me.  I'm just glad that God loved me enough to send me that little bit of proof.  And now I get to plant flowers!  Hooray!