Some days you feel up to your neck in laundry, Lego pieces, and litter about the house. On those days, it can be hard to slow down and see the light at the top of the mountain of toys you feel buried in.

It can be hard to see the big picture and practice gratefulness for what you truly have. It is easy to take things for granted when you are a mom just making it through to the end of each day. I know for me, that happens more often than I would like.

Ahh kids are sleeping. Time to relax. Wait…

This display of shoes is a sample of my after bedtime “cleaning” last night. There were shoes scattered across the mudroom floor and toys far displaced from their toybox homes. I was just ready to plop down on the couch with my husband. It had been another long day of fetching snacks for boys, mediating child disagreements, and preventing my one-year-old from his 967th near death experience. Yeah, I’m keeping a tally.

I knew that if I just went and sprawled out on the couch though, I wouldn’t be able to relax. I’d be sitting in, what would feel like, the aftermath of a 7.5 earthquake in a toy store.

Why so many shoes?

So I found a happy medium. I placed the toys in the nearest bin. Quietly, though, so I didn’t wake my 1-year-old who has been asleep for an hour already and would most likely be up again within the next hour. Then I went to the mudroom, looked at the shoes, some with their pair in a different room entirely, and just used my foot to shove them as close to the shoe shelf as I could. The energy it would take to bend down and actually PLACE them on the shelf just wasn’t in me.

As I was using my foot as a human hockey stick, I wondered why on earth each individual kid feels the need to wear a different pair of shoes each time they go outside. Whether it’s to play on the swing set or to pile in the minivan to run to town.

Some days my tidying up would have ended on that simple thought. Other days, I am more patient and gracious. Last night was the latter.

Gratefulness

How lucky am I to have a million little shoes spread across my floor? Some people would kill for that. Others wish they could go back in time and experience the mess only little ones conjure again. I am dealing with small literal messes right now. In the future, it will be the bigger ones that come with bigger kids. Emotional ones. Ones that aren’t as easy to clean up as sweeping shoes aside with your foot. I hope they are far and few between, but I know they will happen. And all I can do now is give my kids the tools they need to deal with them when they do come.

For right now, though, I can continue cleaning up the little messes they make every day (heck, every minute of every day) and prepare for the bigger ones to come in the future. So many shoes, yet so many blessings.

Conclusion

Are there days you feel it is hard to be grateful? When does that happen the most for you? A certain time of year or maybe just depending on your mood that day?

For me, it is when a ton of little things all build up, and it feels hard to get out from under all the literal and figurative clutter.

I find it helps when I stop and try to become aware of everything that is bugging me and getting in the way of feeling blessed. Even just taking note of it and making a mental list allows me to put it in a box in my mind, close the lid, and put it up high on a shelf in my brain where I can’t see it anymore. Then it frees up space for me to see all that I have and realize how lucky I am to have all my boys here with me, happy, and healthy. And all those little things seem tiny and unimportant anymore. Until tomorrow when little irritations start adding up again and I need to restart the whole boxing process once again 🙂