The Pre-Spring Exhaustion

I feel as if I’ve hit a wall.

This is completely normal, I know.

Talk to any homeschooler, any educator, any parent….and they will tell you that February/March is just the hardest time of the school year.

We have run out of the energy we stored up from Christmas break and the holidays. And we still have quite a few more weeks to go before a Spring break.

We most likely won’t have any more snow days, but we also haven’t officially welcomed long days outside soaking up the sun.

We have been sick. And then sick again. And sick again. We have been slammed with so many sickness that we have lost count (actually, Theo is counting…and it’s 18 since September). One kid has had a cough that has persisted for a month. Three other sicknesses have come and gone while he continues to cough. A month seems so small when written in words, but when experienced in the long hours of the night consistently for one month, it feels like an eternity.

I think that children being sick is the hardest part of being a parent, in general. There are some sicknesses that I handle better than others, but overall, having sick kids is just plain hard. It throws off the routine, it takes away much-needed sleep, it makes everyone feel grumpy and out of sorts, it requires new coping mechanisms that aren’t healthy in the long term (but are fine in the short term. Until the short terms bleeds from one sickness into another and it’s suddenly been months and months of illness and those habits are now normal). I feel bad because even though we have had some nasty illnesses, for the most part they have all be handle-able. If it was just one of these sicknesses in the last 7 months, I wouldn’t think twice about it. No big deal, just par for the course. We would just navigate the week and move along with it. But we have been slammed with illness after illness. Week after week we have one sickness after another. We have missed months of church, weeks of school, days of work. It feels like my parents, myself and Theo are all working full time to take care of kids (most of the time sick kids) and it’s just absolutely exhausting. One sickness – no problem. Two sicknesses- discouraging. By sickness 18? We are so far beyond being able to handle it. And yet handle it we must. Along with handling our jobs, and school for the kids, and the kids that are well and bouncing around with energy.

We continue to search for land to move our family to. We have wanted to do this since we first got married, but never felt like it was the right time. Until now. Now we crave acres of dirt under our feet and being able to raise our kids where the boundaries are looser than suburban fences. Unfortunately, that is the trendy thing to do right now and we all know about the housing market right now. It seems that any time we find a property to consider, someone snatches it up with an all cash offer above asking price. Something we just simply cannot do.

We wrestled with what it means to live within our means when it seems like everyone else gets what they want. Or when everyone else’s means is so far above our own.

And I try to remind myself that what we have is beyond sufficient. We have built a beautiful family. We have all we need and so much more. We have a life that someone out there is praying for. Our home is beautiful and more than sufficient for our families needs. Contentment does not come naturally, but fighting for it can also be exhausting.

Someone reached out to me on Instagram and said that they are thankful that I am sharing this “in-between” time in our lives. So often it can feel like everyone else is getting their “wins”. Even for those that have worked hard and it is well-deserved, it can be hard to see and hear about. Every time I see someone share about getting their “dream house” or “a little plot of land”, I turn a little green with envy. I get it. I’m there with you if you struggle in that way. Every time I hear someone share about how healthy their kids are, I wonder if they have got it right and I’m doing something wrong that my kids have been sick so much.

So I continue to share and write because I want you to know that you are not alone if life is hard for you right now. It doesn’t have to be BIG hard. It can be small things adding up to HARD.

This season for us has been HARD, and I often avoid sharing about it because it just feels like complaining. I do not know a single person who has not gone through an incredibly difficult time in the past 2-3 years. I know many people who have gone through or are going through things way harder than what we are facing. And I also do not like to complain. I have so many good things, and so many good blessings and I’m learning to look for them even when I feel like I just can’t find them.

I am also learning what it means to wrestle with my faith. I’ve gone through several periods in my life where there was a “make or break” moment in my faith. These moments came with a BIG trial – my brother having seizures and being medically evacuated to France. My 5 week old baby in the hospital, possibly not going to make it through the night. Those moments I knew I had to choose- faith or no faith. And I chose faith, and it was so worth it. But sometimes it’s in the continuous mundane moments that are not a big, monumental black and white choice. The choice to have a good attitude when the thermometer blinks a fever AGAIN. The choice to serve my husband when I’m bone tired and don’t want to give anything to another soul. The choice to not whine and woe is me when we’ve seen another desirable property go under contract to someone else. The choice to make a healthy dinner for my family when it doesn’t seem to make a difference in our health anyways. The choice to be diligent to wake up and pray and read my Bible, even when I have to first convince myself that God IS listening.

It’s the subtle hard and I find faith in a good, abundant God harder in those moments than faith in obvious hard.

Anyways. I sat down to write a blog post about a tea party that Tera hosted and instead all of this came pouring out. Ha.

I know Spring will come in just a few short weeks and I will be renewed by Vitamin D and letting my kids play outside for hours each day. The buds will bloom on the trees and it will be glorious. I know that the end of the school year will come and my little first graders will be reading and they will run with joy and abandon into the summer. I know that one day we may be able to afford land, and I also know that even if we have to spend the rest of our lives in this home, we will be ok. We will still have everything that truly matters. I know that one day we will be able to look back on this season and we will cringe and maybe eventually laugh at how prolonged and difficult the endless sickness was/is.

But right now we are just in the thick of it and so we will keep going. One step at a time. One day at a time. One small, faithful, faith-filled moment at a time.