Turning Our Focus

You may have already seen one of these pictures on my Instagram a few weeks ago, but I wanted to share them here with more of the story-

Here’s what I wrote on Instagram, “Life around here has been hectic lately. Our basement flooded, kids have been sick, there have been a million Dr appointments and an unexpected tooth surgery, plus a million other normal day-to-day things we have going on. I’ll admit, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and focus on the negative, but then I come downstairs to find the boys playing piano together, and as soon as I put Ford down he wanted to be right there with them, and it reminded me that life is all about what you focus on. There is always bad, and always good, and I hope I will always remember to focus on the good.”

There is SO much good in my life, even when life seems overwhelming and like everything possible is going wrong. I just need to remember to focus on it, and in my mind, I feel like I do, but when people genuinely ask how I’m hanging in there, I tend to say something more like “well, lifes hard with three kids” etc etc, and it is, but I need to be better about what I focus on when I answer those questions. My children are a joy, I love them. Yes parenting can be hard, but that isn’t what I should be focusing on, and when I don’t focus on it, I barely even notice that parenting is hard.

I had a really great conversation a few weeks ago with a good friend of mine about how we can easily get distracted by things that are good and lose our focus on what is best in life. Many times we spend so much time doing “good” things, that we end up not having time left for the things that are “best” like one-on-one time with our children or our spouse. One of my favorite talks centers on the “good,” “better,” and “best” things in life. I feel blessed that I was raised in a family that knew the importance of what was best in life, and we spent much of our time growing up either at church, at school, or spending time with our family. As Brandon and I have become parents and especially as the kids get old enough to want to go play with other kids all the time, we have had to start deciding what is better and what is best more and more often, and sometimes it can be really hard to know what is the best thing for our family, and for me one of the hardest parts is telling people no when they invite us to something that is a good thing to go do and would be fun but our family really needs that time as just Mom and Dad and our kids, so we turn down the invitation. Yes, at those fun things we would be together, but where would our focus be? Most likely, it’s not on each other. The kids are running off with friends or cousins, and Brandon and I are chatting with the adults. It’s good, and there are times when those activities are great, but nothing is as important as that time with your immediate family, especially if you’ve been missing out on that lately.

Seeing how much my boys just enjoy that time as brothers really stopped me in my tracks and helped me to pause and enjoy that time that we have while they are little and to put down the vacuum and just be present and focus on them. They are what’s best in my life.