The House Is Still Standing

Happy Monday, friends!

I'd thrown out the disclaimer back near the beginning of this blog that I wasn't a medical doctor or a licensed therapist or anything like that so you should take any advice or information I put on here with a grain of salt.  My good friend and technical wizard Vince suggested I approach it from the position that "this is what we do and everybody's still alive."

I think it's excellent advice and I intend to follow it but it got me thinking about the "everybody's still alive" bit.  The girls aren't so much active babysitters anymore now that Graphics Magician is old enough to stay by himself for stretches of time but the instruction we used to give them was "as long as everybody's still alive and the house is still standing, we're good."  In other words, we didn't want them to worry too much about anything other than the bare minimum.

But sometimes it seems as though we've spent copious amounts of our lives making sure the house was still standing, just making sure we were surviving.  I'm not entirely proud of that, but we've had eras in our lives when we were living in crisis mode, dealing with one problem after another and hoping that we could just keep the bare minimum of existence together.  And to top that off, trying to put on a brave face to the outside world.

These days we're attempting to be more honest with our struggles and challenges with those outside the family and we're also trying to "seize the day," to enjoy our lives and do productive things and make a difference in our community and our world despite the issues we face.  I may tell you the story sometime of a lady I know who's essentially housebound  through taking care of family members but who manages to paint and garden and maintain an active and vibrant internet life regardless.

So on occasion the best thing we can say about a day is "at least the house is still standing."  But we want more of that out of life and by God's grace we're trying to go about it.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.