Motherhood Island

Every once in a while, not often, but sometimes, I am a Good Mother. We've been inspired lately reading the book of Nim's Island and last weekend we decided to make our own islands out of salt dough. How fun, inventing our own islands! All I actually did was come up with the idea and help Maggie make the dough, then she, Soph and Spence did the inventing. Here are the results:

Spencer's ended up being a snake that he took outside and lost after he painted it. Oh well.

I just wanted to document the fact that I do cool stuff sometimes. Call it Working Mother Guilt (because ever since we started the Festival Team I have come to the dismal conclusion that I am a working mother now) but I periodically feel like I am an underachieving mother. I haven't taught my kids to speak French (though Gary and I do), they don't have entire chapters of the scriptures memorized (though they do know the articles of faith), and I really hate doing girls' hair nor am I any good at it. So sometimes they leave the house looking like Plain Janes. And I lose my temper sometimes, and we didn't do workbooks and math camps and science experiments all summer to get them ahead, we have yet to memorize the preamble to the Constitution (well, Maggie did), my five year old is not reading chapter books and doing calculus yet, and I don't always cook them warm breakfasts (cereal, anyone?). I have lots of goals, and some good ideas, but many of my best ideas have never actually happened (see the above comments). But sometimes, kids, I do pull through sometimes. Remember that! :-) And hey, we did Princess and Adventure camps this summer too! I get points for that, right?

To give myself some credit, their homework is always done; their clothes are (mostly) clean and so is the house; we do our family prayers, family nights, service projects and scripture study; I am here to greet them when they get home from school to give them hugs and snacks; and we do have rules and chores and family responsibilities. And Gary is here to help with all of the above (well, except the laundry) - plus he makes it all FUN. I'm doing okay. I just know I could do better if I had a few more hours in the day, or extra organizing skills, or less laziness and more energy or something. I guess the only thing we can do is keep trying to improve, right?