Craziness?

I just wrote the following email to my dear Power of Moms partner, April.  It's a pretty decent snapshot of my life these days, so I thought I'd put it up here for posterity and for anyone else out there who wants to feel good about their hopefully less packed lives!  I've been saying "no" to a lot of things and delegating a ton to great people who are so kind to help (but they need to be trained before they can really help and that takes plenty of scheduling and training time).  Still, the buck stops with me on a ton of things.  And I care too darn much about other things that seem sort of small so I just try to do them myself. 

So here's my email to April (we do status updates to each other every couple days):

I've been responding to tons of emails today and I'll spare you the details but I did get a ton done (with Chantelle) on the new family volunteering section, got Mary and Megan trained on the value of the month stuff (and got the May value up), did a call with Jennifer about the East Coast Retreat she's working on (still securing location and dates), got our bank account all set up, paid our initial deposit to Red Mountain for the June Retreat (we'll owe them $2000 on Friday but I've got checks in hand and it's all good).  We're up to 22 officially registered for that Retreat and Shawni did a blog post about it today which should yield at least a few more early bird registrations.  I put up a new welcome message but it got scrunched on the main page so I'll try to fix that.  I spent quite a bit of time on the bio/photo information with Anna - she seems great and I think all this "specificness" should pay off - I hope anyway.  The "face" of our website really is the photos we use so it's important!  I edited my own bio and photos (although it's still too long - I'll worry about that later!).

Tomorrow is my volunteer morning in Liza and Isaac's classes plus Isaac's got the state science fair (I've got to be at Dixie College for a chunk of that) so I won't get to much Power of Moms stuff.  The next day I'll work more on the Bloom program - need a stretch of a couple hours to polish that up and usually I just get snippets of time around here!  

I ran the school's uniform committee meeting last night (luckily some of the people spoke English this time) and the meeting went really well and everyone thanked me up and down for facilitating but I don't even care that much about uniforms so how do I get into these things???  I guess I was flattered that they thought I could help smooth the feelings and hold a good meeting despite some past issues.  And I'm supposed to pick out carpet for the workout room at our community clubhouse since I hated the ugly choices the older men on the board brought in and were ready to just buy - so I got the job of picking out something better.  Why do I have to open my mouth? But those carpet samples were BAD and I can't stand to see good money wasted on not-so-good stuff if there might well be a better option....  

We did go on a great bike ride today and met up with neighbors at the park and it was very nice. Plus all the cactus flowers are out and I love them so much.  I look forward to the day when Power of Moms doesn't need to be taken care of like a colicky newborn!  But I know we're doing the right thing so I'll keep plugging away and praying hard.

I also went to a funeral today.  This amazingly Christlike woman in our ward just passed away at the age of 43 after battling cancer for 7 years.  She left behind 5 great kids from ages 11-21 and a devoted husband.  I felt overcome with the blessing of my health and the sadness of this good woman's children going through graduations and weddings and babies without their dear mother.  It made me want to cherish every moment with my children all the more.  So I'm setting much stricter boundaries around my Power of Moms work.  The kids are doing fine - great in fact - better than ever - even though I'm quite busy.  I do spend quality time with them pretty much every day - homework time, reading time, meal time, snuggle time, tuck-in time.  It seems like it's enough for them.  But I don't know if it's enough for me.  I don't feel like I'm getting quite enough of my wonderful kids these days.

Good luck with your speech at Women's Conference tomorrow!  I know you'll be fabulous.  I'll be thinking of you and praying for you.

Love, Saren

So there you have it, a very partial list of what wasn't even one of my more crazy days.  And mostly, it's quite amazingly OK.  I do get stressed out and frustrated sometimes (especially when there are website glitches that eat up time).  I do look forward to finishing a couple big things and being able to cut back on my Power of Moms hours so I can devote more time to being a powerful mom to my own family more fully.  But mostly the blessings outweigh the hard stuff and this just feels right.