Thank You For Taking Care of Your Family

In Tennessee we are in that in=between season when we wear sweaters and coats one day and peel off layers the next. We neared 80 degrees earlier this week. Yesterday morning the wind chill was 26. Mother would know what winter it is. That’s what Tennesseans call a spring cold snap. We have Locust Winter, Redbud Winter, Dogwood Winter, Blackberry Winter, Whippoorwill Winter, and Cotton Britches Winter. It must be Redbud Winter because I saw some blooming yesterday. One of these days I’d like to have a redbud tree planted in our yard, but I’m very excited for the first time since we moved here to have our very own forsythia bush. I finally remembered to buy one last year.

When our children were growing up, changing out winter clothes for summer ones and summer ones for winter ones felt like a big job. I imagine it is a challenge for many of you, too. Try to savor it a little bit. I miss it now. One spring our toddler John found the transition a bit unnerving. I remember the first day I gave him a short sleeve shirt to wear. He didn’t like it. He tried to pull the hem of the short sleeve down to make it like the long sleeve shirts he had been wearing.

Busy mamas like you have so many things to do to take care of all the precious people God gave you to serve. When our children were young, we used to read a children’s book about a mom and little girl who went on an outing to the zoo. The little girl pretended that she was the mom while the mom pretended to be the little girl. After a while, the little girl was ready to switch back, saying that it must be hard to be a mom before listing the hard things she had had to do while she was pretending.

It’s nice to be understood.

I enjoyed seeing day to day things in the Smithsonian’s Copp Collection, things that have modern-day counterparts that you are now taking care of for your family: