Another guest post with Denise, click on the picture to visit her blog!
This past weekend, my husband was sleeping recovering from a cold and my boys were watching Monster Trucks and jumping around and screaming. The house was shaking. Our bedroom is right next to the living room and the dining room/office is right off the living room too so my sleeping husband was bound to be disturbed by their loudness and my working on the computer was defiantly being disturbed by their rowdiness. Inevitably, someone falls into a wall, someone misses the jump onto the couch cushion and someone is running for a Band-Aid. It’s insane.
I got fed up. It was too noisy. You can only take screaming fans, a yelling broadcaster and the major rumble of engines blaring from your TV for so long as your kids stand on the arm chair or the coffee table or the stairs and fall onto the couch cushions they have removed from the couch to the floor as well as every pillow they can get a hold of just to see if they can ‘bounce’ when they have hit the now cushioned floor. They have never ever bounced. This has never ever stopped them.
Turning off the computer (they knew they were in trouble then), I shut off their TV (big trouble), told them to pick up the pillows in that quiet voice a mom can pull off better than shouting and that room was in shape in no time. I told them to hush up, Daddy is sleeping and I was wishing I was sleeping too!
So, all four of them got out the coloring paper, the crayons, the markers, the drawing pencils and spend most of the next HOUR coloring their dream monster trucks. It was amazing! I turned the boys cd on quietly (Buck Howdy, of course!) so it leant some fun to the quietness.
Suddenly, ds2 (our second son) says “Isn’t this just so nice? We are all sitting here talking and coloring and isn’t this just so nice?” Since no one was saying anything, he added “yes, it is so nice!”
I was walking around, soaking up the moment of peace, tidying up (because it’s never clean here, just always getting ‘tidied up’) and it struck me what ds2 said. When the TV was off, the computer was sleeping and we were just ‘being’, well, that was the highlight of the day. There is nothing wrong with the boys watching TV, there is nothing wrong with me researching on the computer….but sometimes we have too much monster truck in our life. Sometimes we need to get away from the loudness, the excitement, the work, and just spend some quiet moments with our family, with our God, just to reconnect, to be and talk about nothing more than what our favorite color is – which, is in the scheme of life – a huge thing to know.
That Friday night was one of the best nights we have had in a long time. I hope the lesson we learned will stick with us longer than the shocks on a monster truck too.
