Challenge day three

I bet you thought I was going to miss today. Oh wait, no one is reading this but me. That's okay. Sometimes the doing of a thing is more important than the noticing.

So today's deal is going to be considerably shorter than before because my moment comes from what I consider to be a complete and utter failure to adhere to what I learned yesterday. So here I was working out all that "law of kindness" in my tongue and "wisdom" from my mouth when suddenly I was faced with an uber challenge in my daily life. It rained yesterday. a lot...a whole lot...so much so that our levee was breached and water came pouring downhill, around our retaining wall, across the patio and...you guessed it, into the family room. Now, mind you, our family room is a construction zone that we have completely gutted and are remodeling from scratch due to the fact that the previous owner of our home had neither a levee nor the sense to replace the septic system when the tank cracked. (Can you say ewww?) Anyway, the water began to come in. Our 4 yr old noticed it and immediately told Daddy who got out the shop vac and began sucking up water. Guess what I did? I yelled. Technically, my husband yelled at me first and to be fair it originally started as yelling TO me, but turned into yelling at me. At which point, I yelled at my children. Thereafter, as I was doing what I referred to as "mopping the deck on the Titanic" I looked up from my turn on the shop vac to see my 21 month old standing in a puddle of water beside me. I screamed. Oh yeah, you read that right. I screamed. A deep primal, "I've had enough" scream. Of course, she screamed back at me, only in fear and shock rather than desperation and frustration. Then I yelled again, only this time for help. My sweet oldest daughter came down in her rain boots, got the baby, took her upstairs, took off her yucky socks and pants, changed her diaper and locked her in their room with them.
As for the family room.... well to be honest, there was really nothing in this room but new sheetrock and the water was contained within less than an hour and my amazing husband had the floor nearly dry by bedtime, but we had some serious apologizing to do. We both hugged each other, apologized for yelling (at least no bad words were exchanged! lol) and promised to try to do better.
And maybe THAT's today's lesson. We fail. We mess up. We are human. We get it wrong. But being virtuous is about realizing that what we have done is wrong and making it right, not just with the person we wronged, but with God.
So, with that, I'm going to go poor out some kind words on my hard working husband who in the midst of his responsibilities today, helped me clean up the kitchen while I was shuttling children to and from practice and running errands for the church. That's teamwork!