Claiming Small Victories

“Today is the greatest day of my life,” she said. I had given my daughter a strawberry popsicle.

Win.

It’s so easy to see the events that go wrong sometimes. It’s not even a fair game of chance with 50/50 odds. With small kids it’s inevitable that the things that you didn’t intend to happen, will, and everything is a little bit harder.

The morning you wake up early to get a quiet hour to yourself is the morning that the kids will be up at the crack of dawn too. This happens to me every single time.

So what do you do when things feel extra challenging? You watch for the wins and claim the small victories.

When you’re late for church (again) because it takes ten extra minutes to get ready because you can’t find his shoes. Just before you decide to send your kid to church shoeless so you can walk out the door, you find them under your bed. Of course they’re there. Win.

In that moment after you buckle the kids in the car and close the back seat door, they’re strapped safely into their car seats with a thick glass window to muffle the sound. You take an extra minute to breathe in deeply and enjoy the quiet outside before you get in the driver’s seat. Win.

Your sweet child might cry during the last hour of the flight, but for the first few hours he was charming. Win.

The one-year-old found your makeup bag and used your eyeliner to draw on his bedroom wall. The loose powder was spared. Win.

And you know that the night you stay up late on the internet when you should be asleep is the same one your kid will wake up sick just a couple of hours later, but you’ll reach her just in time before the throw up goes everywhere. Win.

When your appointment ran late and your child is tired and hungry on the way home, it’s a small victory to find the bag of dry cereal you left in the car three weeks earlier. Win.

When the kids go to sleep at night and we have a healthy family with a roof over our heads…Win.

What are your victories today?