Everyone has their own missionary outpouring that they can be investing in, wither or not they know their calling yet. Sometimes as a single mom, I can get discontent in my season of life. This is the time I need to focus on my own missions more so than myself. Before we jump into this discussion today, hop on over to Girl Defined and watch their video on how to cope with singleness through using missions.
While these girls live very different lives from us single moms on the other side of the spectrum, many of us have been sexually impure, we are single moms for a reason after all. Teen knock ups, divorced young mother’s, etc, etc, there is still valuable information that can be gleaned from their video.
One of the things that I wanted to point out from their video is the verse from James which discussed that each season is God’s best for you in the season you are in. So, if it’s alone, husband/boyfriendless in this Valentine’s day season, well count it as a blessing mama. Think of it this way, you now have so much more time to pour into your children, to pour into your missions work, to pour into your career, college, family, or whatever it might be that you are in need of pouring into.
As a very young single mom, in this college season of my life with a young child, I have several outpourings that have pulled on my heart strings. While my lifestyle doesn’t allow (like many of yours doesn’t allow going on mission trips over seas), the callings of our hearts are different from the girl, in the video. One such calling is creating a lasting mother daughter relationship, and showing other young women, that just because you are a young single mom, doesn’t mean that you can’t be a great mom, and have an amazing bond with you kiddos. So in this season, I’m pouring I to my child as much as I possibly can. We read bed time stories every night, and have floor time and preschool activities whenever possible.
Another mission that has started calling on my heart is home making. This one started drawing me in with all the Pinterest pins of beautiful homes (pop on over to my Pinterest account and it will be a hot item of pinning, trust me). As well as the pins from the “perfect” SAHMs about how to be an expert home maker. These facinated me, but felt so out of my teach. My home had toys all over and was always in disarray! Everyone was misreble, anytime guests would come it was either EMBARRASSING, or a scramble with them waiting at the door to try to pick up all the chaos. So I started looking into how do they do it? How do the busy mom’s claim to make their homes great, what the heck is this 10-30 minute clean up at the end of the day? And keeping up with laundry, I couldn’t do it to save my life! Or could I?
It turns out that you can!
I started by creating toy rotation boxes, with a twist (you’ll hear about the twist in upcoming blog posts). Basically with not all the toys accessible at one time, my daughter actually sits down and plays with the things from her box (there’s minimalism for you) and the mess at the end of the day is so much more manageable.
I take 30 minutes at the end of the day, and do the floors and counter tops. (Vacume, Swiffer, sweep, Clorox wipe, and pick up stuff). This 30 minutes is scheduled in while my daughter is yes I’ll admit, watching some evening this week and eating her bedtime snack. But, hey, it works for us!
I tidy up the bathroom any time I go in it, and I do laundry when our little box gets full. To further keep up with it, I did a capsules wordrobe for myself, so I didn’t have so many cloths to worry about and o was stressing about what to wear each day. To further simplify things I must admit that I’m a laundry folding girl, not a hangers girl. I hate hanging things. So, I got a plastic tub for under my bed to put all my clothes in. I fold them in stacks that all coordinate, so I can just grab and go with my outfits each morning. A secret trick of mine, is that I actually fold all the cloths as I take each piece out of the dryer. I have a basket for my daughter’s capsules wordrobe to, so all of my folded cloths gets put into a basket and I’m done. Nice and tidy! I’ve found that nice and tidy, makes for a so much more stress free mood!