One Day…One Good Habit…at a Time

Part III of The VERY Hard Work of Lasting Change

(You can read Part I here and Part II here.)

 

Sometimes you just have to choose, and it can be really hard to choose. That’s when good habits come into play. They help you to do what’s BEST to do.

For example…

Right now we are living in chaos. It’s a happy chaos, for the most part, but at times it can really wear on my psyche.

::Warning: The Following Photos are not for the domestic faint-of-heart,

i.e. my sister Yvonne and my friend Tina. 😉

 

This is a photo of my living room right now:

We have sanded off the popcorn ceiling and will be spackling, priming, and painting the whole room. The end result will be beautiful and fun!

The process, though?

Is almost unbearably messy, as in…

Here is my dining room:

 

Here is my sitting room:

 

 

And here is the “heart” of my home, aka the warzone kitchen.

 

 

Who can live like this? Well, I have the feeling that a lot of people do, which is not a huge consolation to my peace-seeking mind. Honestly, all this clutter and mess makes it hard to think, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging.

The other reason, though? I haven’t yet made blogging a habit, and that, my friend, is the real heart of this post.

When it comes to blogging…and cleaning…and staying on top of the day-to-day clutter…I haven’t established the habits necessary to run a home with relative peace and order. Balance, my friend, is what I’m after: a home that is peaceful and neat but also, a mom that is kind and who has time to play.

Do I read a book to my young sons? 

Or do I get after at my teenagers to clean the kitchen? 

Because I can tell you right now which one is easier, but if my husband and I are doing all the work, we will quickly burn out and have time for nothing else.

Plus we love our kids too much to put up with their selfishness.

So daily—daily—we must plunk away at our very worst habits and try try try to establish good ones. For example, I need to start picking up after myself if I want my kids to do the same.  I am notoriously bad at not putting things away!  Usually, it’s the carton of half & half, which I leave on the counter because “I’ll be using it again.” (Or even worse, as the above photo attests, I leave the empty carton on a stool because I’m smack dab in the middle of writing a blog post!)

Sigh. I continue to be such the work in progress.

Here, then, is one good habit that I am establishing. I am currently on Day 27 of praying the rosary every day, and this, my friend, makes me very happy. Two apps have made this new good habit possible: HabitSeed and the Holy Rosary Audio.

 

HabitSeed is a delightful little app—so simple and yet, so very lovely and effective.

 

 

I especially like the scroll that unfolds when you hit the green check mark, with its nightly snippet of pithy wisdom:

 

 

Except one time my 7-year-old was at my side, and the message was incredibly random and weird. “I have waited two months to have this bowl of ice cream,” it read, “And tonight I’m going to have sex with it.” What the what? I quickly clicked away from the screen but my 7-year-old was blissfully unaware.

Gosh, I love 7-year-olds. Apart from their whining, they rarely complicate my world.

Teens, however, do tend to complicate our life. The older they get, the more they pull away from our rules!  They need to; this is how they learn independence.  That said, I’ve come to crave the rosary. *I* need the peace that it gives my heart; I need the assurance that Mary’s got this…

…and them.

 

So there you go!  This is how I’m fitting in a daily rosary, which (when you really think about it) should not be that hard. Each decade only takes 3 minutes. The rosary app is good for this; I listen in the car when I run my errands and usually have my rosary done by suppertime.

Sometimes I like to save the last decade and we pray it together at evening prayer. I wish we could pray the whole rosary together, but we’re a squirmy bunch and we do what we can.

We do what we can!

And then we try to be better.

 

Up next in the Series: How to choose what is best to do when the messy house keeps screaming your name? Hint: good habits make it happen.