Or let them eat (store bought) bread: Prioritizing our kids over homemaking.

Yesterday, I shared some of my latest breadmaking endeavors with you, with the intention of completely contradicting myself today. 

I love homemaking.  Really, I do.  I enjoy making bread, cookies, and salsa from scratch.  And when I have time, I enjoy sewing, even if I do have a love/hate relationship with my sewing machine.  I don't exactly love cleaning, but I love a clean house, and God has given me much joy in cleaning in recent years. 

That said, I think it's so important to keep everything in perspective.  I read an article recently and the author said he knew a woman who passed away in her 30s.  The dying woman said she wished she'd made less bread and spent more time with her kids.

When it comes to homemaking and breadmaking, we should strive for balance, and frequent heart checks are important, at least for me.  In our world of blogging and Facebook, we see much more of what goes on in peoples' lives, and sometimes this feeds our need to impress others or it fosters feelings of inadequacy. 

I love reading homemaking blogs.  They spur me on in my longing to do my job with excellence.  But sometimes I read them and think I just can't measure up.  No way, no how. 

But when my heart is kept in check, I realize that I want to make homemade croutons, bread, and kefir because I enjoy them, they nourish my family, and because homemaking brings honor to God.  Not so that I can impress someone. 

When I read homemaking blogs or posts on Facebook, I try to take the ideas I can use and ignore the ones that I don't have time for.  And I rejoice with others in the neat things that they're able to accomplish, even if I never will.  Will I grind my own grain?  No indeed.  But I might try out a yummy new recipe.  I don't want these things to become idols, and they should never come before loving my children, my husband, and those around me.  If anything, they are an extension of that love.

A friend recently emailed this poem to me.  Her kids have graduated from high school (homeschool) and are now in college or have careers, so I know that she can tell me firsthand how important it is to cherish the little years. 

“Now is the time to get things done…wade in the water, sit in the sun, squish my toes in the mud by the door, explore the world of a girl just four.

Now is the time to study books, flowers, snails, how a cloud looks; to ponder “up,” where God sleeps nights, why mosquitoes take such big bites.

Later there’ll be time to sew and clean, paint the hall that soft new green, to make new drapes, refinish the floor – Later on…when she’s not just four.”

-Irene Foster

Have I read a book to my child today?  Collapsed into giggles in the bed?  Danced the hokey pokey in the living room?  Sat on the front porch and played "I Spy?" Rolled a ball across the kitchen floor?  Built a lego tower just to knock it down?  Had a tea party with Pooh and Eeyore? 

These things are much more important than homemade dinner rolls.

Time to go!  My favorite two year old woke up from her nap and it's time to play.  If I don't enter into her world now, at 2, will she let me into hers at 16?