Time to Grow

Do any of you have little personal rules? Things that you've said you would or would not do in your life--and I'm not talking standards. I'm talking about little things that maybe came from your youth or that you just have in your mind as 'your rules'. These are things that you don't care whether anyone else follows but you want to. Sometimes you come into conflict about one of your rules and have to decide whether you're going to live by it or give into reality. Sometimes they are easy to give up and sometimes you have to swallow your pride. Most of my such rules have come from my youth and were not set by *any* realistic sense whatsoever. An example of one of Tom's 'rules' was he would *never* marry someone from Preston. (Thankfully he swallowed his pride on that one!) Maybe you've said that you'd never own a van or that you'd always leave the house with your kids perfectly groomed or that you would never do such and such to your children. {Please tell me I'm not the only one who has these rules! Just because Tom had ONE, doesn't make me feel any better!}

Unfortunately, I seemed to outline a boatload of these rules for myself as a youth; some of them I've been able to simply disregard and easily rid myself of some silly expectations. But others have been a little harder to let go of. One of my rules, for example, was not to have kids over age 35. I know that medically speaking under 35 is the optimal maternal age, but other than a slightly greater risk for Down's Syndrome (which doesn't bother me to the least) what reason is there that I should have that rule? Obviously I've disregarded it because Tess was born just after I turned 35, but it was one of the 'harder' rules to accept breaking.

But I've got one rule I'm having a hard time accepting that I'm breaking; strangely enough, it also has to do with child bearing. When I was 14, my mom had my baby brother Joe. I resented my parents during my mom's entire pregnancy. I was incredibly embarrassed--none of my friends' moms were still having babies. . . . how could we ever afford it?. . . and my list went on and on. Frankly, I had a very, very hard time with it all. So one of my adamant rules has been to not put my teenage children through the same thing. Yet, what does one do, when spiritual impressions come so strongly regarding another child that you can't deny them and you just happen to have a few teenage children in your house? Keep your 'rule' or submit? To be honest, for a while I resisted. Of course, all of it wasn't entirely the no-babies-when-I-have-teenagers rule because I do have a super active toddler and very rough pregnancies and then there were concerns about my whole ability to cope with the depression that pregnancy brings etc. etc. (if you look back at my posts over the past 3 months, you can see a lot of them were pep talks for me: Faith, not fear; Choose Righteousness and Happiness no matter what your circumstances; Kindness (because at the moment, I so feel like not). BUT, I have learned that innumerable blessings come from the submission of our wills to Heavenly Father. So I've tried to accept this as a time for me to grow (in more ways than one:) and to allow this as a way to polish few more of my rough areas. That isn't to say that there still haven't been internal struggles. There have!! But it is when we condescend below what we feel as acceptable that spiritual growth takes place and power comes into our lives in ways it can't otherwise if we are humble. So I've been *trying* to be humble so enlightenment and growth can take place. Otherwise, it is just an annoying trial. So, yes, to all of you who needed the big overhanging question from my last post answered. It is true, Chandler's mom is going to have a baby. Check back in March for final results :).

PS. Another one of my recent hang-ups has been the timing of Chandler's announcement. I'm a person who is absolutely fine with (and prefers) the first public announcements of pregnancy to be the clothing announcement. But after I got over the pouting and self pity of the whole thing (which unfortunately lasted too long), one of the answers was this was part of Heavenly Father's time table. . . .and a post about it was needed by someone much sooner than I would have ever done it. So here it is, whether I'm comfortable with putting this out there or not :).

Another PS. . .I have way more valiant teenagers than I ever was!