Hearts at Home

A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Normal, Illinois to go to the Hearts at Home Conference with my younger sister. It was the second year that we attended together. I'm trying to look back at my notes and see what things I can apply to my life to make myself more of the mom I want to be. It all sounds great when you're in a seminar far from the kids and home responsibilities after eating a delicious made to order hotel breakfast that you didn't have to eat cold or cut up for a little one. But once you're back in the thick of it, it's hard to follow through.

I attended workshops on raising sons and how to relate to them, on getting yourself organized, on giving yourself permission to dream and on turning stress into an opportunity for connection in addition to listening to presentations by the conference founder and the keynote speaker, Candance Cameron Bure, who I also met at a book signing session. There were a couple more we were scheduled to go to, but by the afternoon of day two, we were both kind of exhausted and called it a day early. Getting away for a couple nights with my sisters (my other two sisters joined us on day two and three) was the best part, the rest was icing on the cake.

What did I take away from the conference overall? A few things:

1) That there's no such thing as a perfect mom and we need to embrace our imperfections.
2) That we need to stop being judgmental of other moms. We're all doing the best we can or doing what works best for our family situation.
3) Make sure you have people in your life that help to uplift you rather than pull you down.
4) That the biggest reason for clutter in the home is indecision - once in a while it may be the wrong one, but it's better to make a decision.
5) Be aware of those miracles in your lives.
6) Be more in tune to how members of your family react to certain situations and don't try to change or fix them, but learn to validate them and offer comfort.

The nicest part of this trip was just that I got to hang with other females. It's not easy living in a house with six men. It's hard to figure them out and understand where their coming from. And it's hard not to be driven crazy by trying to figure them out. It was great to have a chance to be with my sisters and eat and giggle and chat. And it was nice to be at the conference and be around 4,000+ other women. And then it was nice to go back home to my guys.