Challenge #1, Day 1

I love my husband!  I'm smiling!  It was a good day!  I love Mondays!  Okay, that last one was a little too far...but I'm trying hard to keep up my perky, happy wife mode going.  Truthfully, I'm not sure how I did yesterday, but I know I was trying.  On top of my Good Housewife Challenge, I had a lot of ideas for how I wanted to start off my week.  I was going to get up early and work out.  I was going to try to clean up the house from the weekend.  I was going to finally put away all the laundry that was in baskets in our living room.  I was going to make a delicious dinner.  All this on top of being nice to my husband...looking back, it was probably too ambitious!  I pretty much accomplished none of those things entirely, some of those things to a slight degree.  I overslept my alarm to get up early to work out because I stayed up too late the night before.  I did clean up some of the clutter and mess from the weekend--we decorated our Christmas tree this weekend, so there is stuff everywhere!  The house needs to be vacuumed and I still have a lot of boxes of Christmas stuff that need to go back down to the basement...but at least I organized them and they are waiting patiently by the stairs for a helpful husband to carry them back down.  :)  I did get almost all of the laundry folded up and put away, save a few shirts or Abby's outfits that needed specific hangers and didn't make it up the stairs before bedtime last night.  I did not make dinner--I realized that we still had a lot of turkey leftover from Thanksgiving, so it would be silly for me to cook something and waste delicious food.  Clearly, I had totally forgotten my husband's hatred of both 1) leftovers and 2) sandwiches...the exact plan I had for that turkey.  I ate a delicious turkey sandwich for dinner, along with some mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce...Dan ended up having a bowl of cereal.  Sigh.

As for the Challenge, I was feeling a little bummed about it because the day didn't quite meet my expectations.  I greeted Dan first thing yesterday morning with a kiss when he was getting ready for work, so that was right in line with how I wanted the day to begin--he was surprised, because I typically wave halfheartedly while throwing on some clothes and trying not to open my eyes (I am not a morning person!), so the smile and kiss was way more than he normally gets.  I know, I'm a bad wife.  Then I sent him a sweet text mid-morning to let him know I was thinking about him, and I sent him another text later to thank him for taking care of a task I had asked him to do last week.  There were lots of smiley faces and exclamation marks in my texts.  The attempted happiness with Dan spilled over into my attitude toward the kids, so we had a fun day--I was able to take the boys to the park during Abby's dance class because the weather was decent (but it got COLD as the sun set!), and it just felt nice to be outside with them.  When I got home from dance class with the kids, I was surprised to see Dan's car out front and our garage door open--he was standing inside the garage waiting for us, which is atypical.  Usually I'm calling him and pestering him to come home from work, not surprised because he shows up early!  It kind of threw off my plan to greet him at the front door with a clean house and a smile when he got home...but I did my best on the fly by smiling and giving him a kiss in the garage.

Kind of what I had in mind for when Dan came home today...

We came upstairs and had my failure leftovers for dinner, the kids had fun playtime with us before bedtime, and I had some time to myself after the kids went to bed--at that point, I was feeling kind of down about my efforts.  Dan and I really hadn't had a chance to talk--I knew he had had a stressful, busy day, and I wanted to hear about it and be a good, supportive listener...but that conversation wasn't happening over the din of three crazy kids.  It's a lot easier being a newlywed when you're newly wed with no kids...duh.  I was beating myself up over my efforts when Dan came downstairs and joined me on the couch--when he sat down, he said, "Well, you seemed to be in a good mood today."  :)  So he had noticed!  I couldn't tell if he was fishing because he had read my blog, but I quickly determined he had no idea about the Challenge--it's a little sad that I can't even get my own husband to remember to read by blog regularly, but in this case, I was glad because I kind of want the Challenge to be a secret this week.  He also said that he liked being greeted with a kiss this morning...score 2 points for the Challenge.  :)  Not bad for my first day's attempt at being a Good Wife!