Tender Mercies

Hanging out in the kitchen of the church during a recent home showing.

We put our house on the market in October and aside from a few showing and open houses at the first, haven't had any activity. So when we got a call that we would be showing our home last Sunday we had a bit of getting ready to do. Luckily they gave us 24 hour notice so we got the house mostly ready Saturday. We got home from church Sunday at 1pm, and had until 3:00 to be out of the house. No problem. Well...there was a message for us that someone else had wanted to see the house at noon. I called the realtor back and she said she'd check with the people if they could still come over. She called back--"Yes, they'll be there at 1:30," she said. HEART ATTACK!

Getting ready for church in the morning is a monumental task, as you all know, and we had left a bit of a tornado in our wake. Cereal boxes were still out, towels from the kids baths, etc. And I had planned to sweep and vacuum just right before we left (because i would have to redo it anyway if I did it Saturday, right? and it is so nice to have fresh vacuum lines in the carpet for a showing :) so we had a TON to do before the house would be show ready, and we only had 1/2 an hour. 

Let me just say that there were not fresh lines in the carpet that day, but I was so impressed by how each of my kids dug in and helped so furiously to get our house as ready as possible and all of us out the door.  (when really all they wanted to do was eat).

Ty spot-vacuumed the house, Shayla finished cleaning the bedrooms, Garrett helped pick up the bathroom and took out the trash, Grant packed us a snacky-lunch to take with us (it was so cute to see him counting out just enough cheese sticks/clementines for all of us), and Miya ran around watching us all (and didn't get things back out when we had put them away.)

I was so grateful for their help and knew that it was no small miracle that we got everything cleaned up and looking great in half an hour. 

If only I could get them to work that efficiently on a Saturday morning...

We had fun playing games at the church and then enjoyed Sunday dinner at a friend's house. What could have been a disasterous day turned out great thanks to hard-working kids and a kind friend.

Tender mercies indeed.