When Homemaking Goes Wrong

Yesterday morning I woke up excited to start the day! The Lord had given me another wonderful opportunity to serve my family. First thing, I padded into the kitchen to check on the grape jelly I had canned the evening before. Hmm. Something looked funny. While the jelly I put directly in the refrigerator had set, the jelly I had processed in the canner had not. What was that about?

I started to research possible solutions to my problem, and decided to cool the jelly to see if that would help it gel. Afterwards, I collected ripe cherry tomatoes from my garden to hopefully make into tomato sauce.

I completely realize that cherry tomatoes aren’t the best choice to use when making sauce! But I had mixed them into my sauces last year, and I thought they would be alright.

Perhaps you know where I’m going with this. I roasted the tomatoes and then tried to blend them up. Ugh, they totally were not the consistency I was going for! Since they were going into chili, I dumped them in anyway, but I was terribly disappointed.

My husband called me later that afternoon and asked how my day was going. “I’m a failure,” I moaned. “How will I ever learn how to make difficult things from scratch if I’m failing at the easy stuff?”

Of course my husband told me that I was not a failure. These kinds of things happen to everyone. I believed him. Sort of. My morning just felt like a total waste of time with two failings back to back.

Later on, I was able to take a step back and realize that everything was going to be okay. Even though a couple of things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped in the kitchen, I needed to keep going.

My family needs me to learn these things. I was never taught to cook as a child, and have always been terribly afraid of it. Well, maybe not afraid of it, but afraid of failure. I mastered easy meals awhile ago, but within the last two years I’ve been trying things like sourdough bread and goat cheese. This has intimidated me!

But I think that both I and my children need to learn how to do this. For our family now, and for their families later. If I don’t learn and teach them, who will?

If we are diligent, eventually we will succeed!

The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes to poverty.
Proverbs 21:5

So today I decided to keep going. After verifying that my garlic had properly cured, I put it up for the year. I made a loaf of sourdough bread, as well as a complete dress for myself for the very first time. Yes! These few wins boosted my confidence.

Friends, let’s keep going even when we get it wrong. Learning to live simply and do things for yourself is hard! We won’t always get things right, and that’s okay. I think that sometimes we learn more by failing than by succeeding.

I hope everything is going well with you, and that your homemaking efforts improve each day! Thank you so much for stopping by my blog. Let’s continue to do well and keep learning how to serve our families better!