As a new father one of my most vivid memories is of coming home from work and finding my little wife rocking her crying baby.  The unusual thing about this was that she was crying, too.  She was tired, frustrated, unable to comfort her child, and sure that she was neither smart enough nor capable enough to be a mother.

That little crisis and hundreds of others have since been worked out and forgotten.  Seven more children have arrived, making a total of 8 in 13 years.  Any one of those children or any one of those crises could theoretically have "broken the camel's back."  They didn't.

Instead, an interesting thing happened.  While dealing outwardly with each new problem and challenge, subtle changes, called growth, were taking place inside this young mother.

Let's look in on a conversation she had with three other women a decade later as they practiced a song they were to sing the next Sunday in church:

"Did you get your peaches canned today, Margie," Linda asked?

"I got 40 quarts put up."

"You didn't get a chance to try my peach jam recipe did you, Margie," Janice asked?

"I made 8 pints."

My, you've had a productive day today," Alice commented.

At this point the conversation turned to Linda who had been a substitute teacher that day.

"What do you do with your kids when you teach?" someone asked.

"Margie kept them today."

"Do you mean to tell me you put up 40 quarts of peaches and 8 pints of jam while taking care of your three preschoolers and babysitting two others?" Alice asked.  "And here I was feeling sorry for myself for the things I had to do."

The conversation next turned to the "Octoberfest" being held on Saturday.  Each Relief Society sister had been asked to bake something to be sold there.  Margie was eventually asked if she had baked anything.

"Well, I wanted to drop the bread off at Nancy's on the way here, but it wasn't ready to go in the oven yet."

That statement just about did Alice in.  Peaches, jam, babysitting, bread baking, aerobic dancing, and song practice while cooking, washing, changing diapers, tending the baby, cleaning house—not bad for a day's labor.

The next morning in bed Margie exclaimed over the way the year was flying.  "Time is going so fast, and I don't feel like I'm getting anything done!"