Homemaker Helper #1

Right now, I'm very busy with the seemingly mundane, so I found this very encouraging.

Putting up the school lunch for the children or cooking a good meal for the family may seem very insignificant tasks as compared with giving a lecture, writing a book, or doing other things that have a larger audience; but I doubt very much if, in the ultimate reckoning, they will count for as much.

If when cooking you will think of yourselves as the chemist that you are, combining different ingredients into a food that will properly nourish human bodies, then the work takes on a dignity and an interest. And surely a fairly well nourished with healthful food so that the boys and girls grow up strong and beautiful, while their elders reach a hale old age, is no small thing.

It belittles us to think of our daily tasks as small things, and if we continue to do so, it will in time make us small. It will narrow our horizon and make of our work just drudgery.

There are so many little things that are really very great, and when we learn to look beyond the insignificant appearing acts themselves to their far-reaching consequences, we will, "despise not the day of small things." We will feel an added dignity and poise from the fact that our everyday round of duties is as important as any other part of the work of the world."

Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1913
from Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings