Best Mom Tip #58: Cross something off someone else's list

I have been feeling quite annoyed with my everyday life lately. It is pretty mundane and nothing is ever really "finished." The laundry will be dirty again tomorrow. We will continue to use plates and glasses--unless we go with paper plates, but that would just make me feel guilty about killing the earth.

I got a dress altered last week, but that required me to undress in a room lit with fluorescent lights so that task didn't really make me feel accomplished, either. I went to the eye doctor and spent $85 for drops because I got something in my eye. Necessary, but not exactly a feeling of success to have that done.

But I also did something off of my husband's list. We have an 11-year-old truck that my husband loves. It has helped a LOT of people move (you know who you are) and has gone camping many times (before our kids were born we actually camped in places that required 4-wheel-drive on occasion.)

Unfortunately, this wonderful truck doesn't fit our entire family at once and that has made it a bit obsolete for our current lives. Over the years, the paint on the hood of the truck wore off while the rest of the paint job remained and this one thing had been preventing my hubby from selling it. (That, and his sadness over the loss of his truck, I'm sure.)

It was hard for him to take it to be painted during the workday so I took it upon myself. I got my mom to watch the kids (they won't fit in the truck, you know) and I took it to get it painted. Then I drove my husband to work for a couple of days and he hitched rides home from friends until we got the truck back.

Now the truck is for sale and it looks like we're in our last week or so of truck ownership. It is the most success I have felt in weeks. I got a big thing off of our list that has made my guy feel better.

It isn't exactly the feeling I had when I solved a major problem at work and felt the satisfaction of a job well done, but it mattered to someone else. And the truck won't need repainting again tomorrow, so it beats out "fed and bathed the kids" on the satisfying task scale.