Do you know that moment when your porch turns into a kid jungle? There are kids climbing, doing chalk, looking for bugs and shoes strung all over. In these moments, you wonder if you should use another door to join them outside?

This is often my front stoop. I love it. On any given moment our front door looks like it should be a playground or at the very least, a back door. The chaos is my crazy beautiful life. Each one of those pairs of shoes belongs to a child I love. Each flower-pot was painted by one of those beautiful children (or myself).

The other day there was great excitement over a black beetle maneuvering through our flower pots. As the boys scrambled to catch him, one of my flower pots was broken.

These are the moments as moms we have a choice on how to react. Yes, the kids could look for bugs in better places. It doesn’t matter how many times I encourage it. They want to be where I am, so if I am sitting there…they are close by. It wont be like this always, so I am soaking it up as it is my season to enjoy their presence. After the broken pot, the kids looked at me. They were watching to see how I would respond. It was only a $0.79 pot, but they knew it was mine and that I had asked them to look for bugs in the yard. I chose to practice what I am so desperately trying to teach them…Patience and Grace. Words have power. The power to up lift or the power to bring down. So, I quickly said it was no big deal and we could fix.

This is how we did it.

I started with pulling out my superglue that I call my concrete to keep the kiddos out of it.

I then ripped fabric like I did on my Love Sign till I had a pile of fabric scraps.

I painted a little mod podge onto my pot, and stuck a fabric strip on top. I slowly did this all the way around my pot. When I did a complete circle wrapped around the pot, I slanted my strip to go a little further down the pot till the pot was completely covered.

Next, I added more mod podge on the bottom of the pot and curved my fabric over the sides and let it dry completely. Once it was dry, I painted the whole thing with a coat of  mod podge, to protect the fabric. I let it dry. Put my plant back inside it, and it was done!

I actually love how the flower pot looks with my Hello Flower Pot even more now! The kids are actually more careful now around the pots, since I have fixed this one. I wonder if it’s how I responded or just that they finally see why I was asking them to move off the porch to continue their search.

When something breaks, it is often easier to just throw it out and get a new one. I love how in this moment I saved some money by fixing my pot and hopefully demonstrated something powerful to my kids as well. We always have a choice in choosing how we react to our circumstances… Choose love friends!