Making Lemonade

Tonight while preparing to make dinner, I encountered quite an unfortunate discovery. The freezer was unplugged and everything inside was at various stages of thawing. Some was still frozen solid, like the extra turkey we bought. Some was completely thawed, like most of the small bits of meat, including most of the chickens I disassembled recently. I whined and groaned about it and I yelled at my kids a little too much while trying to clean it all up.

I said a prayer with the girls that I would be calmer, and that they would go to sleep early and stay asleep. After I said "amen," I had an epiphany. I could be mad and yell at my kids to stop getting in my way, and be upset at the loss of our food, or I could take life's lemons and make lemonade, stop yelling at my kids, and get on with life. So that's exactly what I did! As soon as I decided that, everything was much better. The girls still got in my way, and I did yell a little bit, but not compared to what it was before. I looked at the positives of the situation. I figured out solutions so we would lose as little of our freezer's contents as possible. I decided it was a perfect opportunity to clean out and defrost our freezer, which is not frost free and completely iced over in most parts.

So now I'm going to list all the lemons, and how I made them into lemonade.

• 300 ounces of breastmilk, mostly thawed! Rose is 20 months old now, not really needing it, most of it was expired anyway (over 1 year old), and the milk I could salvage was all fairly recent.
  
• The chicken all thawed out! I can't refreeze it once it's thawed. I can easily cook the chicken in water, break it into bite-sized pieces, and freeze the cooked chicken to use when I make something that calls for cooked chicken. What a future time-saver! Plus I can strain the cooking liquid and use the broth!
• Uh oh, two roasts from different animals thawed out completely! Can't refreeze those, either! I'll just stick the beef roast in the crock pot now, and slice it up into sandwich meat. And we'll have pulled pork for dinner!
• Yuck, the freezer is full of fish heads and salmon eggs, and who knows what else that Dave put in there! It's high time to clean that stuff out, anyway. Dave didn't treat the eggs right anyway, and the fish heads he can replace when he goes fishing in the spring (he uses those for bait). Now I can declutter my freezer and make more space!
• Uh oh, I think I may have broken the freezer from defrosting it so vigorously. We hate that freezer anyway! And since we found out our tax refund is going to be decent again this year, we can afford to buy a new freezer soon!
  

Dave was really sad this year that he didn't get a deer or an elk. Now I see that the Lord works in mysterious ways. We would have lost a whole lot more had he gotten a deer this year. I wouldn't have been able to salvage nearly as much as I have been able to. And now I have a brand new perspective on life, and I'm very grateful for this blessing I've been given. And for my now cleaned-out freezer (that hopefully still works, since we have a few weeks before we can get a new freezer).

Note to self: Tonight during personal prayer time, be sure to thank Heavenly Father for this blessing, which I have certainly learned completely now, so no follow-up lessons will be necessary.