What am I cooking? I have been copying Kat’s habit of cooking larger batches of food and freezing, so will have lasagna tonight, and I don’t have to cook!

What are my weekend plans?  A long run, a charity pancake breakfast, a birthday party, a CCD dinner, a christening.  Is your head spinning?  Mine is!

What are my prayer intentions for the day?   For peace of mind and the mental space to parent intentionally.  Our school year got off to an odd start because we had to deal with remediation from the hurricane.  The kids got their work done, amazingly, but I got into the habit of being occupied with other things and not really present to them, and I want to change that now.

What can my children do instead of watching TV?  My two littlest ones are banned from any screen time, because they had gotten way too dependent on it in the past few weeks.  Also, it has been humid and gray out most days.  Whine seems to be the answer of the moment, but I am working on it by offering coloring, playdough, cutting up apples and any thing else that can grab their attention.

What have I done for my marriage this week?  I have tried to be more sympathetic about his bum shoulder, make sure there was dinner when he got home late from work and stifle my whining about the home repair situation.  I also planted mums, and I think that doing small things to make our house more cheerful is good for all of us!

What am I reading?   Undaunted Courage, which is about Lewis and Clark.  I am trying to read something that relates to what the family is learning about in history each quarter, and people love this book, but I am finding it to be a bit of a slog so far.

What’s challenging me lately?   Logistics, and all of the above, and getting up early.

Something that made me think?  I continue to be humbled and surprised by how difficult it was for me to deal with the flood in our basement.  It wasn’t really a sadness about losing the things, it was more the interruption to my life and the order of my home, the phone calls we had to make, the work man coming over all the time, the child potty training who kept showing up around the workmen with no pants on.  I really value privacy at home, and this was an interruption to all of that.  Yet, I had it better than almost anyone can hope to — I had workmen to do all the real work, I had support from my husband, I have good insurance coverage.  So many people lost so much more, and are still cleaning and recovering, so many people were already living closer to the margins of survival than I do, people in Trenton nearly rioted trying to get FEMA food vouchers, and I could just go out and replace whatever was lost from my fridge.  It’s hard to know what to make of all of that.

It is September birthday week here, we have celebrated John and Mary’s 7th birthday with pancakes and cupcakes, and today we lit the candles for Peter’s 10th birthday.

Peter is the oldest builder kid, and as you can see in the picture above, 10 is really big!  Peter contributes so much to our home life, and he has had a strong role in forming our other children, he is like a builder on a different level, the one who can see the low details which the adults often miss.  I love how his younger siblings keep him young, he does not just help care for them, he happily plays with them and deeply loves them.  I love that he put his brother’s name on the list of people to invite to his birthday party, showing that he counts John among his friends.  I love his enthusiasm for learning, that he thanks me often for homeschooling him, that he is not afraid to try hard and stretch himself intellectually.  I love that he told his father with great pride about how he looked up and found a Chesterton (Fr. Brown) book in the library all by himself.  I love that he is getting better about handling difficult emotional situations, and I love the safe space and freedom which homeschooling has given him to do so at his own pace.  I love the way that he screams at the TV during baseball games, and I will love watching him celebrate the playoff season with his dad.  I love his pride in his skiing.

I love his height (over 5 feet), but I sort of hate it, too, because it is a reminder to me that he is growing up.  I love that he gets to be the first to do everything, but I hate that he has to suffer because often I haven’t figured out that next stage yet.  I feel sentimental about him, we tell him all the time that he got our family started, that we were so overjoyed with him that we decided to be open to having more children (and more, and more, and more!).