Building Cathedrals
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.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In