Monday Blech

Three nights of weird Nyquill induced nightmares have not improved my capacity to cope with reality. It's too bad, me feeling so rotten, but still having all the work of life piled up ever before me. If I do the tasks I've allotted to each day I should be able to move calmly and majestically through the week, order spreading out from my fingers like a wave that over takes the house and garden. That's been my working paradigm. Unfortunately, I'm actually hobbling around like a stuffed bun, unable to breathe or think. I was limping, don't ask me why the inability to breathe makes my legs cease normal functioning, over to church to shove some stuff around, because catechesis is over for the year, already, crazily already, and summer Sunday school starts next Sunday, and I had purposed, cough, to move the rooms around after church, and Matt looked up from his restful improving book, and said, “what do you think you're doing?”

“I'm going to move the rooms,” I said, “it's on the list.” I meant to sound dignified but I'm pretty sure the word 'list' was born like the whine of gas escaping from a balloon, or something.

“That's ridiculous,” he said.

Whatever. I moved the rooms. And so now I don't have to do it today. No, today I have to hound Matt to do a lot of correspondence and errands he doesn't think he will enjoy. And I have to go food shopping. Part of lying around hopped up on Nyquill necessarily includes the riches of Pinterest where I was sure I would be able to plan perfect road trip food. Practically every page and picture promised me that I would be able to hack my way to perfection with a tackle box. See, they all said, you can fill a tackle box with lots of different snacks, and then the child will be happily occupied for hours, with all the different snacks. I paused to imagine the wreckage. Six little tackle boxes, filled with snacks, pried open in childish hunger, the snacks flying everywhere. Understood, after a long time of fruitless search, that the gods of Pinterest intend for me to go on a road trip with only one child. Not six. Spent ten minutes trying to decide which one I would take, if I could only take one.

Also on my list is to fret about flowers that will bloom while we are gone. I've tried not to articulate this worry too loudly to Matt, who unaccountably thinks it is stupid, and have just agonized away on my own. The Climatis and the Peonie are in the cusp of blooming. But I'm pretty sure they will actually burst forth on Saturday night while I am sleeping, and that I will have to skip church and stand in the grass, looking at them, and feeling tragic, because there will be no one, and by that I mean me, to enjoy them for the week they are in bloom.

God in his mercy, and maybe judgement, probably doesn't want them to be for me, this year, and so that's what's going to happen. On the other hand, the little roses are blooming, already. To my great relief.

So that's where we are. The end of the scholastic year, sort of, and beginning of summer, if that's what this cold wet day can be counted as. Didn't have a lesson planned for the last day of Catechsis. Asked them what stories they wanted to go back to, one last time before next year. Was persuaded, against my own desires, because it's such a pain, to pull out the leaven. Flour, yeast, water, a mess. Used all the yeast in an effort at the very last, to actually get the concoction to rise. It bubbled away. The key, I guess, is to use all of it every time. Then we pulled out the good shepherd, and they moved all the sheep from the one pasture to the other. Then someone brought the wheat. And the pascal candle. And all the candles of Pentecost. And we sat around for quite a long time, not really saying anything.

The best Catechsis always happens when the Catechsist has a cold and can't pull her own mind together. I've noticed this before. It's important to have a plan, and a lesson, but those days are always a struggle. It's when you can't think and just want to sit still that the children are relieved of your agenda and do what they want. The sheep, for instance, organized into careful rows. I've never thought of doing it that way.

And, being obtuse, I took pictures during the prayer time. If photographing children while they are praying is wrong, I don't wanna be right.