The Second Verse is Not Exactly the Same as the First

Well, you might have noticed the great tragedy of there being no podcast and links yesterday. I came to the end of the day alarmed and amazed. I think I have been blogging steadily and unrelentingly without missing a single day for more than a year now. I guess I would have to go back and look. It’s so much a part of my routine that I never pass over it. Except yesterday. And that’s because I really really needed to sleep. So I did. I Slept late, and then put my parents on their way to Europe and Africa, and then finished something I promised I’d do last week, and then slept again. Meanwhile Matt pulled up some more carpet and moved the boys off the sun porch and into the guest room. Just in time because the temperatures during the night were supposed to be very cold. Not that I can tell anything about the outside, actually, from my vantage point under three comforters and a fat dog.

So, we didn’t even do a podcast. And I didn’t shove all my carefully collected links up. Which is tragic because this was a good week for reading the Internet. All kinds of interesting stuff out there. Maybe we’ll pull it together sometime this week. Who knows–in between digging around for winter clothes and facing down the last birthday of the calendar year (Marigold turns 7 on Thursday), catching up on school work before the quarter ends, and helping six fussy children figure out what they’re going to be for Halloween, it might be that I just don’t get to it.

As usual, as we come to the end of October, I have been wrong in thinking that once school started everything would settle down. We’d get into a grove, I said, we’d make the routine go and then we’d have all kinds of time. One thing that definitely wouldn’t happen this year would be me careening from project to project, event to event, crisis to crisis. This year, I said way back in August, is going to be different.

And that’s the problem. It is different. Everything I got used to doing last year and all the years before that isn’t exactly what is happening this year. Every year isn’t a precise copy of the one before. They’re all very similar, but just enough different that you have to run like mad to keep up. Last year was the first year of middle school, for us. But now I have two middle schoolers. And then we moved house. That’s kind of a thing, isn’t it? Last year my parents came in May and this year they came in October. And six years before that I had a child turning one this week, whereas now she’s turning seven.

And, let me tell you, a seven year old working out her birthday expectation is Not The Same as a one year old’s birthday expectations. Marigold has reworked her birthday list three times. The first time it was a list of live pets. The second time it included things like a motorcycle that really drives (not in my budget). The third iteration is centered around a guitar. We’ll see.

So anyway, I’m behind! I’m going to roust the children who are all still dead asleep even though it’s 7:30, and make us all go to bible study. There I will learn that all of this doesn’t matter anyway. Ecclesiastes is such a pick me up.

Have a nice day.