Living At Wit's End

For the past 17 years every summer, always in June, I go on an adventure that starts in January.  It involves a good friend, my kids and a substantial number of other people’s kids.  My dear, dear friend The Teacher asked me to join her on this adventure when I was six months pregnant with The Organized Child.  It started in a small classroom filled with very active and energetic three year olds.  And, while I was absolutely exhausted at the end of the day, each year I come back again and again.  This adventure is one of great stress, but HUGE rewards!  It is one of my greatest passions, despite swearing year after year, that this is the end, no more!  Each year somehow, no matter how stressed and completely spent I am, I am filled up with enough energy to take on this adventure.  I can’t claim that it is grace, because I must admit there are many times I don’t handle what is thrown my way with any grace at all.  Never the less I embark on this adventure and pray that God will take m

Lent has come and gone.   Easter Sunday has come and gone.   The picture in my head still remains even though my end result looks nothing like the picture.   I set out on my Lenten journey with specific images of the end result in mind.   How my Lenten journey would look, how my forty bags in forty days would look.   I’m here to say my picture is a whole lot prettier than the real thing.   I did fulfill my Lenten goal of forty bags in forty days, I did not fulfill the image I had in mind. Here is how it panned out Sold:   One large baby gate Bags thrown out:   13 (this included things recycled or just thrown out because it was broken, unusable etc.) Bags donated to the VVA:   26 Bags donated to JMJ Life Center:   2 A lot of what I got rid of was clothing, I managed to clean out some of my bedroom and go through some of the children’s clothes and toys.   However most of the bags consisted of stuff from our garage.   Overall this frustrates me a bit.

My forty days/forty bags is going along VERY slow, but I am still determined to reach my goal by Easter Sunday! In the mean time I want to post something that I have wanted to post since January.   Four of my kids are involved in our church.   My two oldest however are very involved.   They are both peer ministers, and are actively involved in the youth ministry program.   In addition they serve the community in other ways such as cantoring, sing in the choir, alter serve, and as an Eucharistic minister.   In January our Youth Minister puts on a high school retreat, this is a mandatory retreat for the confirmation candidates, but is open to all high school students. Both of my kids volunteered to give witness talks this past January.   The theme of the retreat was Faith Book (a play on social media).   Oldest talk was on “discernment” and The Organized Child’s topic was “about me” (focusing on her life with our without God).   Oldest talk was very good; it focused on how we ha

I came to the conclusion that if I want to stay on track with school, make all the scheduled appointments/activities on my calendar, and continue to run the house I cannot take on any large, time consuming, projects.   So, I have decided that in order to meet my Lenten sacrifice I’m going to have to only do a little bit every day, sometimes just a drawer or a cabinet or even smaller.   Not my original plan, but I keep telling myself steady plodding brings prosperity and slow and steady wins the race. I have a very dear friend that I’ve known for about 18 years now.   She is very quick witted and makes me laugh all the time.   I’ve never known her to be in a bad mood, I always feel lighter after talking to her.   I saw her over the weekend and was telling her about my dilemma, how I want very much to tackle these big projects but in reality I need to do lots of mini ones like a drawer daily etc.   She replied “of course it’s like the whole meal verses hors d'oeuvres, you need

So I'm not feeling really great about this lent so far.   My plans have not gone the way I intended.   Last Friday I spent most of the day visiting with my parents when I went to pick up the little ones from spending the night.   Then I took the Middle Child to an afternoon/evening birthday party, it was 40 minutes from home so I hung out until it was over.   By the time we got home it was after 9:00, I thought it would be nice to spend a little time with the Director before I went to bed.   So, washed out day three. Day four, over slept.   Took care of important stuff but shows no evidence of being done, such as lowering car insurance bill, talking over important stuff with the Director etc.   I did manage to make a plan for de-cluttering though.   I broke down the house into all the rooms or areas I wanted de-cluttered.   From there I broke the rooms or areas into specific things that needed de-cluttering.   When I was done I had 69 things that needed my attention, that is

So I had grand plans for yesterday, even though it was Valentine’s Day. The plan: get up early do school take the kids to see their grandmother at the rehab/nursing home for Valentine’s Day shop for Valentines picnic create de-cluttering plan pick one area of the house start de-cluttering and do a surface clean of that area take the three youngest kids to my parents to spend the night pack picnic make the Director a valentine card take older two to church for their Peer Ministry Valentine party go to movie in the park with the Director Reality - I woke up not feeling good at all.  After being up about 20 minutes I told the kids today was a holiday.  (As we homeschool year round and usually have more than the required days each year I didn't feel bad or worried about taking the day off.)  I went back to bed for a couple of hours.  When I got up for the second time, I ended up sitting with the kids searching for valentine card ideas for about

Yesterday I didn’t get a huge jump on the house because it took me most of the day to figure out that I was absolutely sure that my Lenten sacrifice journey would in fact be de-cluttering, organizing and cleaning our house.   So, after I finally decided the following took place: 1)         I got rid of seven bags of stuff and a port-a-crib.   I’m not entirely sure that I will count this in my 40 bags, as the bags were already packed up and ready to go.   They have been in my living room for quite a while so on one hand they are now officially gone from the house, hopefully blessing someone else.   However, on the other hand I didn’t actually gather the stuff during lent.   We’ll see where I stand at the end of lent as to whether or not I count them.     I scheduled a pick up at our house on-line, put the bags on the front porch, clearly marked, and waited for the VVA to pick them up.   Good thing too, as I found out yesterday that my local Goodwill branch closed uugg

My kids have been running around today singing “Lent, lent, it’s time to repent, because it’s lent, lent our wills they get bent, by what we’ve done and failed to do, but ask for mercy and He’ll give it to you.  I'm reminded that I still haven't solidified my Lenten sacrifice for this year. How will I repent and ask for mercy? How will I grow in love and faith this year? As I said yesterday I’ve really been struggling with how to make the most of this lent. Yesterday I prayed and read and prayed some more. I woke up this morning with a pretty good idea of what I planned to do for my Lenten sacrifice. I had read several things yesterday (unrelated to each other) that seemed to drive the same point home and then I read the following post from the Holy Hero's web site  this morning. “ A priest friend sent us an email about Lenten penitential practices. He said it so well; I thought I should give it to you all to read. "The Lenten penitential practices o