This Is Serious

I have a friend who has the ability to say one thing that always seems to be what the Lord wants me to be thinking of.  Often times it's just a casual conversation, but one word will jump out at me and stay with me long after we've said our goodbyes.  Recently my husband and I were chatting with this friend, and he relayed a teaching moment he had with a mentor.  Someone had shared about the difference prayer was making in their life, that after a month of committing to daily prayer they noticed everything changing in their life.  The mentor told him, "that's beautiful, but can you tell me what is different that brought about this change?" There were the usual responses: Christ's presence, peace, a different awareness.  But all of these fell short.  What the mentor was really trying to convey was that the person was serious in front of a proposal - prayer.  That when we take our lives and our relationship with Christ seriously, only then can we respond in any adequate way to who He is in our lives.   And he went on to say, as my friend relayed, that if we don't understand the need to maintain this seriousness - if we focus too much on the beauty, on the mountaintop - then we risk going right back to the place we were before we found this peace, as if we had learned nothing.

Being a Fraud

There are many times in my life when I feel like a complete fraud.  Like the person people see is not the person I really am.  Boxing Day this year was a particularly challenging day for me, because the busyness of the Christmas season collided with my husband's need to be at work his normal working hours and on call for the hours in between.  We were wiped as we usually are after Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and though I had made plans to visit my parents on Boxing Day what I really wanted was to just stay home.  Not to be by myself getting all six kids ready, tearing them away from their toys and their friends.  Not to have my husband at work and missing him like crazy.  Not to have my house upside-down.  I felt the simultaneous pressure of both cleaning and organizing after a whirlwind holiday, and of taking it easy and letting the kids celebrate.  So I let them have a friend over for the morning while I busied myself with cleaning, then lamented the fact that when it was time to leave nobody was helping.  Of course they weren't, it was the first day they had spent at home this Christmas!  And their mother was sending mixed messages, because she really didn't know for herself what she wanted.  

Back At It

Today marked our official first day back to homeschooling after an extended Christmas vacation that took a lot out of me, and I'll be honest about the fact that I was not looking forward to it last night as I settled into bed.  Our Christmas this year was CR-AZY as crazy can be, definitely the busiest so far and one that has us looking forward to making some changes next year as kids get older and get up earlier (4:30 am this year for the first time ever - argh!  Haha!)  Add to that the fact that my husband was on call from December 22 to December 30 (during which time he worked his standard Monday-Friday schedule which blessedly did not include Christmas day, but did include Saturday and Sunday between Christmas and New Years, in addition to extra long days and a few late-night call-ins), a Boxing Day wedding and a New Year's Eve wedding (the latter of which my husband was a groomsmen in), the usual family get togethers and Christmas/New Year's Mass schedule that are busy all on their own, and we were needless to say exhausted.  Jeff was thankfully able to take the first week of January off, and when he asked that I not do school for the week so he could enjoy the family time he missed out on over the holidays let's just say it didn't take a lot of convincing.  That week overflowed as well with much joy as we had friends from out of town visiting for the first part, and Jeff's brother and girlfriend arriving from Toronto later in the week.  Christmas has grown to epic proportions around here and we were all living it up. I was not looking forward to getting back to the grind this morning.

Confessions of a Mom of Many

I spend much of my life, like I suppose most people do, being sized up.  Because I spend my days surrounded by little people, people naturally have varying assumptions they are often not afraid to share with me on a daily basis - some good, some not so good.  I suppose that's a function of the world we live in, everyone has an opinion about everything.  But there are many things people say to me that are way off base or simply not true and rather than make a laundry list, I thought it would be better to give a little glimpse into some of the things you may find surprising about a Mom of many.  Here are some of my biggest confessions: