Thursdays at CatholicMom.com begin with a look at the past week’s Small Successes!

The other day, when Sherry Antonetti, who hosts Small Success at CatholicMom.com, let me know that the post was ready for me to add the secret code for the linkup, I replied that I really need Small Success Thursday, because “summer is kicking my butt.”

This week’s butt-kickers included:

• a Kid with Swimmer’s Ear, and subsequent insulin resistance thanks to that infection (still working on that)
• a 3:30-AM wakeup yesterday, with no good reason, and no possibility of going back to sleep
• walking into the kitchen to make dinner after being away from the kitchen for a good chunk of the day, and finding that Daughter had made pancakes for herself but hadn’t noticed, when she cleaned up, the many large batter drips all over the stove, which had to be chipped off before I could cook anything else
• the Street Urchin who reported, yesterday, that he’d lost his earring in the pool, a story which really deserves a post of its own.

I am trying very hard to roll with things. I am also trying very hard to devise a schedule where I can get my job done during my best time of day (for efficiency as well as a smaller chance for errors) and still be available for my family as needed. This can be done if I wake up by 5:30, which can be done if I get to bed by 9:30 and don’t have to wake up during the night to deal with diabetes.

Well, that schedule hasn’t happened once this week, though yesterday I threw in the towel around 4:30, got up and got quite a bit of work done. I was emotionally toast by lunchtime, though!

So I got out of the house for about 45 minutes yesterday before I completely lost my mind at the Kid and the Street Urchins, got a bagel and a lemonade at Panera, and sat there on Twitter while I ate and calmed down.

I also tried a new recipe that I saw Rachael Ray make while I was sitting with the Kid in the waiting room of the Urgent Care.

I scheduled the Kid’s eye doctor visit AND his well-child checkup.

And I’ve been non-negotiable with the Kid regarding his chore responsibilities. He has morning chores to do before he can touch a computer or video game, and other chores that must be done before he can use a computer or game after dinner. Plus he has to do some reading each day.

Related: as part of his summer-reading requirement, The Kid has to read 2 fiction books (one of which is open choice) and 1 nonfiction book (open choice). I mentioned something about the Bible one day and he asked if he could count Bible reading for his summer reading. I told him he absolutely could use that as his nonfiction book, but he had to read a complete Testament to do that. I figure that if the school added “a biography of a saint” to the list of nonfiction possibilities, they wouldn’t be quibbling about the Bible.

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© 2015 Barb Szyszkiewicz