Category: Attitude

Grace Before Meals

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I’m a big fan of Father Leo Patalinghug’s website and his cookbook (worth the purchase price to get that “secret” fajita recipe).

I have the feeling that someone at my daughter’s high school has also been influenced by Father Leo. Either that, or great minds think alike.

Tonight is the first night of “Tech Week” as the kids get ready for the spring musical. For seven nights of “Tech Week” (each weekday this week, as well as Monday & Tuesday of next week), a group of parents will arrive at school at 4 PM to cook and serve dinner to the 150 students participating in the play, stage crew and orchestra. It’s a way to make sure that these very busy kids get a good meal before rehearsal, rather than a fast-food sandwich. But it’s also a way to help the kids bond as they work toward a common goal.

I’ll be there to cook, serve and clean up on four of the seven nights, and I’m really looking forward to it. I think this will be a wonderful experience for all the “play kids”–and the parents as well.

And when the play is over, I’ll look forward to having the whole family back around my dining-room table again. But if the kids can’t be here, I’m glad they’ll be there.

Reworked

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Barbara has been doing an occasional series on laundry.

Laundry is one of those chores that we do one way and we stick with it. Even when our system isn’t working well for us, we stubbornly stick to that system.

I freely admit to being a slave to my laundry system, which hasn’t worked well for us since we moved into this house. That was in 1998.

Our old home was compact, with no wasted space, but not much to spare either. The utility closet (big enough for furnace, water heater, washer and dryer and nothing else) was just inside the front door–in the dining room. I had room for one laundry basket on top of the dryer. So laundry got done and delivered to the bedrooms, to be put away. I had no choice–there was nowhere else to put it.

Then we moved to this house, which has a laundry room in the basement. Since I had always folded the laundry right there by my dryer in the old house, I did the same here. But it was so easy to fold the laundry and place it in a laundry basket–one for each family member.

Five laundry baskets take up an awful lot of floor space in the basement.

And by the end of the day, I would forget to hassle nag remind my kids to carry their laundry baskets upstairs and put their clothes away. So they’d go to the basement to look for stuff, and rummage through the baskets, and I’d get annoyed because they had unfolded all the neatly-folded laundry.

It wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t working too well for them, either.

So I tried something different–which, for me, is a big step. The only time I willingly try something different is when I’m cooking. I stepped out of my Laundry (Dis)Comfort Zone. When the dryer was done, I dumped everything into a basket and took it right upstairs. I folded it on my bed and delivered the folded things to everyone else’s beds. Now when they get home from school there is laundry on their beds, to be put away. There are no baskets cluttering up my basement floor, full of tumbled clothes. There is no “Mom, where’s my (insert name of article of clothing here)?” There are no mad rushes to the basement downstairs to find that missing piece of a uniform.

I deliver as I go, and it’s amazing how much better I feel about getting that done. The only thing I need to tweak is what happens to the Lonely Socks, since I’m no longer in the basement to utilize the Lonely Sock Clothesline.

It feels so good to retool a system and have it work out so much better!

Availability is a Gift

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The other day, Stay at Home Mom at Work wrote about the gift of availability.

It’s a rather long essay, but one well worth your time. To whet your appetite:

how grateful I was to be able to do this for [my daughter]. I was able to spend all morning in this pursuit. Not all Moms can do that. Some work – in various ways for a paycheck or in volunteering positions that don’t allow for spontaneous adventures such as this one.

This has gotten me thinking a lot about availability, and my attitude toward the demands that my family places on my time.

It’s pretty telling, right there, that I consider it “my” time. As if I own it or something.

After I got both the kids and their lunches onto the school bus this morning, I had about an hour to tidy up the kitchen, start some laundry, and wrap up the package that needed to be mailed. My husband (AKA Mr. Cubmaster) realized that he would be very late to work if he waited for the Scout Store to open so he could buy the Scouting awards that were needed for tonight’s meeting. So I said I would do it if he gave me the list. I wasn’t entirely gracious about it, and I heard myself not being gracious, so I switched into “joke mode” and told him that this was going to cost him a couple of Milky Ways.

He was good with that, and even handed me the Wawa gift card that was in his wallet so I could buy those Milky Ways as I ran errands.

Off I went, to daily Mass, the post office, the Scout store (where the manager observed that my husband owes me a nice dinner in exchange for today’s errand…he should be glad he’s getting off easy with those Milky Ways), Wawa (for said Milky Ways), the Big Box Home Supply Store for light bulbs and furnace filters, and Chick-Fil-A for a gift card that I have to send to school as part of Little Brother’s class prize for a fund-raiser event. I returned home at 11:30, had lunch, got my work done as well as some laundry, and then got busy sorting out the awards for each of our 30+ Cub Scouts. Beads, belt loops, badges and pins all went into the appropriate bags. I was going to be done soon!

And then the phone rang. It was Middle Sister. Her friend had missed the after-school bus. Her friend’s mom doesn’t drive, and her grandmother wasn’t around to take her home. Could I give her friend a ride?

My first impulse was to refuse. Was she crazy? Didn’t I have enough to do today? But I realized that I could pick up Middle Sister’s friend when I was on my way to get Little Brother after choir practice. Since her friend lives fairly close to Little Brother’s school, I could drop her off then.

And that’s what I did. I found out later that this friend had missed the bus because right after school, her boyfriend broke up with her. I was glad that I was available to get her home. Middle Sister, in the middle of a track workout, saw me in the school driveway and gave me a big wave.

So I went back home to finish bagging up those Cub Scout awards. And I wasn’t resenting that task anymore. I was glad that I was available to do this to help out my husband. My freelance work and my volunteering commitments did not prevent me from helping my husband and my daughter’s friend. That last load of laundry will still be there tomorrow, and I’ll get it done then. Provided, of course, that I’m available.

Lazy

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Laziness is the mother of ingenuity. I firmly believe that this is true. While the saying goes that “necessity is the mother of invention,” in my experience, most clever creations wind up falling in the category of Saving Time And/Or Effort.

One of my very favorite books–from the time I was about ten or so–has been Cheaper by the Dozen. I was always fascinated by the parents’ line of work: they were efficiency experts. I’m a big fan of efficiency, because I learned pretty early (by second grade or so) that if you got your work done quickly, you had more time to read.

Things haven’t changed. I’d still rather read than mop, as evidenced by the state of my kitchen floor. And while I loved the idea that the Gilbreths figured out the quickest way to get something done, I haven’t followed it to the extreme of stalking my children in the bathroom to time their personal hygiene routine. (Then again, some of that, in the Gilbreth’s case, was surely due to the 12-children, 1-bathroom situation.)

Back in high school, I worked in a bakery. I figured out that I could add up the total of people’s purchases in my head while I bagged the bread or tied the cake boxes. That way, I wouldn’t have to manually enter all the prices into the cash register. It drove my boss nuts, but it helped turn over the customers a whole lot faster (a boon on busy weekend mornings).

Now, I’ll brown several pounds of ground beef at a time so I can have quick tacos or skillet stroganoff later. I route my errands, saving myself time and gas.

I guess shortcuts are generally good, if you use them to free you up for what really matters. Like reading. Or playing “U-Build Battleship” or “Rack-O” with Little Brother.

Teach Your Children Well

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I try to teach my children to do the right thing.

Little Brother is doing pretty well. He’ll hold the door for lines of people–sometimes it seems we may never get inside where we’re going because he’s too busy holding the door for the people behind us.

So today he and I were at the store, and there were two cash registers right next to each other. While I was paying, I happened to look down and saw that the customer who had just been beside me had dropped some money on the floor. She was almost out the door with her purchases at that point.

“Wait!” I called after her. Then I instructed my son, “Little Brother, please pick up that money and give it to the lady who dropped it. She’s by the door.”

The lady made some joke to the cashier who had helped her about being so rich that she could afford to leave her money on the floor in the store. But she didn’t even bother to thank Little Brother for helping her out.

But the man with an empty shopping cart who was on his way to return the cart to the store, who stopped to hold the door for me and Little Brother, was more than polite when Little Brother took the door handle and told him to go in first with his cart. I think Little Brother was thanked five times.

Oh well. Part of teaching your children to do the right thing is teaching them to do the right thing without expecting a thank-you in return. After all, in the Gospel story, only one came back.

Tweety Bird and Jesus

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This morning I opened up my email and found yet another “forward” from an acquaintance of mine. She has my email address because we both belong to the same organization, but I rarely get any email from her related to that. However, a few days a week she sends me a “forward.”

In general, I’m not a big fan of “forwards.” They’re like the chain letters of the Internet world. I’ve been told in “forwards” that if I don’t forward them to nine people, I don’t love Jesus. Other times I’ve learned that deleting this “forward” means I’m not patriotic.

The email I received this morning opened up with a cute picture of Tweety Bird and then the telltale all-caps, 3-different-font, brightly-colored text. (At least this time the sender cared enough to delete the email address that had sent it to her and to address it to a BCC list!) The email described an encounter with Jesus, as if he had come into the room with the sender, and then informed me that He was being sent to my house. I should not allow Him to sleep there, I was told, but instead I should send Him on to other people.

I just don’t have patience for these things. Even though the sentiment is nice, I don’t feel like there’s a personal connection when one of these is passed along. And while I might have my reasons for being a little cranky this morning, which may make my reaction to this email a little over the top, it was a long time coming. I’ve used the internet long enough that I’ve seen (over and over again) most of the “forwards” that are going around.

My love for God, my country, and my family and friends has nothing to do with whether I forward an email. And I think the inspiration in the story about Jesus was more than a little diluted by the Tweety-bird opener.

An Exercise in Patience

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I got to daily Mass today for the first time since my surgery. I’m moving slowly (as I told a friend the other day, I’m definitely the “tortoise” rather than the “hare” these days) but I get there.

After church I was hungry and really wanted some Chick-Fil-A breakfast. So I headed over there and ordered my Chicken Minis and a sweet tea in the drive-through. In no time at all, I thought, I’d be home munching on chicken.

But the car ahead of me took a long time. I felt kind of impatient until I started paying attention to the occupant of that car. It was an older woman with a handicapped tag dangling from her rear-view mirror and a “Conquer Cancer” license plate. A store employee repeatedly poked her head out of the drive-through window to speak with the customer, offered her a daily newspaper, and generally spent some extra time making sure everything was taken care of. The whole time, she had a smile on her face.

Needless to say, once I’d observed a little bit about who was ahead of me, I was ashamed of my own impatience.

When it was my turn, a different employee handed me my food and apologized for the long wait. “It was not a problem,” I told her.

I’m impressed with the level of service that was provided to the woman ahead of me in line. I’m not surprised, because this is Chick-Fil-A, and that restaurant never fails to exceed expectations in terms of service, cleanliness, and food quality. The employees are unfailingly helpful and polite.

Today I will take the time to contact the Chick-Fil-A manager and compliment his employees. And I will take the time to pray for the woman ahead of me in that drive-through line. You never know what someone else’s needs and cares truly are; you never know their circumstances; and sometimes you are kept waiting for a very good reason.

Morning Observation

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In terms of sheer morning-motivational power, it’s hard to beat the effect of showering and getting dressed right away. It’s got more of an influence than caffeine. I’m convinced that coffee drunk while wearing pajamas is much less effective than coffee drunk while dressed for the day.

Easily Pleased

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Little Brother just finished his breakfast (maple-and-brown-sugar oatmeal). He came over and gave me a big hug, because I am the best oatmeal maker.

It’s nice to know that all I need to do to make this little guy happy is boil water and shake a few sprinkles across the top of the oatmeal bowl.

I don’t feel like I did all that much, but he’s happy and his hug showed me that he’s grateful. And it made me think that I could do more to show my gratitude when someone does something for me–not something extra, not even something extra nice, but just when something is done. When my husband comes home from a long day at work and then heads to the basement to work some more. When my kids get their chores done on time and without argument.

Just because it’s routine or expected doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve gratitude.

Graciousness and Generosity

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Those two go hand-in-hand. And I fail at both of them regularly. My first response is usually “no.” That’s 99 44/100% of the time. No.

It is my own selfishness, my own refusal to be inconvenienced, that prevents me from saying “yes.” And when I finally do say yes, I’m not gracious with my generosity–or generous with my graciousness. That kind of attitude is no good for my family.

Today’s Gospel (John 13:16-20) challenges us:

When Jesus had washed the disciples’ feet, he said to them:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master
nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.
If you understand this, blessed are you if you do it.”

Jesus had washed his disciples’ feet. What a model of graciousness and generosity! Not even the lowest slave or household servant would be expected to do such a thing, Father H. explained to us this morning at Mass. In fact, he said, it was scandalous that Jesus would have dressed as a slave and done a thing like this.

And Jesus wants us to do the same. Not literally washing someone’s feet, but acting generously and graciously when the need is presented.

I need to, at the very least, stop using things I cannot control as my excuse, and learn to stop saying “no” so much. If I cannot immediately get to “yes,” maybe I can at least get to “wait and let me think about it.”

That’s way better than “no.”

Today, may God give us all gracious and generous hearts.