Short Blog About Long Day

I really, really need to go to bed, but before I do, I want to blog about the day because it was a truly unusual, special day. So, here is the Cliff Notes version:

7:00 Up and atem. Make sure all three boys understand it will be 30 degrees colder today than Tuesday and they must wear long shirts and jeans.

Breakfast, make lunches, get boys in truck, drive to Uni-mart, get some milks for their lunches because we're out of bottled water. Drop kids at school, pick up some stuff I had copied for tonight's meeting, go back home.

Change into outside work clothes. Chris goes to pick up missionaries. They arrive wearing outside work clothes. We dismantle the raised-bed garden, mow the lawn, take out all the volunteer tomato plants, pull weeds, trim back the grass that had grown too tall for the mower under the tomato growth . . . while Chris cleans off front porch and fills truck bed with things for the dump. Done. Load truck with all the gardening stuff. Go to Gaye's house.

Chris mows lawn, I do a smidge of weeding, the Gaye and I rescue some more gardening stuff from the stuff Chris had intended to take to the dump. We put that away. Missionaries rake the leaves along the back fence and pull them out to the edge of the road for county leaf pick-up. Gaye calls Chris to help her get the air conditioner out of her window. I take over mowing. Missionaries keep raking, pausing occasionally to pretend they are kung fu fighting with the rakes. (Kids, sheesh.)



Lawn is done, leaves are done, gardening stuff put away in Gaye's basement for the winter (well, we're not done with the rakes and tarps by a long shot.) We hop back in trucks.

At the community garden we harvest all the hot peppers. There are tons and they are ripe and hot and wonderful. Then we pull up all the plants and transport them to the compost pile. We do the same with everything else that's left in the garden. Finally, we close with fifteen minutes of weeding (three people weeding together for 15 minutes is like me weeding alone for an hour). [Oh, that? That's a stalk of brussel sprouts on his shoulder. We all thought the brussel sprouts were great fun, although only Milo and I really wanted to eat them.]



We all go get lunch and arrive home (separately, Chris had to drive the elders home first) just in time to change and run over to the school to do our Thursday afternoon reader's theater. Both classes did great. Time flies. We grab our own kids and head home. We hurridly fix dinner and enjoy it. I go back to preparing for my PAC meeting (fly in ointment--at this point we completely forget to take Max to his group piano meeting, never mind that it's at the same time and place it's been for 6 weeks now). and then I drive back to the school and chair a roller-coastery, at times emotional, meeting that I still consider a success because a) noone cried and b) I made us quit at the agreed upon ending time and c) it was the best attended meeting ever. I attribute this to my idea to list the topics in the note home to parents telling them about the meeting. Our particular PAC's biggest problem is that a) people think they have to join (nope, no fees, no nothing, you just show up) and b) people don't really know what we do. So we're working on that.

Now, I'd been up till 2:00 the night before finishing a work project (well, really I was up till 1:30, but then it took another half-hour to fall asleep) and so at the end of the meeting I was just ripped tired.

Nevertheless, I stayed another hour afterwards just chatting with R (who is in the PAC with me and also at church with me) and D (who is just in the PAC with me) before finally driving home. I was going over in my head how grateful I was that the meeting was over (they're just hard on the psyche) and how productive the day was and I felt, as I had all morning and most of the afternoon, soooooo grateful for the help of the missionaries in getting those chores done because they had been weighing on my mind and yet every moment is so packed with workwork or volunteering at the school right now that I just didn't have a CLUE when I was going to get those things done.

And here they were done. And done well.

And then I went totally numb, which is when I realized I'd have to blog this quick and then get myself to bed. Tomorrow must be all about workwork and Chris says Max is coming down with something, so we'll see . . . how it turns out. But you know, God really did a fine job today with sending me the things I needed. I really need two big missionaries willing and able to help me pull up tomato plants and I really needed a big hunky husband to do it all with us. And I needed the rain that came mid-afternoon to hold off until we were done with all of that--and it did.

Good day, God. Thank you.