Week In My Life: Monday

This is my third year participating in the Week In My Life link-up. Somehow this year it is landing during an extremely busy week, but aren’t they all? Let’s not assume I will blog every day, and then if I happen to come through, we’ll all be surprised. No one will be more surprised than I am. Let’s get started!

The day begins the same way it always does, as a child with ice cold feet crawls into bed next to me and immediately starts chatting while I “mmmph” back at him. I am not a morning person, and I’m even less of one when I haven’t slept enough, which…well…let’s face it, is most days.
As I lie there, wondering what day it is, I remember that during the night I heard the boys chattering away in their room.
“Hey,” I say, “what were you two talking about in the middle of the night?”
“We were talking about a shadow on the wall,” he says. That makes sense.
We get up and I pack lunches as our boys eat breakfast—ramen noodles and smoked salmon and yogurt smoothies and cereal and a few apple slices and strawberries. Not everyone eats everything Just another breakfast around here.
John has offered to take our boys to school, and because of my poor morning planning, they run out the door as I am showering. So we yell “Goodbye, I love you!” through the bathroom wall.
Then I’m off to work for a busy day.

I worked quite a bit of the weekend writing and responding to emails from home, yet somehow that doesn’t mean I have a jump on the week. But I love my work. It’s a day full of good conversations and writing and phone calls and even more emailing.
Then, even though I’m too busy to make time for anything in the day, I decide to go to the interfaith prayer for peace at Loyola University Maryland (where I work) in the afternoon.
Somehow it’s just what I need, as we listen to prayers in multiple faiths and different languages.

We light candles and pray for peace.

I tear up a little as we sing, “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” But mostly I feel grateful to be alive, to know my family will be waiting for me when I get home, to be part of this community, to be joining students and colleagues in this time of prayer for a community that extends around the globe.
Then I’m off to the store for cucumbers for our dinner salad and home to my family. John picked up the boys from school, and I can’t wait to get home. Dinner is leftover meatloaf and chicken nuggets for the people who don’t want leftover meatloaf—who are those people?—and I make my secret nugget sauce recipe, which I suppose is no longer a secret.

Then the boys pick from their bottomless buckets of Halloween candy for dessert.
After dinner, people are pretending to remove their thumbs and Daniel keeps blocking my path.
“Say the password, Mama,” he says. “It’s ‘Loyola.’”
And then it’s something else, and something else, but he always tells me, so that works for me.
I load the dishwasher—perhaps my top achievement of the day, unless you count emptying it this morning.

Then the boys and I play a game they love where they run a pet store with all their stuffed pets and I am their only customer. By the end of the game, most of the stuffed animals have been eaten by the stuffed snake, and the store owner (Daniel) has married me. So my name is Mrs. Pet Shop Owner, and I’m just delighted to have him helping me raise my dozens of stuffed pets.

It’s fun and a nice break from the video games we work hard to limit.

By the end of the evening, it’s clear both boys have colds. We decide to let them sleep on the floor of our room, where they will be nearby and where, presumably, they won’t wake up in the middle of the night to discuss shadows on the wall. John offers to read them Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz as they fall asleep.
Check back tomorrow to see whether I manage to blog two days in a row!

Catholic Review

The Catholic Review is the official publication of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.