Tuesday July 15th

About a year ago I decided to assign days to some of my household chores.  Monday became errand day, because it always became an errand day, no matter what else I had planned.  Tuesday became bread and butter day.  I have to borrow my mom's Bosch to make the bread and make the cream into butter (anyone who would like to buy me a Bosch is perfectly welcome), so I try to do them both on the same day.  Wednesday became bathroom cleaning day because if I don't try to do it on a certain day every week, I will let months go by without cleaning the bathrooms. (I realize I shouldn't be admitting this out loud.  I'm just trying to make you feel better about your bathroom.) And Thursday became vacuuming day.  Vacuuming is my worst chore.  I don't know why it is, but I am much better at cleaning bathrooms and doing laundry and just about everything else.  Unfortunately this is not a story about how I resolved my vacuuming issues.  But we'll keep hoping that I'll figure it out someday.  And of course these aren't the only household chores I do in a week.  These are just the ones that weren't getting done, and so needed some focus.

The problem is, I'm not a very strict taskmaster for myself.  I allow myself all kinds of excuses for getting out of these chores on their assigned days.  I'll usually get bread and butter day done, just because the family will demand bread, and the cream will fill the whole fridge.  No one but me cares about the other things, though, so it's pretty easy to skip them and get away with it.  It does start to bother me if I haven't taken care of these chores in a couple weeks, though, and such was the state of my house this week.  I can't remember why I didn't clean the bathrooms or vacuum last week, but I didn't.  And this week we are leaving for a family reunion on Thursday, so my week is short.  I already wasted yesterday just because I was tired and grouchy all day.  (Gretl was the same way, so maybe it was in the air.) That left today and tomorrow to get all my chores and errands done and get ready for a three day camping trip, and at 2:00 this afternoon I still hadn't done anything worth mentioning.

At 2:00 today I would have told you that none of it was getting done, and maybe we should just stay home from the reunion.  But sitting here at 11:30pm, I can proudly say that I made bread (and it turned out great!), made the butter, and cleaned all three bathrooms.  Boo-yah!!!
There had to have been some divine intervention there, because that's two days of chores done in half of one day!  Plus we had dinner and shuttled kids to activities, besides running Gretl to the potty, starting Dora videos, and everything else that happens in a day at my house.  I am very grateful to the Lord for sending the time warp or the rocket boosters, or whatever it was that happened to make today possible.