We have had the blessing of money provided this month specifically for food.  So last week, I stocked the freezer fuller than it has ever been.  Ground beef, turkey, chicken…all the things I cook with as a basis for our meals.  I had my weekly planning time yesterday afternoon and laid out meals for the week.  The days of leftovers are fairly over, we usually eat it all or make two full meals, one to freeze.  So tonight was burgers and fries because it’s F week and fries sounded fun.

All well and good right?  One small problem.  In order to access the well stocked freezer, here is what I would have to do:

Go outside.

Get a ladder.

Bring it in and place it in the hallway.

Climb the ladder into the attic.

Crawl through the attic (which I’ve discovered has rather damp places and traces of mold).

Shimmy (is that a word?)  through a hole my husband cut in the sheetrock/firewall in the attic last night with a saw.

Crawl down through another hole to get into our 6 feet of garage where our freezer is located.

Get said food out of freezer.

Climb back up (all this in the pitch dark) into the attic.

Drop food through the hole in the wall.

Fit myself through the hole in the wall.

Carry food across attic and down ladder.

Make dinner.

Why can’t I just open the garage door to get the food?  After hours of cleaning and organizing our little garage space, when we shut the door, the spring broke and the door crashed down.  Without the springs, it weighs nearly 400 pounds and we could not even budge it last night.  Why don’t I want to go to all that trouble to get some beef to make hamburgers for dinner?  Truth is, I won’t fit through the hole Christopher cut in the wall up in the attic.  So even if it sounded fun, I wouldn’t make it.  Or I would end up wedged like Winnie the Pooh when he ate too much honey and got stuck in Rabbit’s doorway which is for me a fabulously vivid and highly amusing mental picture.

So no burgers tonight, we’ll do eggs instead-maybe omelets to be more dinner-ish.  Tomorrow’s dinner?  We’ll see how long it takes to get this worked out.  Trying to be flexible and just laugh.   I’m really striving to roll with the punches and figure out how to delight in the challenges that come up every day.  My kids watch everything I do and I’m seeing responses from them that I really don’t like sometimes.  No one else is responsible for that but me as they are with me nearly 100% of the time.  I feel like they hold a mirror up to my face and sometimes it is so endearing and other times it makes my heart sink.

Back to grace.  Just finished Grace Based Parenting and now am about to pick up Philip Yancey’s famous book, What’s so Amazing About Grace?.  This whole raising children is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, that’s for sure.

What did Kyler do today? For those keeping track, he stuck a screwdriver up his nose  and hurt himself quite badly I’m sure he will never do it again.  Blood and tears and more blood.  He also, without anyone knowing, carefully placed a good many Kix cereal balls back into the milk container then put it away.  At lunch time today, Caleb had the surprise of pouring a glass only to find it was quite contaminated with little yellow balls, he was less than thrilled.