Count it All Success

It's Thursday so I'm here reporting in this week's successes.   There were the great colossal moments like the Fall Festival and getting kids to the doctor's, orthodontist, myself to the obgyn and my oldest to is music lesson all on time and there were the grinding moments like loading the car up to get the middle four to their school this week while their Father was out of town.  That we have held close to each other and kept our sense of humor despite all kinds of chaos, calamities, unexpected appointments and delays, is a big miracle in my book. But the biggest victories were ones not anticipated. 

1) My two year old stacked three blocks.  I swear he's reading his IEP and spends the next week making the teachers rewrite his goals.   We were in the waiting room while his brother was getting x-rays of his mouth for braces.  The lounge had three Rubic's cubes.  He made a stack and knocked it over and did it again three times.   The thing is, you sound really stupid when you start cheering because your kid made a three block tower but we did.  Today, he showed off for his PT and they were very pleased.  I told them to put "Read War and Peace." in his objectives for next week because I want to get to that one day.

2) Homework for one of mine has always been a battle.  But third grade has been a real struggle.  After a meeting with the teacher to device a system, that drudgery has thus far disappeared from the radar.  She sets the timer and does ten minutes at a time.  It all gets done, she's proud of herself and so am I! As an added bonus, it makes my life is much less "Dial a nag." 

3) On Tuesday, as part of keeping myself strong for this week, I made us go to the daily 9 o'clock mass.  I spent 90% of it in the back watching my two daughters tend their babies, baby girl and penguin and rerouting Paul who wanted to go racing up the aisles.  The girls had created beds out of a table and were reading them stories from the song booklets  I would have wished they would have been a bit quieter but in the end, the goal --to gather strength for the week from mass and the sacraments was achieved and that's enough.  

4) The other night, I sat with my daughter and talked about how hard it is to see my dad struggle with memory loss and that oddly, while I'd been able to pray for him and for my mom, and to ask for him to be healed, I knew my heart was some how afraid of asking for the miraculous.  I knew this was folly as I even write and know and believe that God should be asked, asked often. I can count the lavish times it has occurred in my life and I won't be able to stop counting.   So even though I know that He never tires of our prattle and our prayers even if we do of ourselves, I'd somehow been shamefully afraid to ask, like I needed to build up credit with God to ask even though I knew this was utter foolishness.   She listened to me talk about how somehow, this time asking was hard for me; like I didn't want to trust, didn't want to hope, didn't want to be disappointed and so I wasn't letting myself hope.  I couldn't explain more than to say I felt trapped in amber, unable to move even to ask, like it took somehow so long to work up to asking.

She smiled and said, "Ask quickly."  and the laughter that broke through inside was tangible and so I asked. Immediately, the weight left my heart.  Since then, I've asked and once I started, I felt free to ask and ask and I'll ask again, and I'll ask all of you, to pray for my family, for my dad's health.  There is a chance that the doctors may be able to restore some of his memory and that would be an enormous blessing.  I am asking God and all to pray that this miracle happens, that my dad can have back some if not all of what he has thus far lost.  

I also am thanking God for my quick on the draw daughter, who remembers what I forget about what God desires most. 

Got a victory?  Go share at Family and Faith Live!