Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A day in the Life

Last year, our family visited some freinds that live in Transcarpathia, it's  region west of the the Carpathian mountains that borders Hungary and Romania. They have their own dialect of Ukrainian that is heavily influenced by Hungarian, and it takes a few days to catch on to their lingo. We were sitting around the table one evening visiting when a lady started discussing, her daughters both in their late 20's with toddlers.
"They keep saying they don't have time to get everything done, they don't have time clean the house, cook, and care for the kids, they are tired all the time and just don't have enough time. When we were young we did all our washing by hand, all our cooking from scratch and somehow, we had time to do everything. I don't remember being so exhausted as my daughter is, and yet,  I see, she really is exhausted, she really doesn't have time."
I have pondered this conversation often. Because it's true. Today we as women have more conveniences than every before, we have automatic washing machines, you in the states even have dryers. We have dishwashers, cars, canned soups and frozen dinners. And yet, we just don't seem to have time. I know my house is never as clean as I would like for it to be, I don't spend as much quality time with my kids as I should, and most nights I sink into the pillow exhausted. All my planners and organizers don't save me much time either.
Take last weekend for example. We had a ladies conference at our church that had been scheduled for over a month, I had given Andrey fair warning, already planned my meals out, what and where we would be eating an on what days. And then on Wednesday night about 9:00pm Andrey informs me that a guy visiting from Western Ukraine will be spending the night at our house.
Okay I think, "no problem, I'll whip up something real quick for him to eat tongiht, and think something up for breakfast, since I'll be leaving before he wakes up"
Then at 9:15 I get a call from one of our pastor's wife asking me to prepared dinner on Thursday night for about 17 people in our small group. I think, "okay the conference last until 6 pm, the small group begins at 7pm, I will need to prepared dinner tonight", Which explains why I went to bed at 2am on Thursday morning. I won't go into the rest of the details, of  attending the ladies conferences, speaking at a new converts class, decorating for the Valentine's banquet, and taking care of our overnight guest, who ended up staying four days.Each day seemed to snowball into the next, and all I could do was laugh at the neatly organized planner that I had filled in a month ago. I was proud of myself that I didn't fall asleep at the Valentine's banquet, and thankful to my husband for giving me the best Valentine's gift I could have recieved yesterday, A NAP!


1 comment:

  1. Oh man, that is CRAZY. I can only handle schedules like that for a very few days or I fall to pieces. Hope you have a little more space in your days now!

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