Oh, what a week!

Family: A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space. ~Evan Esar

My brain is fried. It's been one of those sort of weeks. Not difficult exactly. Not even particularly tiring but now I'm at the end of it I just feel incredibly bad tempered. Dysfunctional even.

Not helped in the least by the rain. Now I like rain but I am starting to get a Liddy complex because the rain inevitabley kicks in late Tuesday night & is pouring down by the bucket load come Wednesday morning when I have to go paddle in it. When it rains the washing piles up & people start aggitating for clean underclothes. Well the undies are clean but if you want them dry as well, well that is a different story!

I sat in on choir again this week & now have the inside scoop on the small choir, which has been formed to give the students who have been round a while more intense training. Not sure how Ditz wrangled that except she doesn't need to be told over & over to stand or sit quietly, have good posture, highlight her part & mark as indicated. Her sight reading seems to be pretty good, much better in fact than I thought it was. The AVAE choir is doing a number of songs in German. Lots of gutteral spitting. Eeeew! Ditz sings seconds, which has always been a very small group of about 4 kids. This particular song has about 8 singing seconds because the seconds part divides in two. Ditz sings the higher part, one of just 3 students & even knowing I'm biased & naturally my kid is just wonderful [that's a given, right?] I was still shocked at how quickly Ditz got the *grunt* going, that was asked for. O.K, I know she can do it; She & Sian play games where Ditz sings down in her boots with plenty of grunt but Ditz has been quietly hiding her light under a bushel so I was more than a little astonished to realise the one voice I could hear clearly, on pitch, was Ditz! Yep. She's prepared to twinkle brightly. Alison is very pleased with her progress & says she's so much fun to boot. One of Ditz's charms has always been that she is usually a happy person to have around. O.K, so school work doesn't make Ditz a happy Ditz but that aside she is usually a pretty cheerful soul & a willing little worker.

The downside of choir night is we get home lateish, pretty wired. Ditz takes ages to settle & we are finding Thursdays impossible. I am now relooking at how I've scheduled because I think I need to move all the written work & intense stuff to Monday/Tuesday & all the reading to Thursdays. Ditz just isn't functioning. I was sort of expecting that & have waited to see how we were managing before slotting in violin but that will have to be Tuesday afternoons. Scheduling it later in the week is so not a good idea.

To really complicate things we have been struggling churchwise for ages. Getting to the mainland every week is just impossible. There are 6 churches on the island & none of them work for us. The Pentacostalists do a great *touchy~feely* service devoid of the word of God. Not for us. When even the girls can pick holes in the theology something is very wrong. The Catholics & the Anglicans with their liturgy are too ritualised for our girls & the preaching is weak too. There is a music ministry which also eliminates the word of God & the little non~denom church is in serious sin in our view because we believe the bible is very clear about the character traits of those in leadership roles within the body of Christ. Talk about frustration. All we want is a spiritual home where we can worship as a family each week but to get the bare minimum of what we want we have to travel off~island. This is expensive, time~consuming & sheer exhausting & it should be so unnecessary. There are other families like us. End result we are all getting together to home church. This is not very common in Australia & I have only ever heard of people in the States doing it but for the present it seems the only reasonable solution & we can get Liddy home for some of it too.

For the time being it looks like we will be focusing on listening to God in prayer & reading straight from the scriptures ~ no preaching. Dearest did ask me to do some background notes ~ a whole 60 seconds worth! For now we will just take it slowly & see where the Spirit leads. Liddy has a song she will play on C.D for us but even so early we are getting glimpses of how God might lead. Liddy's gift is missions & there are several young people we could get in a bible study with Liddy leading & me as back up encylopedia. Hospitality is so not my gift I find opening my home this way completely fraught making ~ you haven't seen my home! We have been building for 25 years & are nowhere near finished yet! The constant rain means we still haven't got our verandah rails up!

As our year begins to pick up pace & race full steam ahead I really like my schedule to stay pretty stable ~ no unexpected blips, no sudden death changes, nobody running round like headless chooks bleating that they were sure they'd told me when quite obviously they haven't...& already Liddy has thrown a spanner in the works. Her timetable is pasted to the fridge with her work number & lunch times for whichever of her accommodating parents is responsible for her on any given day. Yes, I know she's a big girl & could get herself to & from work on her own if she had to but if we're home & available why should she have to? Besides when she gets overtired the CFS starts kicking in again & believe me it's just not worth it! Liddy, who is competant & user friendly [at work at any rate], is being moved from customer service to being in charge of the dairy section. The manager wants Liddy in a managerial position as quickly as possible though his plans are being somewhat sabatoged by needing Liddy out the front to help train new juniour staff & fix the computers. Only Liddy hasn't got a timetable yet!!! Now you tell me, how am I to schedule without it? She may be able to get hours that suit her better & be home a little earlier, which would make all of us much, much happier little vegemiters. I hate her late nights. By the time I pick her up I'm exhausted & she's rarely on time. Someone's till always has to be recounted because the juniour staff seem chronically unable to add up.

So that's my week. How's yours been?