Life is Getting Back to Normal, and Resolutions (or lack thereof)

Finally, I can say hello! I have been trying to find the time to post over the past few weeks, but life has been hectic! We had a fun Christmas break, with a trip to Disney World the first week of January. We started our first semester of homeschooling on the 5th of January, and my older two both had birthdays in the past week!

So, now that the craziness (or extra craziness) has past, we're getting back to "normal".

Now that I have two blogs, I may not post on both as often. My goal is to keep our home school discussions and issues separate, so you won't see much school talk here. Please visit my sister blog often, though, since I am still a baby home educator!

I'm not really the resolution-type, but I do have a few BIG goals for the new year. My prayer life is still my biggest struggle, and Satan is doing his best to keep it that way. A friend introduced me to A Mother's Rule of Life, and I have been struggling to get through the book for several months. It is not a long read, or even a hard read, but I have been tempted away from it over and over, and every time I pick it up , my mind is bombarded with interruptions, distractions, and even confusion. This tells me I REALLY need to read it. So often our One Thing Needful is the one thing that the evil one tries to keep us from.

My other goal, is the other thing I've been struggling with (my whole life). De-cluttering. My house is pretty straight if you don't look that carefully. Closets and drawers, however, are my nemesis. I've been slowly working on this, but as soon as anything pops up, like holidays, trips, birthdays, or sickness, my closets just fill up!! At this moment, you can barely walk into my bedroom closet. I am hoping that by the spring I will have my closets under control. The trick is when to clear them out, and how to keep them that way. Please comment on any of this if you have things that work, or don't work for you!

There's my day-to-day in a nutshell right now!

We wore St. Helen out!

I love being in a multi-generational Orthodox family. This is a rare thing in the part of the country I live in, where most of "us" are converts to the faith. I happen to have parents who converted to Orthodoxy when I was a few months old, and my husband is "cradle" and has honestly never been inside any church except an Orthodox Church ever!!

I digress...there's a point to this. This past week has been very stressful. My youngest has been battling an awful urinary tract infection. She has a chronic problem that was diagnosed at 2 months, and because of that she's been on preventative antibiotics for over a year. Unfortunately, the antibiotics weren't enough to stop an infection this week, and she was VERY ill.

On Sunday night, her fever spiked so high she was shaking, which freaked me out. My husband was holding her, quietly mumbling prayers into her ear. My older two were surrounding him, my oldest crying, trying to say the prayers with him. At that point, I was pacing, pleading St. Helen, her patron, for help and intercessions. My parents had come over, in case we had to take her to the ER, and they were silently praying as well. As the night went on, her fever actually came down. My mother-in-law called and said she'd be praying for her during the night.

I am so thankful to be surrounded by family of the same faith! We all came together in common prayer. I know St. Helen is interceding on her behalf. God has truly granted healing mercies. The next morning my Mom called to check on the baby. As we said ended our call, she stated something that summed it all up. She said, "We sure wore St. Helen out last night!"