Laura is loving dress up. Her teacher at preschool found an unplayed with box of dress up clothes. Sara and her friend dive in with vigor. Yesterday, Sara felt ill. I picked her up from school and we decided to get Laura early too. When we arrived to pick her up, she was none to happy. She had just started a precious dress up game and we were interrupting it. School has become very popular because of this.
I’ve been trying to read Sara the Narnia series in one form or the other most of the summer. Her Sunday school went over the theme of the Dawn Treader this summer. I actually read the first chapter aloud to the class. The “homework” was to read chapters of the book in sequence with the lessons. I never was able to keep up. I figured Dawn Treader would be a more exciting book. Unfortunately, for Sara, Dawn Treader was slow to get into. I tried again recently and switched to the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The reading has been going slowly. It, too, has been slow to ignite my kids interest. So it has been neglected in favor of other library books. Tonight, in a bid to get to stay up later, Sara grabbed Narnia. She knew I would read it. I laughed at her cunning. She was right. So we snuggled up tight, like kittens sleeping together, and read about Edmund discovering Narnia and the White Witch. I think I finally have a hook on Sara’s imagination. She begged for another chapter. Yes!
Cooking has been a sore point with me lately. I have cooked some lemons in the past couple of weeks. I tried a new recipe, shrimp with pesto and gnocchi. The shrimp tasted shrimpy, the pesto had a odd taste and whole wheat gnocchi will not be repeated in my house. I tried a roasted chicken stocked chicken soup. The recipe wanted to put tortilla slices into the recipe to act as “dumplings”. That was a poor idea. I nursed that one for awhile and then gave up. Tonight was redeeming. I had to use frozen scallops. I was skeptical after my frozen shrimp tasted so poor. I chose a recipe that had cheap ingredients. Most recipes want to use port or chanterelle mushrooms. Expensive ingredients for a failed meal. I pulled out one we’d tried many years before…cornmeal crusted scallops with mint chimichurri. As luck would have it, the meal corresponded to our worse night, Wednesday. I didn’t get dinner on the table until 7:45pm by the time I got settled into cooking a slightly complex meal. It’s not my normal plan for an evening after a day of work. Yet, it worked very well. The chimichurri was liquidy, but tasty and soaked well into the couscous.
While cleaning up all the dishes that have been accumulating lately, I listened to Mars Hill’s Mark Driscoll preach on Mary and Martha in Luke. I knew it was going to be a good sermon. This is one of the gospel stories that resonates with me. I think since becoming a parent, I’ve struggled with Martha versus Mary moments. There’s the practicality of life, getting things cleaned, kids fed, the endless list of things to do. Then there’s enjoying life, kids, stopping work to play. You can’t do either completely. If I just played with the baby all day, the house would be a mess. Yet it’s important to carpe diem. The sermon tonight had great pearls. One was to have a heart like Mary and hands like Martha. Start with Mary first (sitting at the feet of Jesus) and then work as hard as Martha.
Mark talked about who is a Martha and who is a Mary. It basically ran down type A vs. B. He said if you don’t know who you are, you’re probably a Mary. I think my SP (meyers briggs) at my core is Mary. I think being a parent has brought forth Martha tendencies, anxieties and worries to deal with all the stuff I have to do.