Yeah, things have been quiet around here. Despite my best efforts to blog consistently, life gets ahead of me.

Working from home is fantastic, but having 4 kids home in the summer causes a dip in productivity during the day and I often find myself catching up on stuff in the evening. By the time I have some time to write, my creativity is fried.

But here’s what’s been going on around here…

• Mark was gone for 16 days to Ethiopia & Kenya. While he was gone I: took 3 van loads of stuff to Goodwill, filled the large recycle can 3 times w/ papers, cleaned and reorganized the garage so that we can fit 2 cars in (took about 30 hours), hung a cabinet in the downstairs bathroom (thanks for the help Dad), hung new curtains, painted an end table & coffee table, bought shelves for the playroom (hung them after he was home), cleaned the den, dismantled the hutches from our office desk to make the room seem less crowded, scanned approximately 300 pieces of paper into Evernote (going paperless), shredded two trash bags worth of old bank statements and tax returns and somewhere in there I ate, slept and worked. I’m not sure why I go on home project binges while my husband is gone.
• Took the kids to Cali for a quick 3 day weekend. Disneyland one day, dinner with friends and lots of hotel pool swimming. Oh, and Cars 2 (super cute). Despite the 90 minute line (it SAID 50 minutes) we went on the new Star Tours ride – pretty freakin’ awesome!
• Next week I’m headed to NC to attend the SheSpeaks Conference put on by Proverbs 31 Ministries. I’ve been wanting to go for years and some freelance work provided the funds. Plus I convinced Jen to come with me 🙂
• As part of the conference I have to prepare two talks – one 3 min, one 5 min – that will be evaluated and critiqued. Yikes! I’ve got my topics, illustrations and scriptures, I just need to put it all together.
• Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to get a illustration, point & scripture across in 3 minutes???????
• Several people from SheSpeaks recommended “Communicating for Change” by Andy Stanley so I bought it. BLOWN AWAY! Seriously! Anyone who speaks to groups needs to buy this book. That goes triple for every pastor I know 🙂
• I’ve got no less than 3 radio interviews coming up about the book. Two are internet radio shows, the other is for FAITH900 in MN. Working on updating a second edition for the next printing.
• My 4 nephews & 1 niece are here from Arkansas for a few days so we’re getting in some cousin time.
• Spent the last four days dealing with PayPal issues. World Orphans is switching our e-commerce system over but apparently my name is now on too many accounts and so it flagged me. They froze both my personal account that I used for decals (hence they are down for a bit) as well as the account I have for my publishing company (although you can still order the book w/ Google Checkout. It’s a nightmare that is slowly getting unwound but a huge headache.
• Little Caesars Pizza just opened near us with their $5 carryout special. I love this because the Papa John’s across the street started offering the same deal. COMPETITION! Let’s see – Little Caesars or Papa Johns? That’s a no brainer! That’s only about $1 per pizza than the frozen ones I buy.

Today is the last day of a 16-day stint single-parenting the four kids while Mark has been in Africa. This trip was a bit longer than most, as he was actually doing two separate team trips scheduled back to back.  Not quite the longest he’s been gone, but close.

I don’t mind it too much. It helps that the kids are older and pretty independent. Working from home helps of course too.

But inevitably toward the end, the patience starts to wear thin (despite having an awesome 30 hours to myself this weekend while the kids were all at grandparents).

Last week the kids were going to the cheap summer kids movie with the church kids group. I had a conference call, so I planned to work from the Starbucks right there. So I bought their tickets and then I set about setting up the snack situation and giving them the appropriate money. We have the Harkins T-shirt and two Harkins cups. That gives us the $1 large popcorn (w/ free refill) and two $1 drinks. I knew the kids may not want to sit right together so I came prepared with an extra ziploc bag. I told them to get the large popcorn and then pour half of it in the ziploc. The girls could have one bag, the boys the other.

Then commenced the arguing over who got the “official” movie theatre bag and who had to use the Ziploc?

Seriously?

SERIOUSLY!

We’re going to argue over WHICH bag we get?

Because, you know, it dramatically alters the taste of the popcorn, right?

And I lost it.

I threatened to take them all home if they were going to argue over popcorn bags. And not in a quiet voice. Not in an extremely LOUD voice either, but in a definite “don’t mess w/ mama” voice.

They hastily settled that situation (the girls said they’d take the Ziploc) and they were on their way.

And for the next two hours I felt bad that I had totally lost my cool with them. Not that the argument wasn’t silly, but I knew I had over-reacted.

So when I picked them up and we all got in the van, I ate humble pie and told them I was very sorry for getting frustrated with them earlier and yelling at them and asked for their forgiveness.

They all looked at me, puzzled.

“When?”

“What are you talking about?”

Um, the popcorn bag thing guys.

“Oh,” piped up Noah. “I don’t really remember that.”

Neither did the others. But they forgave me anyways.

And this mom said a little thank you prayer for short-term memory loss and grace.