Anticipation

My wife and I are trying not to think too much or too often about the fact, all our kids are coming home for Christmas in Kenai this year. Scott and Brittani and Brad will be spending their Christmas break with us. That's a first for us! Only 10 days away as of this writing. We haven't struggled too much with thinking endlessly about them coming yet, we have had plenty to do in the mean time. Take today for instance.

It is Wednesday so I automatically have things on my calendar. I do take the step of arriving at the church and going to the back room to take out the accumulation of "recycling" (it used to be trash) to the borough landfill. There is so much it is blocking the back doors which are a fire exit... so someone better take care of it. So off I go to recycle all this stuff. When I get back to the office I have enough time to answer some email, call our ministry guest for Sunday and give Jean some things to do for me before heading off to the Kenai Chamber of Commerce lunch meeting. I meet some people I know there and meet several for the first time. When I get back, I meet with Ryan to load up the 8 (heavy) boxes full of shoe boxes headed to Fort Yukon to take to the Post Office. We load them up, deliver them at the PO and wait in a fairly long line for our turn. It takes awhile to weigh all the boxes and get them shipped. We notice the church van needs a new windshield wiper so we stop at Napa to get a new set. Finally getting into the office I return phone calls, make some calls and start working on the Christmas Eve service that is coming up too quickly. I then turn my attention to pull together some scriptures and ideas for my Sunday evening message. I work on this for the rest of the afternoon. Then I meet my wife for a quick dinner before church. When we meet for dinner like this, it is rarely a leisurely moment of respite but more often another planning session. My wife has ideas, lots of ideas. So we work through some of them and then it is off to the church to greet everyone and get things together. Soon the foyer and all the rooms are humming with people conversing and kids getting excited. It is an intense time of short conversations and "how-do-you-do's?" I now have a short period of time before we greet everyone as they leave for home. To make use of the time I am catching up on this blog because I haven't posted yet for a week. I also have to make a call to enlist some help for an idea I am working on. When it is all over, we are expecting someone to come over to the house to look at a piece of furniture my wife is selling on Craig's list. I also have to test some dvd's I have been burning as I have been attempting to transfer my VHS tapes over to digital format. Then I am going to fall fast asleep.

So, that's my day, not much room for daydreaming or wishing the kids could get here sooner. In fact if they did I wouldn't be able to see them anyway for all the stuff I am attempting to get done.