Tag Archives: time

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Get-It-Done Book Review… and Giveaway!

See below for a chance to get free stuff in the mail! Yay! Free stuff!

Being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action… Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant.

–Timothy Ferris, The Four Hour Workweek

I’m a bit addicted to time-management books, but their quality, usefulness and readability are all over the map. I read Ferris’s book and got a couple of things out of it, including the above quote which is brilliant IMO, but overall the book just didn’t hit home with me.

I recently found a new book that embodies the quote above and is actually fun to read. Stever Robbins has a personal productivity podcast (say that five times fast) and has put his best stuff into a book, The Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.

Robbins’s book blends a lot of high level thinking (what are your goals?) with nitty-gritty techniques for being more productive (here’s one: to keep from getting distracted when working a project, make an “interruption list” of things to tend to when you’re done with what you’re working on). His chapter on procrastination has a lot of practical suggestions and is a great complement to Anne Lamott’s angst-ridden meditation on the subject in Bird by Bird. And chapter 1, “Live on Purpose,” deals with goal setting in a very intuitive way. I’ve never really gotten the “vision/ mission/ goal/ objective” distinction, and his stuff on “goal ladders” is simple and makes sense to me.

Robbins also has a great sense of humor. This may be the only time-management book in which zombies play a prominent role. In a section on e-mail, he talks about templates and macros as a way to streamline your communication:

Let’s say your boss has you saying no to a dozen different requests each day: a dog show invitation, a request for money, and someone claiming to be a long-lost child, asking to be added to the will.

Those are pretty different. You want to respond to each individually, but your responses can have paragraphs in common. All might start like this: “Mr. Boss appreciates your letter. Your tragic plight is touching.” Then you add a paragraph or two crushing that person’s hopes and dreams, and you finish up with, “Mr. Boss regrets that he can’t do more for your deeply troubling situation.”

Some of the latter chapters get more theoretical, and the one on building relationships seemed a little utilitarian. Yes, building a network does help you be more productive, but part of my job is to love people whether they can be useful to me or not. Still, it’s worth a read if for no other reason than that he takes that treacly starfish story (you know the one) and gives it a much-needed twist.

This would be a great book for a young person starting out in a career who really wants to get their life together, although others would find it valuable too. (No book of this genre is going to work on people who don’t want to change or who can’t see the need.) It’s a quick read, with several novel suggestions for working smarter.

And! Because I love hearing tips on how other people make their life work, leave your favorite lifehack/best idea in the comments. On Monday I’ll choose someone at random and send them a copy of the Get-It-Done Guy book.

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Would You Work Part-Time if You Could?

Someone told me recently, “I work 10 hours a day and can barely keep up. I love what I do in my job, I just wish there were less of it.”

When I hear things like this I feel grateful that I am able to work part-time. I work 2/3 time and because I work evenings, weekends, and am always “on call,” the mid-week hours are more flexible. So I can take my kids to the park, or get my haircut in the middle of the day and avoid the rush. I don’t have to find time to squeeze in some exercise—it’s built into each and every day.

Yes, it’s challenging sometimes. There is a sense of “falling behind” career-wise. And as a friend and fellow PT pastor put it, “It’s hard, feeling like if you just had a liiiiiiittle more time to spend, this thing you’re working on could be REALLY great.” I knew what she meant. And I know part-time work is not economically viable for everyone. I choose to work part-time because I like it—it allows me to live a more well-rounded life—but I’m able to work PT because my spouse doesn’t. And I feel a pang of guilt when he pulls out of the driveway at 6:50 a.m. to beat the traffic to work, before the kids are even awake. (Getting them out of the house singlehandedly is no trip to the spa, mind you, but that’s another post.)

I hear people talking about what we’re learning from the economic downturn. Some of us hope there will be a resurgence in old-fashioned stuff like saving and living within one’s means. One thing I’m hearing again and again is that many of the jobs that are gone are not coming back. High unemployment could be with us for years. What are we going to do about it?

I’m wading into territory I know little about, but I’ve wondered whether we’ll see the rise of part-time work, and whether we can find ways to make that a healthy change and not just a “best we can do”  thing. There’s nothing sacred and eternal about the forty-hour work week. It became the national standard only in the 1930s, though its roots are much older. It was meant to protect workers from being forced to work too much, not to force them to work “enough.” Futurists in the last century predicted that labor-saving devices would allow us to work less and have much more leisure time, yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. We work more than the citizens of any other industrialized country and take much less vacation.

Could more part-time work be part of the answer? Churches all over the place are downshifting full-time staff positions to part-time ones, often with a great sense of shame. Of course these are people’s jobs we’re talking about. But I know folks who would work PT if they could—if they could work out the personal budgetary issues and if their workplace would let them. The person I quoted above would never dream of asking to work part-time because it would be seen as a lack of loyalty, or that the individual “can’t cut it.” If PT workers become more of a norm, maybe that reluctance would change.

Of course one of the major barriers is economic—would people make enough to live on? (That’s where the simplicity/saving stuff comes into play.) And we’d either have to make PT employees eligible for health insurance, or de-couple healthcare from employment (I favor the latter, but that too is another post.)

If the jobs really aren’t coming back… what will we do?

Would you work part-time if you could? And are there other barriers besides economics that stop you from doing so?

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Prayer, Solitude, and… Punctuality?

A friend recently turned me on to Catapult Magazine, which is smart, thoughtful writing about the spiritual life (that’s my tagline, not theirs). The theme of a recent issue was “Community,” and I enjoyed this article about the author’s experience living with others in a community called The Hermitage. Here’s the piece I took note of:

We cultivate spiritual disciplines [together]. Some of the disciplines most needed and practiced are personal prayer, solitude, and punctuality.

I have never heard of punctuality as a spiritual discipline, but I love it.

Punctuality shows respect for the person left waiting. And if you’re living in community, sharing work responsibilities, punctuality is a way of submitting to the needs of the community and being accountable to them.

Punctuality is a big thing for me. Granted, I am late a lot more than I used to be before I had kids. (How many times have I need thwarted by a missing shoe or an ill-timed poop!) However, I remain committed to being on time for things as much as I am able. Chronic lateness is one of my pet peeves because it communicates that whatever has detained the person is more important than I am.

Punctuality also happens to be the way my life is set up right now. When Caroline was in kindergarten, I (or another adult I had designated) had to be at the bus stop when it arrived or they would not let her get off. Day care centers assess a fee if parents are late picking up their children. Thankfully, our provider doesn’t, but I still need to be there by a certain non-negotiable time. In short, people are depending on me to be at a certain place at a certain time, and I honor that as best I can because I honor the relationship.

This makes ministry a challenge though, not just logistically—I have to plan hospital visits more carefully than I’d like, and try to guesstimate how long they’ll take—but spiritually too. I end up screening calls more than I might otherwise, just in case the issue will require more time and attention than I have before the next thing. And I think some immediacy and intimacy is lost as a result.

This is something I’ve struggled with for years. I think to myself, if I were a real minister, instead of this hybrid minister/mommy thing, I would be able to drop everything and just go. Well, sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t.

I don’t feel very OK with the partitioning of my time in such a rigid way. After all, Jesus was all about the interruptions, eh? He was rarely so focused on getting to the next thing that he closed himself off from the needs that were right in front of him. And yet he seemed to be always on time for whatever needed to happen next*. Jesus seems a bit like Gandalf, who “is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”

And that’s my challenge, too—to live in this clock time and not be enslaved by it, but to love that reality and try to be gracious with myself and others as I move within it. Part of that is accepting the hard stops in my day, while not overstuffing my time such that I am going too fast to be flexible and aware. I wrote recently about the ethical consequences of being in too much of a hurry. But I find it a profound gift to think of punctuality as a spiritual discipline, a way of loving God, my neighbor and myself.

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*Except with Lazarus… Jesus was late on that one. Or was he….?

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The Busy Samaritan

I’m reading The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz. It’s the kind of book I would like to write someday—personal narrative interspersed with musings and research about this peculiar, challenging, life-giving, counter-cultural practice called Sabbath-keeping.

The whole thing is worth a read, but one piece has haunted me for several days. Consider it a parable of a parable.

Shulevitz writes about a study done at Princeton Theological Seminary on the Good Samaritan. The study sought to determine what makes a person react as the Samaritan does in the parable. The researchers performed personality tests on a group of students, then told half of them to report to another building, where half would give a talk about the Good Samaritan story, and the other half would talk about their future career as pastors. They were broken down even further: one third were told to hurry because the seminar had already started; one third were told they were on time but they shouldn’t dawdle; one third were told that they had plenty of time but ought to head over there anyway.

Meanwhile the researchers had placed a man in an alley nearby, who coughed and groaned ub clear distress when each student walked by. His story was that he’d just taken some medicine for a respiratory problem and was waiting for it to kick in.

After the data was analyzed, only one variable could be used to predict whether someone would stop to help the man. It wasn’t personality, and it wasn’t whether they had the Good Samaritan on the brain.

It was how hurried they were.

The researchers found that even those who had not stopped had seen the man, but several who were hurrying did not register that he needed help until well after they had passed him. “Time pressure narrowed their ‘cognitive map’; as they raced by they had seen without seeing.”

It would seem, Shulevitz concludes along with the researchers, that “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”

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The Persian Flaw in My Day

Each month I develop a short list of daily practices—things I try to do or think about each day. I was inspired by The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, who was in turn inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s list of Virtues, which he tracked each day to check his progress. You gotta love a Founding Father who found time to be so anal-retentive…

My daily practices might include walking (which is on my list every month), singing in the morning (always makes me feel good, and is one of Gretchen’s favorites too), or reading something that I’m not required to read (fiction, “fun” nonfiction, poetry).

Anyway, one of my practices in September is “let something go.” This may mean leaving something unsaid, but also includes leaving something undone that was on my to-do list.

Now, leaving something undone is kind of a no-brainer, like eating breakfast, or breathing. There is rarely enough time or energy to complete absolutely everything I hope to do in a day. I’m always coming to the end of a day and moving one or multiple things to the next day’s list.

But this month I’m trying to shift the focus. Instead of working diligently throughout the day, then looking at the leftovers each evening and saying, “Oh well, maybe tomorrow,” I’m trying to pick something out in the morning that I had planned to do and to say No to it. To let it go, preemptively and intentionally.

I’m doing this to give myself some additional space in my schedule, but I’ve been surprised to realize there’s something deeper going on.

You’ve probably heard the old thing about the “Persian flaw,” which is the practice of rugmakers to include an intentional mistake in their rugs. Only God is perfect, you see. The Persian flaw is as an act of devotion and humility.

I think of “letting something go” in the same way. The way I figure it, my life is my great work (I mean great in the sense of large, and only in that sense!). One of the most important materials at my disposal is Time, and after many years of ministry and motherhood, I’ve gotten pretty skilled at utilizing it. Sometimes too skilled. I’m trying to make Time my friend again—a real friend, not just the friend I call when I need something, amiright? So leaving something undone is my Persian flaw. It’s an act of devotion and humility.

The poetry of the creation story (Gen. 1) is very linear: this on day one, that on day two, rest on day seven. Nothing rolls over on the almighty to-do list, eh? Letting one thing go each day is a way of acknowledging a perfection, a coherence that will always be beyond me. It also helps me find a little bit of Sabbath each day.

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how the iphone makes me a better christian

A recent conversation with some college friends about the smartphone and its effect on concentration and human interaction has me thinking…

Last year Relevant Magazine published an article containing some hand-wringing concern over the iPhone. (If you read it, it’s in the July/August 2009 issue, p. 27.)

Read it for his whole argument, but basically the author felt pulled by the economic “simplicity” lifestyle of the Anabaptists, the warnings by Wendell Berry (whom I adore, the big curmudgeon) against overindulgence in technologies powered by strip-mined coal, and the assertion that Christians need to be “wise as serpents” in the wake of this huge marketing machine hell-bent on convincing us that we’re deficient without this “messiah phone.”

I can’t completely dismiss the points about the environmental impact and the sustainability issues–Robert told me that it would only cost an additional $50 per phone for them to be built by people receiving a living wage–and I would pay that.

But I think the articles other points are a bit overstated. I know that there are folks out there, extreme gadget-mongers, if you will, who might feel like their life is incomplete without the latest thing. But c’mon, that’s way outside the norm, isn’t it?

Though I am a heavy user of technology, my views are pretty nuanced. I think a lot about what all of this is doing to our brains and to our sense of embodied community. (One thing I mourn is the loss of serendipity: thanks to Yelp and other sites, one need never go to a poorly-reviewed restaurant again, for example… but what about that great surprising hole in the wall that has yet to be discovered?) The problem is, a lot of the criticism of technology is SO over the top that I find myself overcompensating, becoming more of a tech apologist than I really am.

The technophobia is particularly bad in certain corners of the church. Even writers I admire do it. Blogging apparently makes us narcissistic. Twitter makes us incapable of deep sustained thinking. Facebook encourages us to share the most boring details of our lives with people, as if it matters what we had for breakfast. I hear this all the time from clergy and layfolk alike.

Given that the median age of Presbyterians is 61–and I’m sure other mainline denominations are similar–we make these blunt generalizations to our great peril. We don’t look prophetic and counter-cultural with such talk; we look out of touch.

Back to the Relevant article. The author’s point was that people are duped into buying the shiny new gadget because they think it will make them happy. But is it really that cut and dried? Wee need to learn how to speak about these things way more subtly. Are human beings really so easily seduced that we think that a smartphone is going to erase all of our sorrows? My wife won’t speak to me, I’m fifty pounds overweight, I hate my job… if only I had an iPhone! That would solve everything! Instead of painting with the broad strokes, we need to be talking about discernment. Intentionality. Authenticity.

The title of this post is hyperbolic and meant to be silly. Yes, I could create a list of ways that the iPhone has made my life as a minister-mom much more effective, creative, and even fun. But what this all comes down to for me is the idea of simplicity and what a paradoxical concept it is.

I read a lot about simplicity and “living lightly” on the earth. It’s a topic that has financial, environmental and spiritual implications. Certainly many of us consume too much stuff, and we aren’t mindful about what where that stuff comes from. Michael Lindvall recently wrote a great piece arguing that our problem isn’t that we’re too attached to our stuff–it’s that we aren’t attached enough. Read it. But where we go from there isn’t always clear.

I love the idea of simplicity and frugality, but some of the contradictions amuse me. Many aspects of “simple” living are just plain inconvenient. I don’t have time to hang my clothes on a clothesline, and I certainly don’t have time to fight the homeowner’s association to allow me to do so. There are countless other examples I could name.

Simplicity is all well and good. But my life is not simple. God or the Universe or The Great Whatever has put me in a place where I am knit together with three children, a congregation, a spouse, colleagues, friends, and the various connectional tasks that are required to care for them. This gadget sitting on my desk helps me live very effectively in the midst of a very complicated life… yet it’s made in China where the wages are way low, and it’s chock full of all sorts of yucky chemicals that a simple paper calendar doesn’t have, and is in many ways a symbol of the kind of consumerism that’s hurting the planet.

It ain’t a comfortable place to be. But it’s where a lot of people are.

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what i’m not doing today

Montreat: Lake Susan and Assembly Inn

I’ve been in Montreat all week for vacation, and this morning I’m sitting on the porch outside the Huck listening to the water cascading over the dam. My kids are enrolled in Clubs, and Robert is having a quiet morning back at the house, so this is my reading and writing morning.

Right now the Church Unbound conference is underway, and it seems like most people I know are either here, or not here but wish they were. Then there’s me—here but not here. Brian McLaren’s plenary session is only steps away. Workshops will take place throughout the next two days. Folks will linger over lunch tables, talking about things I care deeply about. The health and future of the church is bound up in the kind of stuff that’s being talked about and birthed here in this conference. And I am not a part of it.

This is my first vacation since March and I have to protect this time. I’m thinking about the recent New York Times article about clergy stress, poor health, and burnout. I’m thinking about a clergy colleague who serves a large church and recently quipped “A day off? What’s that?” and it made me want to weep, not laugh. And I’m thinking about Henri Nouwen’s thoughts on the temptations of Jesus, and how one of those temptations is to be relevant (turn these stones into bread), and how hard it is for us to resist that one. It would be so easy for me to slip into the sessions, to do a little networking, to pick up a great idea or two to take back to the church I serve. Instead I’m committed to Sabbath, which is a kind of blessed irrelevance, ordained by God.

David Wilcox has a great bit on stuff that bugs him for metaphorical reasons (among other things, the Blue Light Special at Kmart, and the Biltmore Estate). This week is also working on me, on a metaphorical level. I serve quite a small church in Northern Virginia, and I write from time to time, and I parent three children. I really like that rhythm, and it works, and I frequently can’t believe my good fortune. I’ve received all of two work related e-mails all week. People know I’m away and are taking care of things without needing to consult me (and in our church of 80 people, there’s just less to take care of).

But recently I’ve had a number of reminders of the road I’m not traveling. Friends and I kid about the size of one another’s steeples but there is something real behind the jokes. My second call has been a great move, and I love it, but it was not what many would have predicted for me. And the strangeness of that is crystallized for me as I sit here this morning with my feet up, writing a blog post and munching on a Pop-Tart from the General Store while people stride across the bridge wearing name tags and clutching folders and conference schedules.

One of the big tropes in certain spiritual and contemplative circles is the idea of abundance—the notion that there is enough manna for each day, that it’s just a matter of trusting that what is truly needed will be provided. Like Martha, we get distracted by many things, instead of focusing on the one thing needful, which is “enough.” In the theology of abundance, it’s our own scarcity thinking that gets us in trouble. We grow anxious and possessive, clutching that scarce commodity to ourselves, whether it’s time or money or prestige or power or whatever.

I think this idea works for a lot of people, and I’m sympathetic to aspects of it, but most of the time I think it’s BS. Video game makers have experimented with games that have unlimited lives or currency, and people find them profoundly unsatisfying. Abundance, in a word, is boring. It’s also unbiblical. Check out the Good Book: God’s drawing boundaries all over the place.

My father died suddenly several years ago. His last few years were spent in a very high-pressure job, until he himself was laid off, and I have no doubt that the stress of this work contributed to his death. There is nothing about the daily lack of him that speaks to me of abundance. The idea that his life’s work was completed, that he’d “done everything he needed to do in this life,” is an offshoot of the abundance stuff and is also BS.

At any moment, there are very real, very good things that we are choosing not to do. It’s great to be at peace with the roads not taken, but to blow those off as somehow “not needful” is to negate the goodness of those possibilities and the God who created them. I find it much more beautiful as a spiritual concept to live as creatively as possible within the scarcities of my life, which exist and are not to be trivialized.

The idea isn’t to trust that what is truly needed will be provided, as if God is somewhere dispensing our daily ration of stuff like one of those pet self-feeders that uncovers a fresh portion of kibble each morning. The idea is to live as a person of trust and hope, whether what we need is provided or not. The point isn’t to have faith in God’s provision, believing that whatever we give will come back to us. What kind of generosity is that, anyway? That’s not grace, that’s karma. The trick is to embrace the fact that maybe there isn’t enough, yet we are called to generosity anyway.

That feels more like the reign of God to me.

So… I am not at Church Unbound, even though I’m sure it will be amazing in many ways. I will not have a late-night ministry conversation at Theology on Tap. I will not make a new friend. I will not receive a critical insight into ministry. And I’m going to be OK with that. Not because I trust that those insights or relationships will come to me some other way, but despite the fact that they may never do so. Not because those things are not important, but in spite of the fact that they are deeply important.

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what is parenting parkour?

I’m on my way out of town for a bit of vacation, so the next few posts will draw from previous material… This is one of those.

Yesterday’s post was categorized “parenting parkour.” What exactly is that?

From Wikipedia:

    Parkour is a physical discipline inspired by human movement. It focuses on uninterrupted, efficient forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both human-made and natural) in one’s environment. Such movement may involve running, jumping, climbing and more complex techniques. The goal of parkour is to adapt one’s movement to any given obstacle in one’s path… Sebastien Foucan, a free runner who trained with David Belle during the infancy of the art, speaks of being “fluid like water.” Read more

It’s really better to watch it than read about it though: YouTube

I have been taken with this idea of life as parkour for quite some time. I even preached a sermon on the topic in which I also addressed the age-old question: WAS Jesus the master multitasker? I say yes.

For me, parkour has been a powerful spiritual metaphor. We move through our days as best we can, with grace and speed, as various obstacles and unexpected circumstances arise. Through it all we improvise, we keep our eyes open, we aspire to that state of flow in which there is no separation between our intentions and our actions and it all just works. Whether I’m parenting or pastoring or some other thing, man, I live for those times.

Several years ago, when Margaret was just a wee toddler, I wrote this poem (?) that I think describes what I’m talking about. I read this now, so many years later, and it feels frenetic and crazy, but I remember it as a pretty good day, a day in which I was in “flow.”

Wednesday: Parental Parkour
Spring from bed at 7 a.m. at the urging of Margaret.
Stumble downstairs.
Environment: Notice unusual sheet of bluish-white light on staircase; look outside.
Snow.
Put cup of milk in microwave; hit 30 seconds.
Dash downstairs to basement computer to check website.
Schools are closed.
Bound up the stairs, two at a time.
Grab milk. Up one more flight of stairs. Burst into M’s room.
Rock baby, kiss forehead. Check eyes for goop. Still watery.
Reach for phone; day-care provider. She’s open, but is M contagious?
Call advice nurse. Not available until 9:45.
Obstacle: M can go to daycare if her eyes aren’t contagious. Wait two more hours and call, or go to walk-in clinic?
Throw on clothes; rummage for granola bars, hop into car.
Weave slowly around icy patches in road. (Not all parkour is at breakneck speed.)
Walk in clinic, sign in, pay.
Tear off pieces of granola bar, feed to baby, unzip fleece.
Listen. Look. Grab prescription. Cell phone rings. Offer to call back.
Pile into car. Call day care. Pull into pharmacy. Turn in scrip.
Obstacle: bored kid.
Empty contents of purse. Strap child in cart. Zoom around drug store.
Pay. Leave. Drive. Stop.
Measure one teaspoon, kiss, leave.
Obstacle: low on gas.
Pull into gas station; return phone call. Pay. Leave. Fluid like water.
Finish phone call. Shower. Dress.
Obstacle: large meeting looms. Gotta get past it.
Jump right over it. Cancel; send report.
And on it goes. Fluid like water.

Just exactly like that YouTube, eh? Just without the techno music.

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the harder thing is the easier thing

One evening a few months ago, Robert went out with some friends, and I was solo with the three amigos. We decided to go to IHOP because there was nothing to eat in the house. Robert said, “All three? By yourself at a restaurant?” Yes, and a sticky one at that!

We had a great time. Afterward we went to the grocery store for some essentials. The kids were pretending the van was a space shuttle and we were headed to the space station for some supplies for our trip to the moon (our house). I decided to turn it into an elaborate extended make-believe space adventure that lasted into bedtime.

I didn’t do this because I’m all that creative, but because I’m lazy. It’s one of my laws of parenting: the harder thing is the easier thing.

It’s actually easier to call them First Officer Caroline and Lieutenant Margaret and Sergeant James, and to pretend to dodge asteroids (other cars), and to dock the lunar lander in the garage, than to zone out and drive and shop and come home and chase them upstairs with a toothbrush while they run amok in their underwear, whipping their pajamas around like lassos.

Amiright??

When it comes to children, it’s easier and more rewarding to expend a little extra effort and intention in order to play, than to be lazy and unintentional and just let things happen. Because the “things” that happen from your lack of initiative will invariably cause you to expend more energy (cleaning up messes, breaking up fights, managing overtired kids).

Think about this for yourself, and figure out whether it works in other spheres besides parenting. As for me, I see this principle at work everywhere. Every few months, Robert and I get into serious inertia with going to the grocery store. Robert won’t feel like making a list, or I won’t feel like going, so we’ll spend the next few days or weeks limping along on McDonalds and random mystery freezer foods crusted over with ice. It would be easier if we just went to the dang store.

BTW, Gretchen Rubin likes to say that the opposite of a great truth can also be true. So it’s true that too much planning can become inauthentic and draining. We can make the easy things hard. I also think that kids need to learn to manage their own boredom. I’m not talking about overprogramming here, but rather doing the work up front that creates a space for them to create.

Here’s a final example of this principle that also happens to show off the blue room in action. Back in May, Caroline was home sick. I was supposed to leave the following Sunday for a week of study leave, so of course it was a busy week. I was really hoping for some time to wrap up loose ends and get things ready for Robert to be a single parent for the week. (And can I say once again that single parents are my heroes?) I was sooo close to popping in a video, which I have done many, many (many) times in these situations.

I was taking an online class on contemplative spirituality and creativity in which we were making mini-books. I thought, Why not? So…… “Let’s make a project,” I announced. I helped James snip some paper with scissors while helping the girls:

hard at work, intent at play

you can tell in her eyes that she's sick :-(

Margaret wrote a story about going to the zoo.

the finished product

It was so much easier to do this than to try and get something done while leaving three small children to their own devices on a rainy day.

Where have you seen this principle at work? Where have you seen it break down?