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What's new? Hrrrmm. My role as Nurse Mom may be ready for retirement. Yay! (At least until the next big illness strikes, which hopefully will tarry a while before showing itself.) Caring for sick individuals can be both very rewarding and very challenging. I have a lot of respect for professional nurses (LPNs, RNs, CNAs, etc.). What I've realized afresh is that part of the challenge is that sick people tend to have short tempers because feeling ill takes a lot of energy, and virtues tend to be harder to cultivate when physical pain is more prominent. Therefore, looking after a debile, dependent curmudgeon** can be very taxing emotionally and physically for a care taker because it requires a lot of love and patience to overlook/ ignore the discourtesies that such a person may be more prone to in that condition. (**I haven't used that word in a long time, but a friend from church happened to mention it yesterday in conversation, so it's fresh in my mind. I know a lot of words, but I generally don't try to use unnecessarily GRE type words that aren't part of my regular vocab because it often isn't helpful or edifying.)
Also, my VBS stint went well as far as I can tell. It reminded me of the Peace Corps slogan, "the toughest job you'll ever love." It certainly was both- enjoyable and challenging. My subject matter was the Armor of G-d from Ephesians 6 (vv.11-17) and my students were all 4/5 yrs old. I could see their eyes glazing over and their hands wanting to fidget occasionally, which didn't surprise me because the material is fairly abstract and hard to grasp sometimes for their age range. However, I think I was able to have some good discussion and keep them engaged most of the time. Apparently I am really out of the loop too since one of the illustrations I tried to use was asking them about Star Wars and what it's about and instead of the pop culture reference being more about Luke Skywalker they kept bringing up Angry Birds. That really threw me. I had no idea that there was any connection. I realize the franchise is at least as old as me. (My mom saw Episode VI in theaters when she was pregnant with me.) However, I stopped paying attention to it after they introduced the newer episodes (I, II, and III).
I need to get ready to take DD1 to her first day of summer camp, but things are feeling a little more up than before. The past week was definitely busy and challenging, but it's a new day/week, hopefully things will be even better/ less stressful this week.
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