I have seriously so much stuff going on in my head right now that I really just need to sit and finish this. And then I can get on with blogging about current issues…=)

It happened right about November 22nd or so. It was a day and a moment that changed my world and it might never go back…

I’ve mentioned before that I am running the cafe that is a new addition to my church. What this looked like before was that I was able to make most of the decisions about which products to order, which supplies to buy, make the drink menus and recipes, and basically get the cafe up an running from the ground up. Schedule wise, we had another commercial company (Silk Espresso) that was coming in and leasing the space from us on Sunday mornings. Which basically meant that scheduling wise, I was only in charge of Wednesday nights, which is a new event that our church is doing called the Journey. And every week we worked Wednesday nights.

HOWEVER…on November 22 (or thereabouts) I got a forwarded email from my pastor from the owner of Silk Espresso saying that she needed to back out of the contract and they could no long work on Sunday mornings. She simply wasn’t making money being there. So with that, my world changed. I am now solely in charge of the cafe. I will be managing it for Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, and Wednesday nights. There were a LOT of decisions that needed to be made in the last couple weeks and a lot of work that’s needed to be done. But I can say that my work is done and I’m eagerly anticipating our Grand Re-Opening this Sunday, where our prices have been lowered and our weekly special is any drink and any pastry for $2.00. Pretty good deal, right?

So the last and final layer of our Thanksgiving week? Let me preface it…for quite some time, Josh and I have been battling a huge sense of ‘entitlement’ in our oldest two children. We’ve been in a lot of discussion as to what to do about this. At any rate, the weekend before Thanksgiving, I can’t remember now what spurred this on, but I made the decision that for the next few days there would be no video games, no TV and no computer (for the boys). In addition to that, I thought how fun (and potentially valuable) it would be to do some research on the true Thanksgiving story, and what life was like for the first settlers that came to America. I think I will continue this tradition every year, because it was such a huge success…and next time I will have a bit more time to prepare for it.

So beginning on Monday of that week, there was none of the aforementioned items allowed in our house so the boys had to find something else to do when they got home from school. (God, forbid!) That night for our activity, we turned off the power (because they didn’t have electricity back then, of course) and by candlelight, we read aloud a story about the pilgrims and why it was so important for them to come to America and what the trip was like for them and what they found when they first arrived her and how hard those first years were.

On Tuesday, all I could think of (and really all I had time for) was that after dinner, the four of us washed, dried and put away all the dishes by hand. Because of course the pilgrims didn’t have dishwashers.

By Wednesday, an astounding thing happened. The boys weren’t fighting. They got out Twister and played it together, quietly and they were laughing together. There was peace in our house. Not the sound of video games or arguing. Ahhh. Bryce asked me excitedly that afternoon what our activity was going to be. Before I could answer he said, “can we wash the dishes again? Please? That was really fun!” I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open. At any rate, what we did on Wednesday, I really didn’t have time for, but we did it anyway. We made an “authentic” pilgrim meal. I found recipes online for actual recipes used back then that had been altered to make them work in modern kitchens. I’m not familiar with cooking over open flames, so that was appreciated. We made succotash, (which Josh and I really actually liked and so did the girls), cornbread the way that they did it back then (different than now) and Indian Corn Pudding for dessert. The boys got to help me with everything and it was pretty fun. Different, but fun.

So although it was a crazy and busy couple weeks, I really am so glad that we took the time to do these different activities. In fact, maybe we should implement that rule into our house 1 day a week. Hmmm…I’ll have to think about that.