Nursing Home Visits, Books and Child Free Time. Hurrah.

Practically everyone I know could give me a run down on the 'abnormal normal' in their neighbourhood; the things that are just commonplace where you live, but probably are not generally standard in the greater society.  For me, here, I'm starting to see what our own brand of abnormal normal is - and it looks a lot like children.  Big families are everywhere, and I'm not just talking about the substantial Mennonite population, although them too.  I was doing a bit of visitation today at a nursing home one town over and everyone I spoke to seemed to have a substantial number of children.  Seven, eight, nine...with my two I was in the minority.  There's a family with four children who go to our church, another with five.  The family of nine is in the next town over, although I was told that one man remembers a family of twenty-four not too far from here!  Twenty four!  I just think it's so interesting that having a big family here is really quite normal.

Oh, but back to the nursing home visit; it went so well!  I was there to see the wife of an elderly congregant, and I have to admit I was a little nervous since it was my first, you know, official sort of duty - but everything was great.  On the way there I even had a chance to pop into the fabric and yarn store in the town and take a quick look around for curtain fabric for Samuel's room; I don't know if I'm just being overly optimistic or what. In fact, before you get any strange Mother Theresa like visions of me gliding gently around the nursing home ministering to people let me clear that up for you:

1)  I got to leave my children for FOUR HOURS with their father and talk to other adults.
2) Other adults who gave me chocolate to 'give to my children' (pshaw.  right.)
3) Other adults who were happy to see me, did not pull my hair or make me take them to the washroom or ask me for food.

I'm going back next week.

I did start a Christmas gift list for the children for my parents, which I'm pretty happy about - really at this stage of the game I think we need to be intentional about gifts because the parsonage has NO (I'm talking almost ZERO) storage space and I cannot stand for one more big noisy toy.  I'm hoping everyone feels an overwhelming desire to purchase books.