My Presidents Day Weekend Goal

It’s President’s Day weekend.  There are no basketball games, no basketball practices, no Sunday School.  The wife has three deserved days off and I have my normal Saturday and Sunday.  Our goal this weekend?

Sleeeeeeeeeeeeep.

The wife has worked 60+ hours each of the past two weeks in New York City.  That entails waking anywhere between 4:30 and 6 in the morning, depending on what time she’s due in, and staying as late as 8, 9, or 10 pm.  So she’s legitimately exhausted. 

Me, I’ve been the primary caretaker for the two little ones, a job I am completely not built for, but I try my best.  Unfortunately, there’ve been a lot of extracurricular activities in the past two weeks: six basketball games, four practices, trips to the grocery store, dropping off Little One at the school talent show (she was in the audience, not on stage), two bouts of snow shoveling.  All that in addition to feeding them, getting them showered, checking homework, and getting them to bed at a decent hour.  Those tasks were unpleasant, but some were pleasant: two trips to the library (Patch: Dad, I need to eat more words!), three trips to various pizzerias in my town.

Currently working on my second go-through with Archbishop Sheen’s Life of Christ and Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God.  With all this busy work, though, haven’t been practicing much.  Nor reading.  Hopefully this weekend, in addition to sleep, I can steal away to a secret location and put away a hundred or so pages.  Perelandra and That Hideous Strength came by post this week, and I can’t wait to delve into them.

But Sleep and Reading may have to take a back seat this weekend: Each little one will have a play date and we’re celebrating a belated birthday with my dad-in-law, so the house Must Be Thoroughly Cleaned Top to Bottom!  Truth be told, keeping a spotless abode has not been on my priority list these past ten or twelve days, so a lot needs to be done.  Hopefully I can get a start tonight before the Mrs. gets home, because once she starts cracking the cleaning whip, I tend to disappear.

Finally, as a service to You this President’s Day, may I recommend the best book I’ve read (actually, listened to on audio CD), twice:

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief (2008), by James McPherson.

The best – and most enjoyable – book I’ve read about probably my favorite President.  Really brought out the tribulation, the frustration and the psychological angst this man went through, day in and day out over the course of four long, tragedy-filled years, to keep the great vision of a United States together.  It made me truly realize why in his famous final portrait, taken two months before his assassination at age 56, he looks at least two decades older.