What I Wore Sunday: A Story About Punctuality

Top: Old Navy (about three years ago)

Pants: Old Navy

Shoes: Skechers (last year)

I had Ellie take my picture again for this week's WIWS.  She really enjoys taking pictures and I think it makes her feel important to have the job of being my official picture taker for the WIWS blog posts.  I've been forgetting to actually put these posts together the last few weeks, so I'm trying to make sure her work isn't for nothing.

I was so hesitant to let Ellie get these green glasses when her newer pair broke (under warranty), but I'm finding that they seem to go with most of her outfits and they actually look very nice on her.  

 I love the way this picture of Madeline turned out.  Too bad that ugly green rubbermaid tote is in the background.  I suppose I really should wash it out and bring it back into the house.  It's been sitting on my deck for nearly ten months.  Now that I've told you that I'm going to feel mortified once I hit publish.  Can you guess what I'm going to do later today?

Katie is fascinated with getting into EVERYTHING!  She went from playing with the knobs on the grill much to Ellie's horror to playing with a partially filled watering can.

So how about I tell you about this weeks' Mass experience.  This is one of our first weekends where we had zero commitments written on the calendar.  Madeline "wasn't" on the altar serving schedule and we could go to any Mass we wanted this weekend.  We talked about whether we should go to the 4:00 or 5:30 Mass earlier in the day.  I like the 5:30, but it means we don't eat dinner until nearly 7:00 (or later if we run into friends of ours who like to talk).  The 4:00 is a bit more crowded, which Bryan dislikes, but we can eat dinner by 5:30.  There are pros and cons for both time slots.  We ultimately decided to go with 5:30 because it's the one we normally go to.  We haven't seen the nice old lady who sits behind us in a few weeks and I was looking forward to seeing her.

So around 2:00 Bryan and I delved into a project of replacing the grease in my Kitchen Aid mixer.  It was a messy job that took over an hour since we had to clean off the gears in order to use a different type of food grade machinery grease that won't break down as easily.  At 3:52 for some odd reason I felt compelled to look at the page in the weekly bulletin that had the altar server schedule.  Guess who was scheduled for the 4:00 Mass?  Madeline!  Cue freak out mode!  I don't know how we did it, but I managed to spit out the cookie I had just bitten into, change out of the ratty clothes I was wearing for the messy job we had been doing and convince Bryan that we seriously needed to go to Mass NOW! all in about 25 seconds.

Katie had just woken up from her nap and thankfully the girls were already dressed for Mass.  Katie did almost wind up going with no shoes.  

We managed to get Madeline to the church about three minutes after Mass began.  We told her to just run in the back and get dressed for altar serving and slip into place like she had been there all along.  A few minutes later after we parked about as far away from the church as we could, we peek in and find that Madeline is the ONLY altar server and she's up there sitting right next to Father.  

Then it was time for us to find a seat.  You should know that I like to be super punctual.  We're usually 20 minutes early for Mass.  The idea of being late just makes me cringe all over.  I was hoping that we could just slip into a pew in the back of the church and just blend in.  No such luck!  We wound up in our normal ninth pew back just on the opposite end.

Fortunately this was one of those weeks where Katie was very well behaved.  Maybe sitting closer to the wall and showing up late was the reason for her being so good.  She acted like she does when I take her to daily Mass, of course, maybe that's because this Mass seemed to fly by about as quickly as daily Mass.  I guess that's what happens when you arrive at the tail end of the first reading.

Ordinarily I'm of the opinion that if we're going to be late for Mass it's better to just go to the next one, but since Madeline was on the schedule to altar serve, we really had to go and just deal with being late. Bryan thought we should just go to the 5:30 Mass, but I didn't want her to miss since we there has been a problem recently with the altar servers not showing up to the Masses that they've been scheduled to serve.  If we hadn't gone, there wouldn't have been any altar servers for that Mass so I'm glad I went with my initial "We have to go there NOW!" freak out.  On our way out I made a comment to Fr. M that we made it and that's when Bryan decides to tell him that "Somebody forgot we had to go to Mass."  Um, no.  I did clarify that we intended to go at 5:30 and that I had realized eight minutes before Mass began that she was supposed to altar serve.  It's a good thing that we only live a few minutes from the church.

Visit Fine Linen and Purple for more What I Wore Sunday posts.