Leaving (not) on a jet plane

This afternoon I’m off to the wilds of Pennsylvania. My first time to attend a our church’s Ladies Ministry retreat. How I have escaped tagging along with this group of sisters for so long is a mystery. I should’ve done this years ago.

So, I’m attempting to pack, do laundry, rid the hardwood floors of the dog hair, put away groceries, shower, and referee sibling squabbles before I go. And I would like to write a blog post for tomorrow, since I can’t exactly bring the Dell with me. Or I guess I could, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a spiritual retreat, doesn’t it?

Husband will be on Kid Duty. I’m even leaving him with the Mom Minivan. Tomorrow is strawberry picking, drop eldest girl at her 4H jam making activity, pick up girl from said jam making activity (can’t forget that!) and whatever else he can come up with. He says the plan is to run them out so they crash good at night (good luck with that, Babe.)

I know when he goes on the men’s retreat the time feels like forever, not because I miss him so much, but because it’s intense to be the only parent with four children 11 and under. But he’s not me. I’m the intense one, hubs is the fun one. Hopefully, he will still be laughing when I get home on Sunday.

Since I will have my phone with me, I’ll be updating Twitter. All of my followers need to know what we eat for breakfast, who the speaker is, what the worship songs are like and what general tricks we ladies can get into when away from hearth and home.

Though the power of Twitter, I shall let the world know just how much fun we evangelicals can be.

And I will enjoy my break from mommy life.

Have a great weekend. Pictures and recap of my adventures Monday (or Tuesday, depending how tired I am when I get home.)

Finding time to read

books-to-read2

Home schooling.

House keeping.

Church commitments.

Blogging.

Email, Facebook, Twitter, Ning groups, LOST (yeah! it’s back.)

With all of these good (and maybe not so good) things to do and occupy our time, how do you find the time and energy to read?

Seriously! I want to know. Because I’m having a hard time keeping up.

I remember back to my lazy college days of when I had an abundance of free time to just ignore the outside world and do nothing but read to my heart’s content. O, the amount of pages I could fly through! Of course, back then I was without household to manage, sans children and husband. I had oodles of free-reading time.

Life was lazy from one wonderful book to the next. Now, not so much.

My to-be-read book pile gets larger. My heart wants to read more. Yet daily life. . . and I like reading blogs, Twitter, and my love for LOST.

So.

How do you fit it all in? All the books, yet still manage to life a balanced life?