Waiting for Patience

As I prepare for Thanksgiving, tonight a comment my cousin made to me last month kept coming to mine mind. I was together with tons of my family for my godmother's 50th Wedding Anniversary. Some of the siblings hadn't seen each other since their brother died. Others in the family it'd been more than a decade, maybe since my grandmother's passing in 1999. Although not everyone was present at the party, we did have a great time catching up. My cousin was taking photos as everyone came into the party and had us put our names on them. After about 10 of the shots were done, she realized that there was a setting on the camera to make them lighter. It was an old Polaroid, so no adjusting after the shot is taken. I was one of the people who had to take their picture twice. When I teased about having to take a second photo, she said "come on, you never take a bad photo - ever since we were little, you've always been photogenic." Hmm, I don't particularly lo...

In what ways are we thankful?! Write about anything you want under this theme! Do you have any family traditions that help you to be mindful of the blessings in your life? I am a girl who loves stability and traditions.  I decided to go to a Benedictine College because of the vow of stability that the monks make, and I'm always looking for how my life will be the same in a few years.  Not that everything has to be the same, but it's hard for me to make decisions when everything is on shaky ground.  When something (like a house for my living situation) is on solid ground, all of the other decisions are somehow easier to make and the change is easier to adapt to. I've been in Charlotte for 7 Thanksgivings now - well, 6 and Thursday makes 7.  The first year I was here my parents and baby brother came for Turkey Day.  The following year I went home to PA (and it was WAY too much traveling for the November/December time frame, so I decided never to go ho...

School starts this week for those ages 3 to 23 (and beyond).  When I was in the Village in the Congo, I went to many a school.  They welcomed me with a parade, told me how happy they were to have me, and then I visited their classrooms to answer any questions they wanted to ask. Each school was set up the same.  Elementary schools were grades 1 to 6, High Schools were grades 7 to 12, and they had a local college that operated a little differently (mostly since there were so few people enrolled).  The schools had two buildings with three rooms for the 6 classes.  All of the 1st graders were in one room, 2nd graders in another, 3rd, 4th, etc, etc...  Between the two buildings was a large area with the principal's building in the middle (much smaller than the other two). Depending on the size of the school, there were anywhere from 25 to 48 children in each classroom.  Pictures tend to be a better explanation, so see below: What the average school...