Would you like Friday on Monday?

Thusday didn't start out too well.  My stomach was really bothering me, and so I laid down for a while and forgot to do the blog.  I did the blog on Friday morning and apparently forgot to activate it as well.  So now we are all caught up and we'll have a new posting tomorrow!!

Friday was eye screening day at Northwest Primary School -- the prekindergarten group.  We go over a number of different things with them.  We test the boys for color blindness; we test all the kids for how well their eyes work together; we do the typical eye chart except that instead of letters, we use a house, a heart, a square, a circle; and we will be using the Pediavision SPOT camera to assess five different eye conditions.

For the convenience of working parents, we start at around 9:30 or something like that and someone from the Lions stayed until 7:00 p.m.  We broke up the day into halves so the first group works until around noon.

There is something so affirming and sweet about being around kids of this age.  They are funny and perceptive, and already they so want to be like everyone else.  They are curious and interested, and despite some noise around them, they do well at paying attention.  Sometimes they volunteer information and that is always unexpected and usually hilarious.

Being around children for me is such a realization of God!  One little five-year-old girl when Dr. Knight was doing the eye chart with her and dropped to the smaller symbols, said, "I have no idea!"  That was hilarious. 

Here is our Lenten quote for the day:

"Look at His adorable face.
Look at His glazed and sunken eyes.
Look at His wounds.
Look Jesus in the Face.
There, you will see how He loves us."

~ St. Therese of Lisieux

 

St. Therese is also known as St. Theresa, the Little Flower, born in Alencon, France.  She died at a very young age, 24, of tuberculosis in the convent in France where she so wanted to serve.  Her mother died when Theresa was four and her older sister had more or less became her mother and also became a nun. 

 

From the time when I was little, I spelled my middle name Teresa.  No one really noticed or said anything to me, and of course, we don't use our middle names all that often.  It wasn't until around 2001 when I applied for a passport and got a new copy of my birth certificate that I read my middle name and was shocked -- Theresa.  I'd always heard that my mother had named me for the Little Flower whose feast day is  early October, and so that was always confusing since a saint from Avila, spelled Teresa, had her feast day at another time. 

 

Well, then that mystery was solved, and so at this late date in my life, I had to retrain my brain to spell my middle name differently than I'd always had.  And the interesting thing is that the name my mother chose closely paralleled what happened to our family.  My mother died when I was 14 and my older sister stepped into the roll.  However, neither of us went to the convent.  We were to discover many years hence that rather than being 100% of German descent, we are actually half-French.  There is something very special, very personal about the middle name.  Mine is especially precious to me because I know my mother chose it.  And that she chose Theresa whose life was poignant and special due to how to followed "the little way."  She believed that we should reflect God's love in everything we do, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.

Take care.  I'll try to be more on the ball this week.