Making Your Home Sing Monday -

I cannot believe it already Monday again! Where does the time go? It is already time for Making Your Home Sing Monday, hosted by Momstheword.


This Monday the Nagle5 household will be having visitors from across the country. LoveAphid and her husband and her dad will be here in Eastern Washington to visit the Nagle5 (probably because she wants to give us something actually newsworth at Nagle5 News!). As we eagerly anticipate the arrival of our guests (who will be staying in a local motel but spending their waking hours with us), we've been trying to think of the things that make it fun to visit someone's home. We've come up with a warm welcome, plentiful food, and a relaxed schedule.

The warm welcome is assured. The kids are really excited. But we want our house to be welcoming, too, without it be stiff and awkward and uncomfortable. To that end, we've spent the past week preparing for this auspicious occasion.

We homeschool and the two youngest Nagles will still have school work to do, but a little less than normal and they're ready for it--we've discussed parental expectations and made sure their work is all ready for them. (Besides, LoveAphid's husband is a physics teacher, if need be, we'll slip in an impromptu science lesson and call it good!)

The house is as clean as it is going to get. Yep, you heard me right...if it is not clean now, it probably won't be cleaned during this week. Oh, dishes will continue to get done, laundry still runs through its cycle, but dusting, mopping, and vacuuming will be on a only-if-some-one-spills-something horrendous basis.

The menu is planned - seriously! I hit Costco Sunday to make certain we had everything we need. We're having sandwiches for lunch all three days, we're having Korean barbecue (made by Superman) Monday, spaghetti and cheese bread Tuesday, and Fajitas Wednesday. We have plenty of fresh fruit for snacks, too. No stress, no worries...the meals are in the bag. Even desserts are on the menu and ready to be made.

We want to participate in this vacation, not stress over it, so a little preplanning has gone a long way. With all the "thinking" chores out of the way, we can just go with the flow. We've scheduled a mid-week Game Night, so our friends and family can all get together to put names to faces. We're still doing museum day on Wednesday, which is cool because the MAC still has the quilt exhibit that LoveAphid was dying to see. We're even toying with a roller skating outing. The weather is cooperating and we'll get some beautiful spring days. I think of it as LoveAphid and her husband getting to live the Nagle5 lifestyle for a few days.

My point is simply that we're done...we're done prepping, we're done worrying, we're done cleaning. Now, we're going to just visit. It seems to me that if we're not careful, we get so caught up in preparing, planning, supervising, and the like, that we forget to live. We forget to be fully present in our lives. Yes, there are tons of things that we need to get done, but life is to be lived.

So, the Nagle5 House is in a happy, excited, what will be, will be place this week. We've let go of all the preparation stress and we're good to go. Now we're just counting the minutes til lunchtime when they'll arrive. Tick Tock! I could say our house is singing Let It Be by the Beatles, but we're weird here, so our house is actually singing "Letter B" by the Beetles of Sesame Street ... Oh, and since we're counting the minutes, it is also singing "Counting with the Count" by Count von Count!

Head on over to Momstheword to see what everyone else is doing this week to put a song in their homes. Moms post is all about pre-judging and expectation. Like so many of us, she was humbled my Susan Boyle's reception by the audience and the judges of Britain's Got Talent. It is great to see us all working to keep our homes joyful.