MSB {15}: New Shoes!

My Sunday Best:  New Shoes!

Welcome to My Sunday Best, hosted by Rosie at a blog for my mom.

 

To Mass this week I wore the dress of always with a grey older-than-dirt sweater and black leggings.  The stars of the show are my new not-Croc shoes!

Lands’ End ran a super great Black Friday deal, and I scooped them up for almost nothing.  Today was their first opportunity to leave the house.

They have a smooth sole.  Much like the smooth soul of Marvin Gaye, they are nice but not universally appropriate.  I got them for winter wearing, but they pretty much friction-free shoes.  Not ideal for the next icy four months.

Mass this week went better than last week.  (Unless it involved actual death, it would be pretty hard to be worse than last week.)

We went to the vigil Mass on Saturday night, and all three older kids fell asleep.

I still had to hang out in the back with Bea, because she cannot be contained.  And there was that one time I tried to stand up but my new shoes wouldn’t grip the carpet.  As I was helplessly willing my shoes to stop slipping, I was pretty sure I looked like Wile E. Coyote.

After Mass a visiting couple in the pew ahead of us pointed to our zonked kiddos and said, “So what’s your secret?”

I just shrugged and smiled awkwardly (the Alicia special), but I wish I had something clever to say like, “A little Benadryl goes a long way,” or “Brandy for me, brandy for you makes the kids fall asleep right in the pew.”  (For the record, we have neither Benadryl nor brandy in the house.  It’s a joke.)

It’s a joke because largely our Mass experience is a slot machine: pull the lever and see what happens.  We try to prepare (and bribe) the kids as best we can; unfortunately it doesn’t always work.  Sitting in the front?  Doesn’t always work.  A well-stocked Mass bag with liturgically appropriate books?  Doesn’t usually work.  But unlike playing the slots, even when we “lose” (and are humiliated and irritated by kid antics), we still win.  Because Mass.  

So we keep playing the Mass slots, knowing we’ll win even when the whole experience seems like a loss.

I didn’t actually ever fall in my new red shoes.  So it was a double win this week.  Yay! 🙂

 

 

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