Image by joseph a via Flickr

Whenever you do something on a regular basis, there’s always one time that everything is just “off”. It’s not that it is bad, but just different enough for you to think back on it later that day and take particular note of it.

Tonight, the four of us went to St. Ignatius for the Knights of Columbus fish fry. We’ve really enjoyed these throughout Lent, but we did fall into a good timing cycle to make it work for us. When that falters….

First, we left the house late. That may not sound like that big of a deal, but when you live north of the river and you want to go south of the river during the Friday evening commute, it can make a big difference. Since we have two ticking time bombs, named Olivia and Catalina, we can’t “waste” time. Leaving 15 minutes late added 20 minutes to the drive. Strike 1.

Since we were running late, we didn’t feed Catalina before leaving, even though we knew we should. Add in the extra 20 minutes and she became a hungry baby by the time we got to the church. V had to feed her before anything else. Strike 2.

I should have bought the dinners and picked them up while waiting for V and Catalina, but I didn’t. V had the cash. Or so we thought. After waiting for her, she gets inside and we realize we’re moneyless. I head, thankfully, across the street to the ATM. Strike 3.

In all of this time, Stations of the Cross finished. At St. Ignatius, there is both an English and Spanish celebration of the Stations. The Knights serve the dinner timed so you can either pray first, then eat or eat first, then pray. In our case, with the little ones, our praying is done differently. Normally, we get there in plenty of time to get our food, get seated and settled before the crazy, mad, incredibly large crowd enters. The best we could do was the end of the line…the end of a very long line. Strike 4.

Well, I fed Olivia her dinner at a table during all of this waiting. So when it comes time to get in line, V goes with Olivia running around in the other half of the gym we’re in and I take Catalina in the stroller. The table is empty, except with some of our stuff. It’s the only completely empty table, so we ended up losing it. I didn’t mark which chairs we needed… yeah, you follow me. Strike 5.

We were able to get home perfectly timed to take O upstairs to get her ready for bed without having to be rushed while doing it or without it being too much time.

All in all, this was a case of us not sticking to our routine and having a routine event go off-script. So yes, next week, we’re going to leave on time.