This past week I made the tough decision to take a break from the church choir that I have been a part of for MANY years. I was starting to feel like choir/church was taking a way from time with my girls. Thursday nights are choir practice and I would leave them with my parents while I went to practice. Then on Sundays, they spent the morning in the nursery while the choir practiced and then for the service. I spend 50 + hours away from the girls during the week for work and then add another 3 hours or so for choir/church. When I am home with the girls, anything we do as a family is scheduled around Courtney’s therapies. If you do the math, we really have very little time to do anything as a family. It was a very hard decision to take this break because my church family is very important to me. Especially the ones in the choir. Most of them have known me all my life. They have been by my side through many ups and downs. Heck, I spent 10 days in Ireland with some of them. But deep in my heart, I knew I needed to do this.

This weekend confirmed that I made the right decision for the time being. Saturday night I said to Joe that we actually had nothing we HAD to do on Sunday until 4 pm. This seriously NEVER happens! I insisted that we were not going to sit around all day. We brainstormed a few ideas of what we could do, but in the end we decided we wanted to take care of a couple of things we have been meaning to do but kept delaying.

So this morning (Sunday) we woke up and decided to go to breakfast. Something we NEVER do. After that we took Courtney for a hair cut and then went shoe shopping for Alyssa. Even though it was running around, it was so nice to spend time together as a family. We weren’t worried about rushing to get everything in, we weren’t worried about how the girls would behave, and better yet, we crossed things off the to do list.

I’m going to miss singing in the choir for the time being, but its just a break. And maybe it doesn’t sound great to say I’m taking a break from church, but if there is anything I have learned it is, family comes first. This weekend I put family first and it was truly a wonderful weekend.