Page from My Journal: Chronicling A Day in the Life of A Reader

My name is Julianna! I’m twenty, turning twenty-one in June (I’m very excited). I was homeschooled all my life, graduated from high school in 2008, and am now a stay-at-home daughter working in the family business, while trying to soak up homemaking skills from my excellent mom. I teach 17 piano students on Mondays and Wednesdays, and am currently trying to prepare them all for a recital in May. When it comes to faith, my family and I are Christians, practicing Judaism. Every day in my week is so incredibly different, I had trouble choosing which one to blog. I chose Thursday, since it’s one of my favorite days – I don’t teach piano that day, and sometimes it almost feels like a vacation!

Julianna (left) and her sister

5:30am - The beautiful strains of classical music fill the room. Our alarm is set to 89.9 WDAV, the local classical music station. It’s a lot better waking up to that, rather than an annoying beep or buzz. I sit up and start my morning prayers. They begin with the Prayer Upon Arising (Modah Ani), which is one of my favorites:

“I gratefully thank You, O Living and Eternal King, for you have returned my soul within me with compassion – abundant is Your faithfulness!”

Other prayers included, among others, are the Prayer for Livelihood, Torah Blessing, Sh’ma, Wayfarer’s Prayer, and even the Prayer for a Suitable Mate. After I’m done, I get up and do my quick morning routine of face-cleansing and mouth-washing.

5:50am - Still in my pajamas, I curl up on my bed with a book. I’m very close to being done with Home, by Julie Andrews (a memoir of her early years), so I go ahead and finish it up. Very charming, sweet, and funny – just like her. Not all actresses are Miley Cyruses and Heather Grahams, thank goodness.

6:38am - Finished reading, I get up, make my bed, get dressed, do my make-up and hair, etc. This wakes my two sisters, with whom I share a room. Normally, Christine (two years younger than me) is up already, with me, but she’s not feeling well today, so she slept in a little. Mary, my youngest sister, normally waits until the last second to get up. Today, I choose an ankle-length sundress tie-died in my signature color (a turquoise blue) – it’s going to be over 80 degrees in Charlotte!

7:06am - Normally, this is when I check my mail and phone and catch up on any messages I may have received, but our email is actually down. It’s been down for the past two days. However, my dad managed to get the Internet back up yesterday, so I write a quick post on the book I finished yesterday, Outwitting the Gestapo. I’m reading through Holocaust books right now, in an effort to understand the events of that time period, and somehow feel a little more connected to the suffering of God’s people.

7:40am - I join my family in the family room for what we like to call the Sit’n’Sip. 7:30 used to be breakfast time, but gradually, we all stopped eating breakfast. No particular reason, other than we just weren’t hungry! Occasionally my sister Mary (15 and still growing) or my 17-year-old brother will have something. As I enter the room, my sisters point out the cool shadow effect happening on our wall, due to the bouquet of daisies, potted tulips, and wooden lamb sitting on the table. I grab my camera for a picture. I love the result, because it personifies our life right now: the daisies are in an empty horseradish jar, leftover from our Passover celebration on Monday evening. We used them to decorate our seder tables. The tulips are a hostess gift from my great-aunt, who attended the seder, and is a model guest. To me, they are a symbol of our family’s hospitality – my parents, especially my father, are responsible for that. The lamb is a Jim Shore Heartwood Creek figurine, and we put it out every Passover season. It is very special to me.
8:52am - Thursday mornings, I like to go over to the local Caribou Coffee and meet up with a few other knitters in our area. We knit, chat, and have great coffee all morning. However, this morning, not many people will be able to make it. In fact, only one woman says she’s going to come, so we invite her to come to our house instead of the Caribou. The coffee is better, and free! She says she’ll arrive between 10:00 and 10:30, so I use this empty window of time to go do a lot of errands. I drive all over Charlotte and Matthews, making a drop-off at Goodwill, visiting our homeopathic doctor for some refills on supplements, the grocery store, the UPS store, the Vitamin Shoppe, the jeweler, and even the Backyard Wild store, where we buy their homemixed bird seed. Finally, I head home.

10:41am - Three minutes after I walk through the door, armed with packages and bags, Mrs. Lindsey (our fellow knitter) arrives! Mrs. Lindsey is in her sixties, and is one of the sweetest women I know. She has been a family friend for years, and is now busy knitting and sewing for her grandchildren. She has the most magnificent way with words, and writes the best thank-you notes EVER. When I’m in my sixties, I want to be just like her. :) Anyway, we all get some coffee & try the “matzah brei” that my sisters made while I was gone, as she starts to tell us about her experience needle-felting in January. We are currently celebrating the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Lev 23:5-8), so we don’t have any cakes or cookies on hand to serve; having cleaned out all leaven (yeast, baking powder, baking soda, etc.) from our homes before the Feast began, we can’t eat or make anything like that, either! The brei was really good, though! It was a lot like French toast. Definitely a recipe to keep on hand. We served it with jelly and marmalade. Yum.

1:02pm - Mrs. Lindsey stayed for about three hours! We had a great time – knitting, talking about her grandchildren, my piano students, traveling, the knitting tea party we went to last week, and various other subjects. I had two knitting projects that just needed finishing, so I got that done. Mrs. Lindsey worked on a striped scarf, and my mother made a lot of headway on a lacy sweater she’s making. Morgan, my older sister, joined us around 12:00, and did a few rows on her own sweater. It was a fun time. After waving goodbye to Mrs. Lindsey, I head into the kitchen to make some iced tea. It’s hot in Matthews!

1:15pm - I work for my father on Thursday afternoons. He owns his own business (IT), and runs it from our home. All five of his children work for him. Morgan is his Chief Operations Officer (COO), Christine and I do the accounting (she’s Accounts Receivable, I’m Accounts Payable – but I supervise everything in that realm), Peter is our senior technician, and Mary is Logistics Manager. My father is a generous boss, we have flexible hours, and the commute is unbeatable. Today, I send out some invoices, check on questions for customers, order a product from a vendor, and finish up tickets. I feel very productive, even though the email isn’t working yet.

2:57pm - Finished with my bookkeeping for my dad, I work on some figures for my client down in Georgia. Having worked in accounting for almost nine years, I now freelance for a few companies. For my Georgia client, I do data entry and manage his payroll. This time, I have a little trouble getting into his computer – there’s somebody else logged on. So I leave it and go outside to enjoy the warm weather and get some much-needed summer color!

3:33pm - Having finished Outwitting the Gestapo and having written the post, I decide to start my next Holocaust book, We Are Witnesses. I never like to start the next book on my list unless I’ve posted on the one I finished first. Otherwise I get my facts confused. We Are Witnesses is truly touching. It’s diaries of five teenagers who died in the Holocaust, so you can imagine how tragic it is.

4:05pm - Morgan asks me to read her Holy Week post. I do, and we have a great discussion about the differences and similarities between Christianity and Judaism. Morgan is intellectual and a leader; it’s great to have deep conversations with my sister. Encouraging.

4:30pm - Thursdays are one of my cooking nights, with my sister Christine. However, tonight is special! Us five “kids” have been invited to Greg’s house. Greg Bartos is the young man courting Morgan. He has invited the five of us over, and he and his sister are cooking us dinner. They are so sweet. We don’t need to leave until around 5:15pm, though. So I head back into the “lab” (the room in our house we use for business) and try to finish my work for my client in Georgia. The computer still won’t let me in, so I give him a call [side note: I HATE THE PHONE]. He gives me a temporary solution, but that doesn’t work. I send him an email (yes, the email is working again!!) and tell him I’ll finish tomorrow morning. There are still a few minutes until we leave, so I go ahead and get some piano practice in. I don’t take piano lessons anymore, but I accompany a homeschool choir on Tuesdays, and I’ve been asked to play in a graduation coming up – both need so much practice! Yikes!

5:17pm - Christine is not coming to dinner tonight, since she’s not well. So the four of us pile into Morgan’s vanilla VW bug and drive down to Fort Mill, stopping on the way to pick up some movie snacks (Greg has recommended a movie, and we’re watching it together tonight). As the scenery flies by, I try to recite my Ephesians verses (my sister and I have memorized one-and-a-half chapters so far!); I do ok, but the drive is a little too hypnotic – I keep losing my place!

6:08pm - The Bartos residence is smelling wonderful. Mrs. Bartos is at a table with a student she’s tutoring, and Greg and his sister Adriah are in the kitchen finishing the cooking. They’ve made rice, broccoli, and a salad, cut up an organic rotisserie chicken from Earth Fare, and set the table beautifully. Dinner is a lot of fun, as we laugh about different things happening in our lives. Morgan tells a funny food story about her visit to a university; Adriah relives a few of her old April Fools’ jokes; Greg mentions the time he and a few friends put chicken bouillon cubes into the shower head at college, so freshmen ended up showering in chicken broth. He was quite the prankster. He’s obviously wised up, though – his school just named him Student of the Month for April. We are very proud of him, and can’t wait for him to become a true part of our family.

8:32pm - We take a break from the movie to have jasmine tea, which Greg bought specifically for this occasion. The movie centers around India and its people, and apparently jasmine tea is very popular there. How apropos. So, sipping our tea and popping the occasional movie snack into our mouth, we finish the film.

9:30pm - It takes exactly 30 minutes to get home from the Bartos’ house, and we have a 10:00 curfew. The movie finishes right on time, and we quickly get our stuff together and leave. Morgan puts the windows down on the way home, since it’s still about 70 degrees. It’s a beautiful night!

10:01pm - We pop our heads into our parents’ room, where they are getting ready for bed and watching a Law & Order. We don’t have a TV, but they like to download episodes from Netflix and watch one or two before bed. They say it helps them relax. I’ve never actually seen one. Our parents ask all the normal questions – how was the movie, what did you have for dinner, did you have a good time. You know the drill. We say goodnight.

10:21pm - After getting ready for bed, I run downstairs to check my mail one last time, and sure enough, all the mail I’ve missed for the past three days has showed up in my inbox – 42 messages! I scan through it, looking for anything important. Nothing there to keep me up, though, thank goodness! I run back upstairs and say my evening prayers, the Bedtime Sh’ma. As I fall asleep, I suddenly remember that I was going to blog about today – and I start drafting it in my mind.

Is this something you would like to be a part of? I'd love to hear from you. We are in need of people who are willing to chronicle a day in their life to post on this blog. If you are interested, please email me: modestpatterns @ sbcglobal.net (remove spaces)