I love these pictures.
I actually dressed her up, fixed her hair, and took her outside for these pictures on her birthday. Yay for a small step towards the massive list of things I want to do with my kids!
Gracie, I’m going to miss you being two; you were about as perfect as a mom could want. So excited to see how three will be!
I am woefully behind at posting pictures! Hoping to catch up… here are the shots from our quick trip to visit with Paul’s parents and grandparents.
Uncle Daniel is only represented in these pictures by the cookies he baked for the girls. Can you find them?
A few weeks ago, the funniest thing happened while I was preparing to iron on a Saturday night.
I took a skirt off of it’s hanger and mindlessly hung it on a nearby doorknob. A little “clink” sounded when the hanger hit the door. Instantly, my mind was flooded with sweet sounds and memories.
I used to hear that “clink” sound a lot on Saturday night.
My mom would be quietly ironing in the corner of the family room closest to the laundry area. I hear the spritz of the spray starch, the poof of the steam, the fabric being readjusted on the board, and of course, the clink of the hanger either coming or going from the doorknob.
Everyone in general was spread out sort of doing their own thing.
My dad’s chair creaks in his office. He must have sat back to think for a minute about his Sunday school lesson. The chair creaks again as it’s returned to upright position; smooth dark fingers return to typing and clicking away.
I can hear my brother walking back and forth in the hallway, thinking out loud to no one in particular.
There are a number of sounds my sister might have been making. Practicing that offertory one more time, fussing in front of the closet, or moving positions on the couch while she devoured a book.
I really can’t for the life of me remember what I would have been doing. Certainly not paying attention to anyone around me.
Funny now, how it all seems so clear.
Hold on to your horses, people, because this is going to be amazing.
I thought of this at least a year ago, and it’s been burning in my conscience so badly that I just can’t keep it from the world any longer.
I have the solution to unemployment. And neither the government nor the taxpayer has to pay for it.
Ready?
Have you ever been driving along a beautiful street and then saw an obnoxious, out-of-place telephone pole and thought, “That is so ugly! I wish they would take them down.”
Well, I have.
And that’s when it clicked.
We need to rid America of telephone poles! We don’t need them anymore and they’re really just ugly, unnecessary fixtures that we have to pay to maintain. Imagine the millions of jobs that this could create if we just committed to taking down the telephone poles!
Here’s where it gets brilliant. The cell phone companies would be called upon to subsidize it, because after all, it’s going to make them a lot more money. You could sell the wood to make amazing reclaimed pieces… that would make more money, too. It’s a win-win!
You wish you’d thought of this, right?
And hey, it really is a long-lasting solution, because you know that as soon as they get that last hideous thing down…
… our whole digital, wireless, crazy technology world is going to collapse. And,
you’ll have to rehire people to put them back up.
I really thought potty training was going to be the end of me. If there ever was an end. And then everyone said the next child would be easier. And it was… by four months.
To make it perfectly clear, it took me sixteen months to potty train my first one and twelve months to potty train the second.
The end of me.
In retrospect, it was mostly my fault. My girls would have “got it” much faster if I hadn’t botched it so royally.
For fun I thought I’d put together a list of what NOT to do when potty training. Some may apply to you; some may only apply to me and my crazy mind. Either way, I hope you enjoy, don’t take it too seriously, and most of all, don’t spend twenty-eight months of your life potty training.
1. Don’t let your child sit on the potty too long. The point is for them to learn to go when they need to; not to have “the bathroom experience” by rule of probability and statistics.
2. Don’t think that treats will train your child to go. I’m not saying don’t give them; but at least for mine, there was no connection between a reward for going and actually mastering the skill of well, you know… going.
3. Don’t switch back and forth between big kid undies and pull-ups. Of all the mistakes I made, I think this was the biggest. I am now a huge fan of going cold turkey.
4. Don’t think that buying a potty book at Barnes and Noble will aid the process either. And it gets really uncomfortable when it becomes your child’s favorite book and everyone who enters the house gets asked to read it.
5. Don’t frantically search Internet sites and help books regarding potty training. I found that most of them either said the same things or were too philosophical to actually be helpful regarding a toddler.
6. Don’t begin to wonder about your qualifications to parent if potty training is a little rough. Most people work their way through it in one fashion or another and you probably won’t be the exception.
Helpful?
If you’re really being tried, just remember there’s someone out there who messed everything up completely and somehow through it all daily gets to hear, “Mommy, I need to go potty.”
Blessed words.
My girlies love clothes. And you can imagine with four of them that we go through a lot. Their Nana loves to shop for them and also gets great hand-me-downs from a friend of hers who has a granddaughter just older than Hope. (how convenient!)
Last time we were at Nana’s house she gifted us with a huge bag of clothes! Which we couldn’t look through for several days! And the girls were going crazy! But I didn’t want to have a mess at an inopportune time! (and do they ever make a mess trying on all those clothes… but they have fun so it’s all good)
When the day finally came for us to go through the stuff, I gave the girls specific instructions: “Girls, I’m going to put the little girls down. Do not touch the bag until I come back out!”
When I returned to the living room, I was shocked and amused at what I found:
The girls had literally made a fence around the bag. “We put all the rocking chairs and ottomans around it so we would make sure we didn’t touch it, Mommy!”
I laughed so hard, took a picture, and thought, “I’ve got to write a post about that!”
Pardon a quick history lesson: Have you ever wondered where the Pharisees came from? They’re nowhere to be found in the Old Testament, and then they suddenly appear unintroduced and unexplained, playing a major role in the gospel narratives.
The Pharisees were the upholders of the law, the self-proclaimed keepers of the kingdom. In their zeal to keep the law and insure that the people of Israel would never again fall into polytheism, the Pharisees had built fences around the law in the form of new laws. These new laws were meant to keep people from disobeying the original laws. But then, those weren’t good enough, and more were put into place. Eventually, the Pharisees made their law-keeping a law unto itself. The purpose of the law in displaying God’s beautiful character was completely obstructed and opposed.
Paul has an awesome “rose garden” illustration about this, but you’ll have to ask him about that.
I cannot explain the depth of my amusement at the fact that my children made a literal fence around something they weren’t supposed to touch. Their childish version of Pharisaism didn’t bother me at all; but wow am I ever going to have an awesome example to use with them when they’re older!
Even though I’m ready to begin blogging again, I’m having some difficulty figuring out where to begin. It’s been so long and everything I have ready just doesn’t feel right. The funny things seem too foolish; the serious things seem too heavy.
So I just decided to talk.
Believe it or not, I really enjoyed some time away from the Internet. It’s so easy as a busy mom or wife to feel so exhausted at the end of the day that anything but mindlessly enjoying the Internet feels like too much of a strain. But that’s really just a trick our mind plays on us. I found that reading books, working on small projects, or even picking up and folding laundry worked just as well in helping me to unwind.
Books remain wonderful. I’m so thankful for some friends who read. They probably don’t realize how they have wordlessly inspired me.
In other news, Mckayla is climbing on everything! She daily gives me a scare of some sort. One Sunday morning I found her on the floor of the kitchen with two unwrapped dum-dums in her hands. She had climbed up the cabinets enough to reach my purse, empty the contents, and enjoy her finds. It was too cute to be mad about. Life doesn’t get much better than a lollipop in each hand when you’re one.
Well, I’ve officially started back. Oh, and I’m really going to try to only do three posts a week for a few months and see how that goes. Haha, with summer schedules that might even be an overestimation. Thanks so much for reading even while I was gone.
Hope you’re having a lovely and hope-filled day,
Christie
He’s back.
Safe, sound, and scruffy.
As he held me close and my head leaned into his big, hard familiar chest I heard him whisper, “Hi, mommy.”
His eyes lit up as he saw the girls. I thought they might scream or run to him, but they waited with huge smiles for him to walk down the “Do Not Enter” corridor and then hugged him and watched him with their ever-adoring eyes.
I teared up when I first saw him coming. He’s here; he’s really here; God brought him back safely to me!
As we went to get his bags and the car, I was so, so, so, so happy to not be the only adult in charge anymore; to have another pair of eyes to watch the girls with, to have a friend to smile at, to know that he would be with me now.
He showered us with presents. If I can get good pictures of them, I’ll share them in a couple of weeks.
Even though he was exhausted, he stayed up to talk to the girls while I made lunch. We ate together and then he went to sleep… for fifteen hours.
But I didn’t care; the backpack in the middle of the living room, the maps and books and pictures everywhere, the zonked out body in the bed, the mountain of laundry waiting to be done, the smiles on the girlies faces, all said one thing: Daddy was back.
And for now, that was enough to be completely happy.
Thanks for reading my first series: Taking care of four little girls alone (while my husband is on an amazing study trip to Israel). Here are links to the other related posts.
It’s official: the Israel trip is on
Day 1: to turn out that last light
Day 3: Is something wrong with me?
Day 4: Sometimes you just need…
Day 6: The problem with “me” time
Day 9: Letting others be there for you
Day 13: Christmas shopping for Daddy, anxiety, and felt flowers
(Hello and thanks so much for reading these reposts of the Israel series. If you’re new, I hope you’ve been enjoying them; and if you’re not so new, then we can all look forward to new content coming!)
It’s been awhile since I’ve really been able to buy Paul presents.
Gone are the days of being in love, single, employed, and able to buy things for the man you love. Not that I’d trade a big warm body to cuddle up to at night, no siree! But I do miss giving him special gifts.
Let’s see, last year I had this great idea to make homemade butter and other gifts to sell at our apartment office in hopes of making enough money to buy him a really great present. After covering the costs of materials I had about sixteen dollars left which I used to buy him The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough which he really liked, but it was not the kind of present I had hoped for.
But this year would be different! I still didn’t have any money, but because he was gone I made some executive decisions about how the money given to us by family would be used. (Haha! rubbing hands together gleefully) Of course, the girls would get their presents, but they already have so much and the things they wanted weren’t going to cost that much anyways. So the girls and I discussed it, and we made a plan to go shopping for Daddy!
Bottom line: it was a blast.
I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty details, but here’s what we came away with. A laptop table from World Market, Hebrews from the New American Commentary series, a dress shirt and coordinating tie (picked out so lovingly and adorably by Hope and Sophia), and a stud finder (we are permanently and irreversibly diy/home improvement challenged). Yay for presents!
********
After a great day of shopping for daddy, I noticed that I was really feeling anxious about him flying home. So much for my unshakable trust in the sovereignty of God that allowed me to not worry at all when he was flying over there.
Basically, I think that knowing he was so close to coming back just made me really want to know that nothing would keep us apart any longer. Everything had gone so well; it was nerve-wracking to think about what would transpire if there were any major calamities now, on our end or on his end. My solution? A night of crafting.
I am not a crafter whatsoever, but I had heard that felt flowers were really easy to make and I wanted to actually make something to give the girls for Christmas. After putting it off for two weeks, I decided that I might not get any sleep that night anyways, so I would do something to occupy my mind.
Unbelievably, they turned out in such a way that you could recognize them! It was tons of fun and I will hopefully do more in the future. I confess one that was supposed to look like a rose ended up looking like a really bad outie belly button, but other than that, I was happy with them.
Now to go to sleep, and wake up, and hear that he’s in the states.
Thanks for reading my first series: Taking care of four little girls alone (while my husband is on an amazing study trip to Israel). Here are links to the other related posts.
It’s official: the Israel trip is on
Day 1: to turn out that last light
Day 3: Is something wrong with me?
Day 4: Sometimes you just need…
Day 6: The problem with “me” time
Day 9: Letting others be there for you
(Thanks so much for your patience as we rerun this Israel series. It’s almost over…)
Since life is still clipping along at an ordinary pace and there is not much to report from the day, I thought I would talk a little bit about one of my goals for this time.
I believe it is a common theme among young mothers who claim to be followers of Christ that finding time to devote yourself to Him in prayer and Bible study can be at best elusive and often downright frustrating. I definitely have to confess that this has been a struggle for me.
I have also realized that simple devotional reading (i.e. go to a passage, read, think: what does this mean to me?) does not suffice for learning the Bible and therefore learning of Christ.
If I can copy off of my husband and some of his professors, you must determine first of all, “What does the passage mean?”, before you can ever make a conclusion regarding what it means to you.
This requires the skill of diligent Bible study.
This past semester my husband was required to read The New Joy of Discovery in Bible Study by Oletta Wald. His praise for it caught my attention. “This is the best book I have ever read on teaching someone how to study the Bible!” My ears perked up; one, because he is extremely careful about how people teach/interpret the Bible and rarely speaks so well of a book; two, because I noticed the book was very short – maybe I could work through it! And finally build a foundation for how to study the Bible.
Well, in case you haven’t guessed already, one of my goals for this time alone was to begin reading and working through that book.
This book really is wonderful. I’ve actually only gotten through the first chapter and practice exercise, but it has been so helpful. It’s really teaching me how to dig through a passage, not to find something that no one has heard of before, but to understand the true meaning of the text.
In all honesty, I’m ashamed at how little I have studied the Bible, especially through these last five years of childbearing.
Is it difficult to find the time? Yes; but it’s also difficult to live day in and day out without that all-satisfying water of the Word. Believe me, I know.
Lord-willing, I’ll keep you updated on my progress as I continue to work through this little book. Interested in checking it out? Here’s an amazon link: The New Joy of Discovery in Bible Study
Thanks for reading my first series: Taking care of four little girls alone (while my husband is on an amazing study trip to Israel). Here are links to the other related posts.
It’s official: the Israel trip is on
Day 1: to turn out that last light
Day 3: Is something wrong with me?
Day 4: Sometimes you just need…
Day 6: The problem with “me” time
Day 9: Letting others be there for you
small steps, big picture 