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reading and literary journals and your suggestions
There’s a lot of details I’ll get wrong in education. (Same was true when I was employed in mainstream education too.) Ideas shift. Trends in education rise and fill. Diagramming sentences matters in one decade, not so much in the next. I started farming out math to tutors and computer “textbooks” at about the third grade. Science isn’t my jam. At home we don’t raise our hands and sometimes we do history class in our pajamas. We travel as much as we’re able for the best sort of learning and no one calls roll each morning. The one long standing, enduring, hasn’t changed detail that I do manage to…
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parenting.
Maybe it’s been my attempts at doing nightly Advent readings during the month of December. Or the conversations that sneak up on me with my teenagers at bedtime. The way one of my kids looked at me with genuine surprise when I said I enjoyed the singing of all the songs at church each week – the part of the service which he happens to like least. The conversations about what makes us do what we do with my ten year old. The continual lessons in opportunities to serve someone other than yourself that parenting is always presenting. Whatever it is, I have been feeling the weight of the…
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Five Finds Friday (mailbox surprises & a video)
This week feels a little like it’s been two weeks long. I’d call it a pretty productive week, but also a week with full evenings and sometimes that equals a really tiring week too. Here we are though – at the week’s end with Friday at our door. funny This week this text appeared on my phone. It made me laugh a lot for some reason. fashionable Today the mailbox bounty was hilarious. It was a tale of two lives, a juxtaposition of reality – the lovely vs. the ugly. First – I received two lovely pairs of earrings hand crafted…
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A Christmas Catch Up (Because I needed one more than you did, I’m sure.)
You know what I need? More hours in the day? Better time management? Someone to sweep my floor continually? (How much are those robot vacuum cleaner things? No – for real. How much are they?) Maybe I do need those things. I don’t know. Maybe I need less distractions. Or fewer tasks. Or something. I don’t know. It hardly even matters because I don’t have those things. You don’t have those things. We’re just living the one life we’ve got and some days that’s not enough and some days that’s too much and at the end of the day we have the same number of hours as the next…
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friendship
Even when friends directly say the words to my face, sometimes I have a hard time believing them. Even when those friends are gracious enough to write the words down in a held-in-my-own-hand tangible sort of way, I am tempted to doubt their sincerity. You see, I bring a lot of baggage to a friendship. Extra drama. A generous helping of neediness. And my inherent go-to is to assume that people are kind or people are helpful or people stop by born of a pity, akin to the sort you feel when you hand your dollar bills to the man on the street holding a sign. Sometimes I am…
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being okay; being the parent
I thought they were all asleep. There were kitchen chores to do. I turned on some music, lit a candle, rolled up my sleeves and got down to work. Sometimes I like baking in the quiet of the night in my eternally gritty yet somehow cozy little kitchen. Because I was alone, I sang out loud. Bits of a song here, all of the lyrics for the next song. Off key, off rhythm, but with joy and abandon. I walk across the kitchen to put something away and I see her little feet first, bare and standing by the kitchen door. “I love when you sing, Mommy,” she smiled…
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The God Who Sees
El Roi. It means The God Who Sees. A few years ago the kids and I read a book about the different names of God. I’ve particularly remembered this name. There are moments I feel seen. Moments I can sense the “being known”. Through conversation divinely orchestrated. In a situation so obviously brought about by a grand master plan. In a secret tiny care being met even though I never spoke it aloud. At those times it’s as if God is speaking in an audible voice and saying, “There you are. I see you.” And then there are moments I feel unseen. Moments I force myself to repeat the…
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the routine of the every day
My regular daily routine is pretty, you know, routine. Attempt to rise before my children. (Though that Mosely is a hard one to wake up earlier than.) Read quietly. Write a little in a journal. Check emails and get a touch of work done. Prep breakfast, wake up the remaining sleeping younger kids who do not yet own an alarm clock. Eat breakfast together. Begin school at the table. Teach/help/direct school until lunch. Fix and eat lunch. Wrap up the last set of help-needed school assignments. Settle in for a few hours of work. (And by a few hours I mean, some regularly interrupted time to sort of accomplish…
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The Last Few Days – in Photos
It’s Monday of a holiday week but you already know that. I tried to fight my urge to stay in bed on these cold mornings and wake up early to greet the day and feel a little more in charge of my life – it’s an illusion I keep trying to maintain in a half-hearted capacity. I have neither the time nor the mental capacity to write a full post this morning but I do have both the time and the mental capacity to share a few photos from the last week or so of life and that feels like enough for today. There was a work gathering recently…
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Five Finds Friday (should I buy the boots & a little poetry)
When the temperatures drop even slightly, my crew and I become hermits. We want to sleep late, stay under the covers, hibernate. It’s just so cozy at home. Give us all the hot chocolate and thick novels and warm blankets. It’s hard to get up and go anywhere. But we do force ourselves out of the house from time to time. This week we had appointments we couldn’t shift (believe me, we wanted to) and school to do and a theatre performance of Much Ado About Nothing to attend. funny Here’s what is NOT funny. Paul Blart. Okay, sure. This movie was out a while ago…
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what does repentance look like?
I use to think about it a lot. Repentance. That one word. And all of its connotations. About what it looked like and what it talked like and what it sounded like. I don’t think about it so much any longer. For a whole host of reasons. But the biggest (and the best) reason is this. I don’t need to think about it. A friend reminded me of something, spoke it in a way that my heart could understand. And his words resonated. They stayed. I love particulars. Plans. Lists. How To. A formula and an agenda and a purpose. Give me all of those. A blue print. The…
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she prays for us.
She sought us out Sunday morning before the service started. Hugged us with genuine affection and greeted each one of my children by name. She was excited – legitimately excited – to see our faces. She told us Tuesday. Tuesday was the day she prayed for us each – by name. Who knew that would matter so much? And that it would, of course, remind me of my mother. My mother, who also had a written down list of people for whom she prayed. My mother, who drove to her job as a nurse at an assisted living facility and prayed down that list as she drove. Name by…
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Wonder: A Book Review
“Thank you God for good books to read,” London prayed in our before bed family routine. And the good book she was talking about on this particular evening was the book called Wonder. Actually, the specific book was a sequel – or companion book really – to Wonder called Auggie & Me. We started with Wonder – maybe a month or so ago. It’s a novel that’s been out for more than five years I think but now that there’s about to be a movie released based on the story, it’s reappearing on the front shelves of book stores. I sort of hate that I am only…
