HomeLife
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard
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2018 thoughts.
Looking backwards has always been standard procedure for me. Journaling. Reflecting. Keeping records and creating scrapbooks in their glory days. (And Chatbooks now.) Nature Notes that tell us what bird we saw on this day last year or six years ago and a daily family journal that reminds us that yes, we have completed a puzzle every December 26 for a decade. Looking back. It’s part of my DNA. So is looking forward I guess. I like “planning” the future too. I look ahead every Sunday and plot the week’s course. The kids and I call it our Sunday Meeting because they like to gauge their expectations for…
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wedding thoughts & musings.
We attended a wedding this weekend. A wedding we felt privileged to attend. (Remember our buddies who turned shaved ice and flavors into a career?) There was a giant field and a big open barn and a view of a mountain in the background. A hot cocoa and coffee bar was set up and a table full of candy and sweets and piled high with delicious cookies. Music was the dominant theme to the gathering. Well, more accurately, worship was the dominant theme. Worship of a holy and creative and imaginative God with a lot of people who loved two young adults plunging into a new life…
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Five Finds Friday (sweatshirts & cuddles & an easy soup recipe for your new Instant Pot)
You already know I love this holiday week. I wish all of life was like a holiday. No school. No pressure to rise early. No pressure to get to bed early. No pressure. That’s what I like. The unrealistic dream world of no pressure for anything. Ah. But we are grown ups here and we know that the in between weeks are not the main weeks and that holiday is not the standard fare. But – while it lasts, I sure do enjoy it. funny Riley and Aaron bought the boys a miniature foosball table for Christmas this year. It’s been a big hit. Also, Puck…
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Holiday Break: Everything I Love
I love the slush of days that lie between Christmas and New Year’s. I count them each as some sort of Non Day. My expectations for myself and for the kids are pretty much nil and that’s so ridiculously marvelous, I can’t even begin to tell you. It’s the best week to do nothing. It’s incredibly satisfying. I watched the movie Arrival with the girls one night. (You know, like two years after everyone else watched it I guess.) I want to talk about it with someone because I can’t say that I loved the film or found it even overly touching, but it did present a…
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seven random bits
1. This weekend I started and finished one of the books you guys recommended for me last week. Charles Martin’s Water for my Heart. Not so much because I had loads of free time, but because it turned out to be so compelling that I just needed to find out what was going to happen and how it was all going to work out in the end. 2. The temperature at night in our home rests at about 55 degrees. I don’t mind the cold so much while I am sleeping, but good day – that temperature makes it rather discouraging to get out of bed come…
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Five Finds Friday (maybe five, maybe four – I can’t guarantee anymore)
All of the weeks in December seem speedy beyond reason. It’s how the time works – right? But we’ve had marvelous quiet evenings home sitting in the living room near the tree’s twinkling lights and you could almost hear our collective sighs at the pleasantness of it. (Don’t worry – we’ve also had rush here and do this and why is the cat eating all of the string on our gifts moments too.) It’s Friday now and the weekend is basically here and I haven’t consumed enough fudge yet to call it a real holiday so I’ll get to work on that! I’ve also decided that some weeks I…
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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 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…
