Wordless Wednesday

The difference a year makes...

Easter 2012

Easter 2013

 

Recent Musings

• My dog eats cardboard. Really any type of cardboard, she's not picky and it just recently started. We thought it was a fluke but apparently, not so. It really doesn't matter to her what's inside the box, that's collateral damage! Gifts from Gramma A in Minnesota, a pair of Aero dress pants, a case of Diet Mt. Dew (ugh - gag anyway!), stored Christmas lights, pajamas from Vickie's Secret, a Coach purse - all's fair when you are craving fiber!
• WyGuy is going to high school. I'm a struggling momma and I'm certainly not old enough to have a high school student. This is much harder than those milestone birthdays. This is literally just a blink away from him becoming a man. Please, please, please reassure me that a grown man still needs his mom!!!
• I love having chickens! In fact, 33 more of them are on their way to our house in a few weeks. 3 layers and 30 broilers. 
• It's almost garden time and I can't decide what I want to plant this year. My staples are eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and spinach, but what should my wild card produce be this year? 
• I love my big car and I would love to fill it up with more cute little noggins... that's what all those open seats are for, right? 
• I hate painting. If I weren't such a fru-gal (like that? I just thought of it!), I would pay someone to do it. I LOVE the change a fresh color brings, but I hate that I felt like I had no weekend because I was elbow deep in Lyndhurst Timber, satin finish. 
• Less than 4 weeks until we head to the University of Iowa to see a craniofacial team for Beebs. Prayers are welcome. We'll likely have some decisions to make as we've already seen two local doctors and we have an idea of what's coming. 
• I don't drink enough. Never have. I can, and often do, go from my morning 2 cups of coffee until dinner without anything to drink. Today, I resolved to start forcing myself to drink. I've successfully ingested over 1/2 liter of water (hey, look here, that's almost 20 oz!!), however, I've been to the bathroom 4 times - ugh. Does that get better or am I doomed to pee every 15 minutes if I actually get to my goal of 1 liter in a day? 
• My blog title is stupid. 

Here's to my life!

Here's to today! 
Here's to waking up early and spending some time alone with my Bible. 
Here's to keeping my voice down and my spirits raised. 
Here's to acknowledging that there is more work to do in me, than in my house. 
Here's to realizing that cleaning up my heart is more important than cleaning the toilet or examining the faults of my family. 
Here is to holding my children more, and my tongue even more. 
And here is to learning, every day.

 

Decisions

Changed. I am changed. So many things about the way I think, the perceptions I have, the actions I take were changed in 2010. I'm grateful. I knew I would be. I wanted to be. Nearly 3 years later, that experience still weighs on my heart. Photos still sit on my desk. Reminders of my blessings and my change. 

For a couple of months that experience has taken a louder voice... it's no longer sitting quietly in the back of my mind as a daily reminder. It's at the forefront. It's on my mind when I wake. It's in my prayer time. It's appearing in pretty random places around me. So I ask you to pray earnestly with me that I would hear what He has to say, not what I desire. Pray for my family that He would speak as clearly to them. I want no decision within our life to be without Him in the center. 

Today, the verse in my reading was Proverbs 24:11-12

Rescue those who are being taken away to death;

hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.

you say, "Behold, we did not know this,"

does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it,

and will he not repay man according to his work? 

Yikes! I can't say I haven't seen or heard, because I have. So I need to make sure I'm doing what He wants, humbly and gratefully, because I do know... and He knows. 

Consequences - a different look

Since the beginning, I've tried to teach my kids about consequences. That ALL actions and decisions have consequences. We often associate the word "consequence" with something bad, but truthfully, a consequence, by definition is simply something produced by a cause. Our actions and decisions are the cause and the result is the consequence. I want them to understand the word fully. Consequences can be bad, but they can also be good. 

It's a hard lesson to learn and even harder to watch it be learned. As a mom, you want to comfort, shelter, and protect them from things happening, but there are so many times when they learn so much more by experiencing a direct consequence for what they have chosen. Ugh, this parenting thing is a gut-wrencher sometimes!

In our house, the roughest part of this road is consequences that involve others, particularly others in the same said house. I think complicating teaching this lesson is my difficulty in grasping the concept of sibling relationships. I've got one brother who was in 2nd grade when I moved out of the house. I was more of a second mom to him than a sister. I spent a LOT of time around adults as a child too and so this whole sibling rivalry/friendship thing is completely foreign territory to me! 

So, in an attempt to nurture this among the Simpson kids, I've been reading about the idea of restitution consequences. The goal behind restitution consequences is to find ways to help “right the wrongs” while restoring the relationship. The message is: Relationships are valuable. When you mess them up, and you will, it’s important to reconnect. 

Having a child "say you're sorry" is smart and courteous, but it doesn't right the wrong. It doesn't teach remorse and reconciliation. Kids are smart, especially mine :-) They'll figure out what to say that they think will get them out of trouble! So, how do I try to implement restitution consequences? By having the child who is at fault (or both if it's mutual) reconcile the offense by doing a specific kindness for the other person - a note, making a mug of hot cocoa to share, taking over a chore... any small act of kindness or sacrifice. 

Brilliant, right? Yep, it will be even more so if it works! We're going to give it a try and see. With a 14 year old... yep, he's 14... I'm a little behind the game, but like I said, they're smart kids so I think it'll all turn out in the end.  

exhale... and write it down

I might be starting to breathe again...

7 of the past 9 weeks, I've been on my own as my other half travels for work. That's a long time. 

So what's been happening? 

• I got a new car!! Well, I got a new-to-me car. I can officially haul children, pets, and all of their stuff without being smooshed. No more "he's touching me!" Yay for small victories!! 
• Beebo turned 8. He's such a funny, great kid. He has the strongest personality of all of my kids and makes me laugh (and scream and tear my hair) like none other. 
• Both boys started and finished football season. 
• Beebo did his 3rd and final year of flag football. 
• Wy did his 6th and final year of JFL. He finished his season with 4 awards, including the Presidential award which was a 3 ft. tall trophy for maintaining straight A's while playing football for 6 consecutive years. Can you even believe in less than a year, he'll be playing high school football?!?
• Sis tried out for the basketball team and made it! She's not very experienced, so she's not a starter and we had some bullying drama at the beginning, but she's settled in and is doing well when she gets on the floor. 
• Beebo tried out for a traveling baseball team and made that too! Next summer we'll be on the road again for ball (nice to just replace one traveling team with another since Sis decided not to do fastpitch travel ball next summer, just local - whew!)
• All 3 kids made straight A's again for the first grading period, with Wy pulling out a 99.7% in freshman Algebra!
• Beebo broke his arm jumping out of a golf cart. That's right, my kid broke his arm golfing. He gets his cast off one week from today and not a day too soon since you can smell it from across the room! Ugh.
• 3 of my 5 chickens are laying eggs! The youngest should be starting any day. We're averaging about 15 eggs a week right now. While I love having them and I love winter... I do NOT love chicken care in the cold. Lugging a 5 gallon bucket of water to the back of the property every 3 days because the water pump is shut off for the winter and cleaning out the coop and run isn't great fun. 
• Halloween came this year and one of my kids is officially too old to dress up. Although I will say that Beebo's costume ROCKED (completely his choice) and made up for the lack of spirit in my oldest! 
• Sis joined the speech team and had her first competition last week. She did a 5 minute humorous interpretation monologue. Of the 13 kids from her school, she's the only one to do a solo performance, obviously the only one who is deaf, and the only one to take a FIRST place!! She amazes me... truly. The people in the room had no idea she was deaf. What a testament to her hard work and fighting spirit!
• We've added another medical issue to our list. Beebo was diagnosed last week. I'll do a post later focusing on it as I'm still in absorption mode and reading everything I can. As dang cute as they are, both Sis & Beebo's birth defects came in the first 30-45 days of development... kinda my job to create a good environment for that to happen. Fail.
• Christmas is 41 days away... shopping is halfway complete!

Wordless Wednesday