Sean & Shey

InstaGlance

As the wife of a youth minister, I'm used to having a busy summer. They usually consist of several weeks of camps, a special Seniors-only trip, pool parties, bonfires and of course, every student's favorite getaway, CIY's MOVE conference.

I love all these activities, except now that I am also a mom, our summer schedule looks a lot different. Mainly, I don't go on as many (or any) trips and the evening activities are relegated by their start time vs. Gia's bedtime. I don't mind this at all for the most part (though I am really sad I'm not going to CIY in Holland, MI next week. The weather will be so beauitful!) but it does make for some long weeks of just me & Gia hanging out. I don't know what its like for any of you other moms out there, but the hours between 3 pm and 6 pm seem to be the most difficult, especially when I know Sean won't be coming home. Its the hottest part of the day, I'm usually worn out by then (even after naptime!) and my creativity for creating something fun is desperately waning. My default is to go shopping but I always wind up spending money, which, obviously is not so good.

So the first week Sean was at Junior High camp, Gia and I went to the Dollar Store. (Yay for an activity we could do between 3 and 6!!) I was on the look-out for any handful of things that I could pull out of the closet when I was at the end of my activity rope and couldn't stand another episode of Dora or Super Why. I spent about $16 total and got enough items that I hope will keep us busy when the long, hot days call for some indoor fun. (The $16 does include a flower mylar balloon for Gia and a package of Smarties for me.) A few days ago, I pulled out the first of our Dollar Store Summer Fun items, and it was really a great time!

Dollar Store Items:

Package of hot-wheels type cars (3 for $1)
One roll of masking tape ($1... self explanatory on the price, right?)

To moms of boys, this is probably nothing new. But Gia hasn't really played much with cars except for when we're at friends' houses. She always loves it and likes to make "tracks" for her cars with the bristle blocks she got for Christmas. The masking tape didn't stick extremely well to the carpet, but the roll of painter's tape I was originally going to buy was about 1/4 the size of the masking tape. As we played on, this track grew and grew... it eventually went under the slide and had several intersections. That's the great part about using this tape... just tear out the section where you want the new track to go! Bonus points: Gia loved pulling up the tape when it was time to clean up!!
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Book Review

Book Review: The Blessed Woman

Saturday, June 29, 2013

I had high hopes for Debbie Morris's book "The Blessed Woman." Just glancing at the table of contents had me a wee bit giddy... The book promised to delve into the lives of some well-known women of the Bible (like Eve, Mary and Esther) but would also examine the examples put forth by some lesser known characters as well (such as Jael and Zipporah). I love gleaning new information on people of the Bible that are not commonly studied.

However, it wasn't very far into the book before I began to bristle with discomfort at Morris's writing. I had no idea who Debbie Morris or her husband were prior to picking up "The Blessed Woman" but by page 6, I had learned about just how "successful" and "blessed" this couple has been with a church attendance averaging over 20,000 per week, a television show, conference and magazine. At the risk of sounding a bit jaded, I'm just not into people like that. I am not trying to pass judgement on someone I don't know, or presume that their ministry is a sham--its obviously ministering to many, many people. However, I have been a part of the whole "mega church" movement (my husband was a pastor) and I'm really honestly over it.

Despite my initial distaste for the way Ms. Morris talked about their ministry, I forged through to the next chapter. Sadly, I found much of the same thing that was in the first chapter-- a lot of chatter about her or her husbands ministry and influential position, and very little about the woman of the Bible the chapter was supposed to be covering. Chapter after chapter, I continued reading. I underlined a few interesting thoughts here and there, but overall, I was sorely disappointed in the content of this book.

Again, I know nothing more of this author than what she has written in this book. And perhaps my discomfort with her personal subject matter has more to do with my own personal experience than anything else. But isn't that what makes something appealing to one person and not so to another? Sadly, I cannot say I would recommend this book to anyone else. If you are looking for a study on women of the Bible, this probably isn't the one for you.

gia

Sugar & Spice & Everything Nice

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Its been a while since I've updated-- my newly-turned 2 year old keeps me hopping! That and a wicked case of bronchitis/URI that kept me under the weather for 3+ weeks. But I just had to pop in for a quick update on Gia.

She is the most adorable thing I've ever seen. Truth be told, when she was a baby, I was scared of the toddler years that were to come. What the heck do you do with a mini person all day long? But now that this stage of life is here, I love it! Well, for the most part. I'm not one of those bloggers (you know, THOSE bloggers) who pretends to love everything about life all the time, 24/7. You know, those bloggers with 2 kids, a full time job where they work nights so they can watch their kids during the day, plan clever crafts and learning times, serve homecooked, organic meals every night, all while getting no sleep and still looking amazing? Yeah, sorry. Not me. But for the most part, I am really loving this stage with Gia.

Sure she has her moments. We all do. She definitely gets her "moments" from me, anyways. Temper tantrums are a daily- sometimes hourly- thing around here. Her latest means of protest is to just fall to her knees wherever she is, if she doesn't agree with my request. More often than not, this happens in the middle of the street or a parking lots. Its loads of fun, especially when I have my hands full of groceries. :) But its just part of the territory.

What I really wanted to write about are the sweet things she's been doing that just blow my mind. I already wrote about her precious prayers. They get cuter & sweeter every night. She's also started praying with us at meal times. She reaches for our hands, hers already coverd with cottage cheese or ketchup, and we grimace & laugh but hold them anyways. Several times a day, she will open her arms up wide and say "Mommy BIG HUG!" My brother was here for her birthday and taught her the art of a fist bump. Now, she'll make a fist, stick it out in front of her and say "hiss hump." She wants to do it over and over again. Its hilarious!

She's also taken to snuggling. She was never a really cuddly baby, but now she's making up for lost time. She always says, "Mommy nuggle?" Its usually when I put her down for a nap (stall tactic) but she'll do it at other times, too.

My two favorite phrases she now repeats to me daily are "Mommy so cute" and "Mommy you're boototiful." She says it was a draw in her voice, dragging out the "cuuuuute" and "boooootootiful." So fun. I love her giggles and squeals and am so thankful for this little girl who calls me Mommy... even if it means never going to the bathroom by myself.

Book Review

Bread & Wine [Book Review]

Monday, April 15, 2013

I don't even know where to begin my review of Shauna Niequist's latest book, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter To Life Around the Table With Recipes. There is so much I want to convey to you about the beauty, the authenticity and the absolute need for a book like this. As its tagline states, this book is a "love letter to life around the table with recipes." Like any good love letter, this one sucked me in, to the point where my eyes welled with tears at nearly every chapter, identifying with some truth and my mouth watered with expectation upon reading the delicious-sounding recipes. With every turn of the page, I found my heart crying out, "Yes! This! This is what I so often try to say but fail to articulate! Yes, this! This! This!" In more ways than one, it was as if I, too were a part of Shauna's inner circle of friends, one of her cooking club girls. Though the names and faces and specifics may differ, I too have been blessed with an amazing gift- a community of friends & believers with whom I "do life."

Shauna writes early on in the book about how she always longed for a home that was bustling with life, people coming through the door at all hours, any day; friends clinging glasses, playing music, telling stories and sharing silence. She writes that she "wanted cars parked all the way down the street, and people who came in without knocking, so familiar with our home that they mixed their own drinks and knew where to put the dishes after drying them." As I read this, my heart swelled to overflowing with gratefulness for our current season of life. We have this right now, and it is something that I, too have long desired. For years, it was my deepest prayer-- that the Lord would bring some really great friends into my life with whom I could just be me. I had only one real friend like this, Tracy, and she lived hundreds of miles away. We lived in California at the time I began to pray this prayer, and I remember the anger and frustration that came with the pressure I felt to "keep up appearances" for my husband's job. You see, he was (and still is) a pastor. There was great pressure on me to perform the role of wife with flawless dedication. I had no one nearby to turn to when I needed to honest and, well... human. God answered so many of our prayers in a huge way. After years in California, we were blessed to be able to move to Indiana, closer to family and back to the lifestyle we had missed for so many years. As we were preparing to move, both Sean and I prayed that I would be able to find some good girl friends and really make a connection in our new church and home.

As we grew to know our new home and church family, God began to bring women into my life with whom I was able to develop friendships. It started slowly at first; I was testing the waters. Would they really like me if they knew my quirks? Can I really be myself around them? Afterall, I love Michael Jackson & Aerosmith... but can I tell them that? Would they still be there if they knew they depths of my saddest day? My answer to these questions came quickly, for which I am so thankful. Just a few months after moving, some friends decided we should all try to get together on Tuesday nights. No agenda or schedule or anything that we had to do, just time to hang out. The first Tuesday was fun. We drank wine, painted our nails and some of us brought our latest Pinterest baked good. We got to know each other a little bit more, and decided to do it again the next week. That was over a year and a half ago, and with with exception of a few Tuesday nights when I was sick out of town, Girls Night has been a weekly must. It is an island of sanity in the midst of a crazy, toddler-filled week. We hadn't been meeting together long before February rolled around, Whitney's birth month. The daughter I carried to near-term, all the while knowing she had a chromosomal condition that was incompatible with life. This would be our first year away from California where she was born, and oddly enough, I missed the things from our old home that had reminded me of Whitney. Though I hadn't known this new group of friends long, they began asking me questions about Whitney. They weren't shy, and for this I was grateful. They asked me questions that many of our long-time friends in California never dared to ask. We sat around Caitlin's table as I told them about our Random Acts of Kindness Day, in memory of Whitney and they all eagerly wanted to participate too. That was when I knew this was the real deal. They saw my brokenness and all that went along with it, and they loved me anyways. Shauna writes, "The table is the life raft, the center point, the home base of who we are together." Her cooking club has soups & breads & bacon wrapped dates. My Girls' Night has Reggae Red wine & strawberry cupcakes & endless manicures. But they both add up to the same thing- the life raft, the home base, the breath of fresh air amidst the stifling heat of life.

Since then, we've added more friends to our group and even a couple of babies. I received my review copy of Bread & Wine the week that my friend Mallory had her baby boy, Cam. She invited me to be in the delivery room so that I could do her birth photography. It was an experience I will never forget- the feeling in the room of great anticipation and the unworldly strength with which she labored and delivered her baby naturally. (I now believe this is a brag-worthy accomplishment. I used to pass it off as no greater feat than birthing a baby with an epidural, as I chose to do. But Mallory's strength and determination corrected this way of thinking in me. So women who have birthed a baby sans drugs- brag away.) Cam was born on a Saturday, and I went up to visit them again on Sunday after church. I couldn't get ahold of anyone to find out if it was a good time to visit or not, but I just decided to go see them anyways. When I opened the door, Mallory and her husband Jess were there, both with their eyes full of tears. I could tell they had both been crying, but I wasn't sure what was going on. I learned that the doctor had detected a problem with baby Cam's heart and they were being transferred to the Children's hospital NICU downtown. Uncertainty swirled around us as the transfer team loaded Cam into a hug space-age contraption. I met them at the hospital later that night, and after learning they were staying in a hotel nearby, a few girlfriends and I headed to the closest store to stock them up on things they might need... fruit, oatmeal, magazines, a soft blanket, drinks, chocolate. Mallory insisted she didn't need anything, but when showed up at their door with bags of groceries, we were glad we hadn't listened. In another chapter of Bread & Wine, Shauna writes "We don't learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you." Now you see why with every chapter of this book, my heart cried, "Yes! This!"

I'm not much of a cook. I cook for my family, but wouldn't say I'm great at it. Its mostly a mix of the usual weeknight dinners, with a few "experimentations" thrown in here and there. But the chapter Start Where You Are encouraged me to begin exploring more with my cooking. The chapter ends with a recipe for Basic Vinaigrette. Some Dijon, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. At the end of the chapter, she encourages you to "save a pickle jar or a jelly jar, and every few days, make yourself a vinaigrette. You'll feel like you're practicing magic, or like you've turned water into wine." Oh. Oh, ho ho. How right she is! I whipped up a basic vinaigrette, adding a few chopped shallots, and poured it into a fancy Crate & Barrel bottle a friend gave me for Christmas. (It had homemade Chai in it at the time. That had long since been consumed, but the bottle was too pretty to throw away!) I left it out on my counter all week and poured it over a simple salad each night. Mixed greens, thin sliced red onion and goat cheese. One night, I drizzled it over some pan seared pork chops. It was divine! The simple act of creating this dressing from scratch has given me gumption to try more things. Up next: risotto with mushrooms and bacon. I know, crazy!

This book spoke directly to my heart in so many ways, but my perhaps favorite part comes from the introduction:

Bread is bread and wine is wine, but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the sacred and the material at once, the heaven and earth, the divine and the daily. ... [Bread and Wine] is about what happens when we enter the joy and sorrow of the people we love, and we join together at the table to feed one another and be fed, and while its not strictly about food, it doesn't happen without it. ... Food is a language of care, the thing we do when traditional language fails us, when we don't know what to say, when there are no words to say. And food is what we offer in celebration-- at weddings, at anniversaries, at happy events of every kind. Its the thing that connects us, bears our traditions, our sense of home and family, our deepest memories, and, on a practical level, our ability to live and breathe each day. Food matters. ... At the very beginning, and all through the Bible, all through the stories about God and his people, there are stories about food, about all of life changing with the bite of an apple, about trading an inheritance for a bowl of stew, about waking up to find the land littered with bread, God's way of caring for his people; about a wedding where water turned to wine, Jesus' first miracle; about the very first Last Supper, the humble bread and wine becoming, for all time, indelibly linked to the very body of Christ, the center point for thousands of years of tradition and belief. It matters. It mattered then, and it matters now, possibly even more so, because it's a way of reclaiming some of the things we may have lost along the way.

Two of my Girls Night friends have already bought Bread & Wine, since I couldn't stop talking about it while I was reading it. This is by far the frontrunner for my favorite book this year. When I do a book review, I usually like to read it and review it in a couple weeks or less. But this book was different. I had to take my time working through it. I underlined, highlighted and dog-eared pages. I made notes on recipes to try and the ones I have tried. I savored every well-written word. I hope that you will get this book and savor it over time, like I did. Or perhaps you will devour it in one or two sittings. Either way, I highly recommend this book. And if you do, let me know what you think! I'd love to hear about your community, the type of community you long for, or the recipes from this book that you try!

These are my people. My Girls' Night girls. Pic is from Baby Cam's baby shower!

You can buy this book now on Amazon. Its available in Hardcover (only $10.98 if you're a Prime member) or E-Reader version.

* I received this book from the publisher for review, but all opinions are entirely my own.

Best Friends

God, Eh-ah. Amen.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

I'm going to let the world in on a little secret: I don't really know what I'm doing with this whole parenting thing. Oh, I've read lots of books on the subject and talked to many moms I admire. I've Binged and Googled and Pinterested to my heart's content issues on the matter of parenthood, especially as it pertains to this new land we've recently entered: Toddlerdom. But when it really comes down to it, I'm just doing the best I can with what I've got. Some days, that's more than others. At the end of every day, though, all I'm ever left with is a prayer in my heart and faith in my Heavenly Father that I'm raising my daughter in His way.

I realize most learning at this stage is through example. For instance, on one particularly bad day a month or so ago, I stomped my feet and let out a loud "gggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" in frustration. It wasn't aimed at anyone in particular, just more of a release from the day. Of course little eyes were watching. So it came as no surprise when it wasn't long before Gia had adapted her own version of this "foot-stomping-grrrrrrr" reaction. As if asking forgiveness of anyone isn't hard enough, try asking it of an almost-two-year old who has no clue what you're saying. Yeah, that's humbling. I'd like to say that once was enough for me to really "get it" that my daughter will follow my example in many ways- good and bad- but I'm just going to be realistic and tell you that I will mess up again in front of her. And I'll have to ask her forgiveness again. But in this fallen world, I'm learning to become okay with that. I know that when I mess up, its an opportunity to bring the Gospel to her heart (and mine).

Just like I've realized my daughter will follow my cues in stressful or difficult circumstances, I'm learning (with so much joy in my heart) that she is catching on to the good things I am trying to teach her, too. She's picking up phrases all over the place. Sometimes, she will say something and I'll have to think back to what I've been talking about to realize that she did, indeed, pick it up from me. I never realized I used "honey" as a term of endearment quite so frequently until she started saying it back to me in her sweet little two year old voice: "huh-neeee." So Sweet.

Every night as I'm putting Gia to bed, we read some books, talk about her day, then I ask her who she wants to pray for. She goes in spurts and it always warms my heart to hear the random people who are on her mind at the moment. Sometimes it is Keegan, her newest cousin. Sometimes its Pop Pop, Gram and kit-cats (their kittens). But almost always, she wants to pray for Ella, her bestie. Or "Eh-ah" as she calls her. We had dinner with Ella & Heather tonight, so Ella must have been on Gia's mind, because after I finished praying (including thanking God for Ella and praying that they would be encouraging & uplifting friends to each other as they grow up), Gia wanted me to pray for Ella again. So we prayed for Ella again. When I said "amen," Gia still wanted to keep praying for Ella! So I told her, "You do it." As she sat facing me in my lap, she looked up at me, then deliberately down at her hands as she folded them beneath her chin. (I'm guessing they learned that at church?) She close her eyes and I held my breath to see what she was going to do. In her sweet, angelic voice she simply prayed, "God. Eh-ah. Amen." God, Ella. Amen. Talk about making my heart burst! Now who knows what her mind can comprehend about those three little words she just prayed. But I think children understand more than we expect them to, and I'm ok with raising the bar of expectations here. As she prayed that, my heart cried "Yes!" along with a million thoughts of them growing up together, prayers that they will be good influencers to each other and those around them, that they wouldn't argue over boys, that they can be different and still be good friends, that they can do life together the way Heather & I (and all our other girl friends) do.

So there you have it, my baby's first prayer. I know I screw up as a mom. Most days I'm just flying by the seat of my pants, hanging on for dear life and doing the best I can. Speaking truth to my daughter and trusting in God, believing His promise that His Word will not return void. In the moments where I see the sinful side of myself mirrored in my daughter, my heart breaks. But in the moments where I see God's plan of redemption and promise bursting forth from my tiny two year old, my heart is not only healed it is grateful & joyous, abounding with hope at the grace given to us by our loving God. And I'm okay with not knowing exactly what I'm doing in Toddlerdom-- I'm not alone.

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