blessed beyond measure

Eat, sleep, breathe basketball. Play hard, play smart, play together. Basketball never stops. Hard work, sacrifice, passion, trust, service. I live with a coach. As do the boys, and as life would have it, Brandon's obsession has fully and unconditionally rubbed off on his sons. To say they are basketball fans is just not enough. They are players in training, and train they do. Constantly. On our sweet little twenty-dollar toy goal hung over a tiny closet door in the kitchen. They run, dive, crawl, slide, swerve, lunge, spin-move, dribble, pass, jump, and shoot. Around the table, down the tiny hallway, even into our bedroom when the need arises. All the time. Every. Day. Trey has these elaborate schedules worked out where he plays for both teams, but somehow he always wins. With the microwave as his countdown clock, he keeps score on an old playboard that Brandon gave him or, in desperate situations, a piece of cardstock wrapped in a sheet protector. His remarkable ...

I wanted boys, so very badly. Of course, if either of my pregnancies were to have produced a girl, she would have been loved as outrageously as Trey and Aden. But oh, when I thought of motherhood, I dreamed of having boys. Can't even really explain why. Didn't know much about boys. Just wanted them. How I praise the Lord for granting my heart's desire, for whatever reason He did. And they're here, and they're sweet and exhausting and oh so frustrating and oh so much fun. But along with all of that comes the daunting task of raising them. Not just making sure they stay alive, which, at least in Aden's case, is nearly a full time job. Not just feeding them and keeping their clothes clean and teaching them not to burp (or worse) in public. But really raising them. God gave these two to us, entrusted us with them, and has instructed us to help them grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men. Just like His own son. I could see this as ...

OK, so we're not actually camping given that everyone has a real mattress to sleep on. And in this quite wintry weather, we're definitely not out . But I figure if my parents got my sister to eat green beans throughout her entire childhood by calling them "green candy", I can call this a campout. Love you, Nene! It is my somewhat feeble attempt, on nights when Brandon's team has away games and he doesn't get home until the wee hours of the morning, to make evenings at home with the boys different in some way. Alas, gone is adventure season. You know, since it starts getting dark well before dinner, the movies are too expensive, and the bouncy house is a flu germ convention. So we just spice up life a little bit by all sleeping in the same room. Aden's mattress comes in, just barely fitting on the floor by Trey's bed, where Trey and I squeeze in together. And I spend much of the night fighting off wayward elbows and knees. Maybe a little lam...

Ten days in and here we are. Not staying away on purpose, trust me. There are no photos. The true why of that escapes me, as none of my daily challenges is physically restraining my arms from grabbing the camera. Or even from snapping a photo with my phone. Who knows. The January slump, I suppose. Trey is progressing in piano and, as one of my goals for the year, we have had our first of hopefully many regularly scheduled lessons. There is not one cell in my body that was meant to be a teacher. Except that as a mother I'm teaching with basically every breath I take, but I really try not to think about that much. Patience is not a natural quality. And it doesn't help that, so very much like his mother, Trey gets extremely frustrated with himself for making a mistake. Just picture God sitting beside me as we watch Trey practice. Trey stumbles, growls at himself and throws his hands in the air, God starts chuckling and elbows me in the side. Yep, here we are. Aden ...