Late is the new on time
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 read the entire "Hot Dog" book, just before school started up again. It took us a very long time to get through, and I had to help him sound out quite a bit, but he did it. Then raised his arms in victory, and has since refused to try reading it again. Not sure if it's a too-much-work thing or a been-there-done-that thing.
Or it could always be his apparent allergy to sitting still, which may end up killing me before the weather warms up enough to go back outside. He's like an untamed beast, raging for freedom. All this energy unfortunately comes out in a very aggressive play style. Kid needs sports. Bad. He says he'll play basketball next winter, since he'll finally be old enough.
Praise the Lord for an outlet. Any outlet.
The moulding just inside our coat closet door has pencil markings of the boys' heights. Both have grown eight inches in the last 10 months. How is it possible? It totally floored me. I mean, of course my mind knew they would have grown, but eight inches is a lot.
Trey has, just in the last few days, started turning his lamp off before going to sleep. Decided to do it all on his own. We are terrified to ask him why he suddenly changed a behavior that he has proudly owned for more than half of his life.
And even if we asked him, he may not know. God is ever so slowly helping Trey work through some of his fears, and I'm not sure Trey even realizes it. But oh, we see it, and it's a beautiful thing.
I've had to put my foot down with Aden on some boyish bathroom-humor-related speech. At first it was only sporadic, just enough to chalk up to boyism. But Trey found it hilarious, and Aden soon realized how fantabulous it is to make another person laugh. Then it gradually became an every-other-word sort of phenomenon.
And for the bazillionth time in my life, I shouted to two mid-laugh, mischevious-eyed little boys, "I've had enough!!". Seriously. Not that we're all prim and proper around here - far from it. But good grief, just stop.
Which is my word for this year. Stop.
It's not really a self-improvement slant, though in the back of my mind I'm sort of hoping to improve a little this year. But if I go at it as a self-improvement thing, it will automatically fail. So for now, it's a study focus. A spiritual journey, if you will. I've found six key verses in the Bible with the word stop in them, and I'm going to take two months on each one.
Go ahead and say it, "Two months on one verse? How slow are you?"
First of all, God's Word is never dull. It is living and active, and it never ceases to amaze me to read something for the umpteenth time, and have it seem brand new.
Second of all, I have a problem with both commitment (see the waning blog post numbers) and listening. Having a very small reading assignment is forcing a good part of my devotion time to be listening time. And it's been groundbreaking.
My verse for January and February is Job 37:14, "Stop and consider God's wonders."
I must interject here how thankful I am that in my searching for the word stop in scripture, it is almost always followed by and. Those two together suggest not just a rest stop, but a U-turn kind of stop. Which I so desperately need.
Anyway, in looking at that verse, I've been tracking down other verses with the words consider and wonders. I cannot tell you how incredible it is to hear God speaking to me over these things. Not just thinking about creation, as the Job verse suggests, but so much else has entered my quiet time: intimacy with God, respect and self-worth, legacy, complete trust, work ethic, sacrifice, and the importance of encouraging others. He is speaking to me. And it is precious.
Hopefully I will be committed enough to kind of keep a log on here of my stop progress.
And hopefully soon there will be photos again, and fun posts about life and growth and home. Until then, here we are, shivering our fannies off, cheering embarrassingly for Brandon's basketball team, mulling over schoolwork, just...living.
And with that, I'm off to make a pot of Pioneer Woman's Perfect Potato Soup. Perfect indeed. One of a long list of blessings.
Happy New Year.
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 read the entire "Hot Dog" book, just before school started up again. It took us a very long time to get through, and I had to help him sound out quite a bit, but he did it. Then raised his arms in victory, and has since refused to try reading it again. Not sure if it's a too-much-work thing or a been-there-done-that thing.
Or it could always be his apparent allergy to sitting still, which may end up killing me before the weather warms up enough to go back outside. He's like an untamed beast, raging for freedom. All this energy unfortunately comes out in a very aggressive play style. Kid needs sports. Bad. He says he'll play basketball next winter, since he'll finally be old enough.
Praise the Lord for an outlet. Any outlet.
The moulding just inside our coat closet door has pencil markings of the boys' heights. Both have grown eight inches in the last 10 months. How is it possible? It totally floored me. I mean, of course my mind knew they would have grown, but eight inches is a lot.
Trey has, just in the last few days, started turning his lamp off before going to sleep. Decided to do it all on his own. We are terrified to ask him why he suddenly changed a behavior that he has proudly owned for more than half of his life.
And even if we asked him, he may not know. God is ever so slowly helping Trey work through some of his fears, and I'm not sure Trey even realizes it. But oh, we see it, and it's a beautiful thing.
I've had to put my foot down with Aden on some boyish bathroom-humor-related speech. At first it was only sporadic, just enough to chalk up to boyism. But Trey found it hilarious, and Aden soon realized how fantabulous it is to make another person laugh. Then it gradually became an every-other-word sort of phenomenon.
And for the bazillionth time in my life, I shouted to two mid-laugh, mischevious-eyed little boys, "I've had enough!!". Seriously. Not that we're all prim and proper around here - far from it. But good grief, just stop.
Which is my word for this year. Stop.
It's not really a self-improvement slant, though in the back of my mind I'm sort of hoping to improve a little this year. But if I go at it as a self-improvement thing, it will automatically fail. So for now, it's a study focus. A spiritual journey, if you will. I've found six key verses in the Bible with the word stop in them, and I'm going to take two months on each one.
Go ahead and say it, "Two months on one verse? How slow are you?"
First of all, God's Word is never dull. It is living and active, and it never ceases to amaze me to read something for the umpteenth time, and have it seem brand new.
Second of all, I have a problem with both commitment (see the waning blog post numbers) and listening. Having a very small reading assignment is forcing a good part of my devotion time to be listening time. And it's been groundbreaking.
My verse for January and February is Job 37:14, "Stop and consider God's wonders."
I must interject here how thankful I am that in my searching for the word stop in scripture, it is almost always followed by and. Those two together suggest not just a rest stop, but a U-turn kind of stop. Which I so desperately need.
Anyway, in looking at that verse, I've been tracking down other verses with the words consider and wonders. I cannot tell you how incredible it is to hear God speaking to me over these things. Not just thinking about creation, as the Job verse suggests, but so much else has entered my quiet time: intimacy with God, respect and self-worth, legacy, complete trust, work ethic, sacrifice, and the importance of encouraging others. He is speaking to me. And it is precious.
Hopefully I will be committed enough to kind of keep a log on here of my stop progress.
And hopefully soon there will be photos again, and fun posts about life and growth and home. Until then, here we are, shivering our fannies off, cheering embarrassingly for Brandon's basketball team, mulling over schoolwork, just...living.
And with that, I'm off to make a pot of Pioneer Woman's Perfect Potato Soup. Perfect indeed. One of a long list of blessings.
Happy New Year.
Comments