I still recall with vividness my son’s drawing, proclaiming my anger issues to the world.
It was in red marker (his favorite color). Chunky hands rested on wonderfully slim, stick-figure hips. “I made you look mad, but you’re not mad in this picture,” he explained.
So for a lot of the world, boredom is real. I read in a meme that pandas can eat 13 hours a day…hence calling this a “pandemic.” Need a couple of fresh ideas while you’re bored in quarantine?
Try these jigsaw puzzles from White Mountain with icons from the 80’s and the 90’s–serious conversation starters. (“Dad, who was Michael Jackson?”)
I loved sharing with you last week a little snapshot of my life.
Alas, my manuscript is due MONDAY to Zondervan, so my little heart has been written out. Tonight I wanted something calm and pretty and open and blue, like an ocean.
Sometimes my microwave feels like a microcosm of my life.
To clarify: Not like this cute, peaceful stock photo.
Sitting with my daughter yesterday, she expressed she had a little fear for 2020. It’s a big year, she explained, with some personal stuff, plus elections and Olympics and what-not.
My first inclination–in light of how young she is, of course–was to brush away her fear.
I’ve shored myself in tonight for something I’ve looked forward to for a month and a half.
For my birthday, my husband got me a personal retreat. And the timing is pitch-perfect. (Well, save the fact that my body seems to have been anticipating the drop of adrenaline, welcoming in a cold.)
Happy Thanksgiving! I love that we still celebrate a day of gratitude. I don’t want to hop over it in my scurry on to Christmas.
I’m hoping for more than a quick, compulsory burst of gratitude tending to last five minutes over some corn muffins. I’m thinking about how to make lifestyle of Thank you, God–over and over, thank you for us as a family. Because naturally over here, we lean toward patting ourselves on the back.
We’re working on covering a window with sticky notes of things we’re grateful for. (You can grab more you-can-totally-do-this gratitude ideas for families in this post. Threw some free printable thank-you notes for kids in there.)
Someone asked me recently how I talk to my daughter about modesty. It was a conversation morphing into how to help our daughters see their bodies as important, but not too important. (See this post, Naked Truth about Body Image.)
Incessantly telling her she’s beautiful—though I honestly believe she is–doesn’t seem to be the answer: “Don’t worry about looking beautiful. You’ve got that one down!”
As we prepare to celebrate Good Friday, I’m marveling all over again at these paradoxes bound up in Jesus’ death: all we gained through his loss.
Hope it increases your overwhelming adoration like it does mine.
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Parenting has this way of exposing a part of who you are in ways both beautiful and terrifying.
As in, Wow! Who knew I had this gift for creative teaching? Or, Who knew I could handle this amount of laundry and still emerge with enough panties to fight the day?
But also, as author Elizabeth Stone has written, Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
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