Whatcha' Been Doing? [Fall Edition]

We love fall around here. Great weather + pretty leaves + Husker football. What's not to love.

By fall, we had figured out a few more things about having 2 under 2, one of which was how to snap more pictures in day-to-day life. You're welcome. [Or, sorry.]

Worth mentioning (at least for my personal record):

We let Addie play with coins and recycled containers. This was a favorite activity for a couple weeks.
Addie painted a small pumpkin in lieu of carving. Prettier and easier. She talked about this afterward for weeks.
Emma loves that fish on the exersaucer.
Ben took Addie on their first date to Burger King for breakfast. She had french toast sticks and her favorite part was dipping them in syrup. Ben noted that he opened the full container of syrup & handed it over only to watch Addie try to plunge the entire french toast stick in the tiny container, overflowing the syrup all over. He said next time, he would do the dipping.
Addie started to want to pick her clothes and hair accessories - see headband picture.
Addie and Lanie (cousin) are becoming very sweet friends. It has been so much fun to watch them grow closer the last 6 months.
Ben sent me flowers randomly one day. I was on cloud 9!
Reading on the potty is a fun pre-potty training activity.
Washing dishes is another favorite in this house - not sure why we own toys.


A fall trip to Chicago included...

#2under2 - kids fly free :) 

A visit to Grandad's office.

visiting grandma cathy's house means extra mommy & addie time because mommy is off chore duty!

Off to walk the dog - "see ya later!"

a fun train day - take the train two stops to the next town over  ...

...where there is a TRAIN RESTAURANT! The food is delivered on a toy train :)

This day was heaven for my choo choo train lovin' girl.  

Emma thought the whole train thing was overrated. And overwhelming.

hip hip hooray - three cheers for Grandma Cathy

and finally, my favorite part of this fall - a trip to California with my main man 10 days after our return from Chicago. Please notice we look much more excited and less tired on this plane selfie than we did on the family selfie with 2 kids on our laps. Hm.

First up: a day in wine country :) 

one of the cooler things we saw was dry ice poured on the fermenting grapes. 

we snuck a peek (and a pic!) where the important fancy wine tasters get to taste their wine. we don't qualify. 

After a day in Sonoma (we stayed here inexpensively - it was nice and a great location!), we drove down the pacific coast towards Palo Alto, where my brother and his new bride live. 

We parked at this random stop off where there were a lot of cars, but no people. A sign of either a hidden trail or an axe murderer. Or both. We hiked down the trail, pretending to be outdoorsy.

Ben climbed up here against my wishes.

We snapped this pic with the timer function on my camera. I love this man! 

We picked up a hitch hiker who was there at this stop. It wasn't our best decision making, but in our defense, when Ben asked her if she was going to kill us, she said "no." I decided not to take her picture anyway.

My brother showed us around his company's new digs, in downtown Palo Alto where rooftop decks are the norm. 

We went to a Stanford game, thanks for the tickets, hudl!

And then we headed home - relaxed and refreshed.

One of those things no one tells you about before you have kids is there is a crazy aftermath & recovery period after traveling, whether or not your kids go with you. It usually involves some version of lots of tears, piles of clothes everywhere, and extreme clingyness. 

Shortly after our return, Halloween popped up. It was WAY fun with kids. It didn't take the toddlers long to figure out trick-or-treating was fun.

These cute pumpkins had hats but they didn't last long. 

It doesn't get any cuter than this, my friends. 

I debated about including Thanksgiving in this post. It is SO DANG LONG already. If you are still reading, kudos! We must be related?

72 attempts at a family pic, and this is the best. Could be worse :) 

Last year, we drove from Cambridge to Charlottesville to spend Thanksgiving with Ben's sister, her husband, and our niece. Elsie and I were both newly pregnant and not feeling so hot. 

But we made 5 different pies anyway. We couldn't decide which was the most Thanksgiving-y: pumpkin, apple, cherry, french silk, or pecan. So we made them all. With homemade crust! 

This year, we continued the tradition, but in Omaha, and with way more efficiency, and only 3 types. We were only assigned pumpkin, pecan, and french silk. Elsie drew the short straw and had to start the homemade crust while I made the pecan pie filling. We had just been poking fun at Alex (my brother-in-law) for getting a giant tub of lard when pie crust only calls for a little. She left her bowl unattended to flour the table for rolling out the crust. I poured myself a cup of corn syrup to add to the pecan pie filling, and absent mindedly dumped the whole thing into her bowl of pie crust mixture! I was about to start stirring when she gasped "hey that's my pie crust!" We burst out laughing, and were thankful Al had bought an entire tub of lard, since I had ruined the first batch of pie crust. 

The girls were happy to get some time with their Great Great Grandma Elaine. [That's not a typo, folks!]

Whew. Happy Fall (3 months later). That's a wrap!
Will you dare join me tomorrow for December?

Whatcha' been doing?

A lot has changed around here since I was last regularly blogging. Kids change fast.
"Oh, it goes so fast" - said every stranger over the age of 50 in public who converses to me when i am out with my kids. ever.

I always smile politely and nod, mumbling some sort of happy, agreeable, socially acceptable norm. But, you know what, they are right. It seemed like overnight, Emma was crawling [yes, crawling] & Addie was talking in sentences. Paragraphs. Novels, really. That girl can talk. (She gets that from her dad.) #sarcasm. My inlaws had the girls overnight recently, and when we came to pick them up, we stayed for dinner. (Good deal, right? Here, watch my kids for 36 hours, and then upon my return, you make me and said children dinner? I'll take it!) Addie was done before the adults and was allowed to get down. She wandered away from the table singing her ABCs and talking to the dogs. My father-in-law said, "she did that the whole time she was here. All day, she just walked around singing and talking." My little extrovert.

So without further adieu, some things we've been up to, in pictures of course.

August & September.

this child loves to play with a ball. our sidewalk is on a slight incline. emma and i would sit on the porch steps and watch addie chase the ball down the incline, then kick & throw it back up the incline. this particular pink ball just appeared in our yard one day. we left it for a couple days in case another neighborhood kid had lost it. no one claimed it, so Addie started playing with it. a couple days later, a neighbor kid came across the street and claimed it as his own. Addie was bummed. She would ask about it every day. Finally, we took a trip to Target and picked out a new one for her, with cars on it.

the second from the left below shows the inevitable result when you dress your kids in cute clothes one time and then try to photograph it to post on social media so the world knows thinks you don't neglect your kids.                                              

                for a long time, 

Addie's favorite activity

was reading to Emma

:) 

            "addie pick bow"                 "wash elmo"                 serious baking                            evening walks 

breakfast selfie.

ben and i had our first ever mini golf date.  

Sometimes, Emma helped me edit photos instead of sleeping.

"addie pump milk emma" 

God bless the neighbor who had his driveway re-cemented, providing this tired momma's toddler with hours of entertainment. 

and because only these children's grandparents would like to see more photos of our past 6 months, we'll call today a wrap. Next up in the "Whatcha been doing? series - Fall."

lessons i've learned from my kids #1

Around the time Emma was born, we gave Addie a doll. She hadn't taken much interest in them before, but with a new baby around the house, a doll seemed more fun. By 21 months old (Emma was 3 months at this point), Addie really loved to take care of her baby doll. Which she called "baby." Or sometimes "Emma." Now, it's just "baby."

She drags her around by the arm. Sometimes she holds her tightly, sways, and says in her "singing" voice Gee-gis (Jesus), mimicking how I sing "Jesus loves me" to her before she goes to sleep. She likes to push her baby in Emma's swing, buckle her in Emma's carseat, wash her with pretend soap, feed her a pretend bottle, and push her around in the stroller.

But, when she pushes baby in the swing, she'll push as fast and hard as high as it goes.
She'll buckle baby in the carseat upside down, straps twisted, and with only half the buckle closed.
Once in a while, as we're getting ready for bed, we'll let her put her baby to bed too. So, she'll pick up the baby, bring the baby to the baby's bed, and sing. "Gee-gis loves me i know know the Bible tells me sooo's" [she always makes 'so' plural] :) Rocking back and forth. Then, she'll say "night night baby" or "luh-you baby..."

and drop the baby on it's head, and walk away.

It's so hard not to laugh.
And yet she's trying.
She thinks she's doing what we do to take care of Emma.

It's easy to poke fun and see how she's missing the mark... I mean, her baby is naked all day, buckled upside down in the carseat, and then dropped on her head to go night night.

But, isn't this kind of how we parent too? We go to great effort to mimic how God, our heavenly father, loves and parents us. How to discipline and how to give grace. How to love unconditionally but not enable. How to train up a child. How to how to how to... And we work hard at this, hoping to produce Jesus-loving, world-changing little people. Yet, at the end of the day, we often miss the mark. And compared to our perfect heavenly Father, we proverbially (hopefully not literally), drop our kids on their heads and say "night night."

But there is grace.
and He has chosen you for your children. 
and so, with God's help, we love, and discipline, and train, and engage, and teach...
and we try not to drop our kids on their heads.
and then we trust Him with the results.

A new year.

Oh hi there.
Is it funny that my last post, 3 months ago, was about writing every day in October?
It might not be funny, but at the very least, it's ironic.

On one hand, I've missed writing. Articulating the thoughts mulling around all day as I listen to my toddler verbally vomit every thought that comes to mind. (Wonder where she gets that from.)
Sharing thoughts with people I don't usually get a chance to connect with.
Spelling things out that I'm too shy to say in person.
Getting to share something that wouldn't necessarily come up were we to sit down one on one.
Plus, I like to have a record for record's sake. I've always been a journaler. I love looking back years later and remembering - what were we doing? how were we feeling? Let's be honest, we tend to reminisce with either an ultra negative, or ultra positive filter. Mine leans towards the ultra positive. Take for example, child birth. [Didn't see me going there did you?] My husband and I have an ongoing joke that I forget childbirth is hard. I'm always like, "oh it wasn't that bad."
He's like, "yes, it was. You were in a lot of pain. There were a lot of tears. A lot. And I had to leave the room. And then I came back. And we didn't eat. And we were tired. And you've blocked it out you crazy lady."
And I'm all like, "whhhattt? No, it was fine. Okay maybe it was slightly difficult."

But that's a different story.

Back to writing.
So here I am again. A new year. I love a new year - a fresh start, a chance to evaluate, to resolve, to think.

Speaking of which, why the break? It's been a mix of two things, that are maybe really one thing.

Purpose + parenting

Sometime in between when Emma was born and now, I had to do some evaluating. A lot of people had said jumping from one to two kiddos was hard. And it didn't initially feel hard in the sense that I expected - I still felt able to keep everyone fed & clothed, and I even figured out how to get to walmart with 2 under 2. #winning

But the thing that I did notice was, a surprising redefining of purpose. Suddenly, my day couldn't just be about my plan and my agenda. With one little tot running around, I could kinda easily (though it didn't feel like it at the time), drag my kid around with me, keep her relatively entertained, while I did a lot of what I wanted.

Once Emma was born, there truly just wasn't enough time or energy in my day to do everything I was used to doing. At first, I figured we'd 'adjust' and 'get the hang of it' and life as we had known it would resume. So, I waited. Through the summer, and the fall, thinking that any day now, I would magically have more time for myself and what I wanted.

Meanwhile, I'm reading through My Utmost for His Highest, and good old Oswald Chambers hits me over the head like a ton of bricks: "If you seek great things for yourself - God has called me for this and that; you are putting a barrier to God's use of you. As long as you have a personal interest in your own character, or any set ambition, you cannot get through into identification with God's interest. You can only get there by losing for ever any idea of yourself, and by letting God take you right out into His purpose for the world... I have to learn that the aim in life is God's, not mine... When I stop telling God what I want, He can catch me up for what he wants without let or hindrance."

As I read this, the Lord whispered in a voice as clear as a voice can be without being audible, "my life is not my own."

Almost instantly, life with 2 seemed to make sense.
My life is not my own.
There may or may not have been a brief period of internal, figurative kicking and screaming. But honestly, it was short-lived. In a way, this realization was the cure for so much frustration.

Any previous illusion that my life was my own was, well, just that, an illusion.
But now, it had been clearly spoken to me - my life was and is not my own. [By the way, this falls under the category of I-heard-it-100-times-in-church-before-but-one-day-it-made-sense-to-me-in-a-new-and-personal-way.]

I could stop being frustrated on days when I didn't get time for what I wanted.
I could stop being annoyed if my kids' naps interfered with my to-do list.
I could stop being annoyed if my toddler was a toddler, and I don't know, wanted my attention every time I sat down to write an email, or took every ounce of my energy when I'd been up with a sick baby, or spilled her oatmeal 3 times in one meal. [Oatmeal is so hard to clean up, by the way.]

And so, we've adjusted.
Or rather, I've adjusted.
Isn't it funny that often when you want everyone else around you to change and get with your own program, God is like, "nope, I'm going to change you and get you on my program."

Now, maybe you're tracking with me or maybe you're thinking, "why the heck are you telling me this and what the heck does it have to do with writing on this blog?"

The other, more practical, side of this whole my life is not my own business is - on a day to day basis, what am I going to spend my very limited "free" time on. Maybe a better way to ask the question is: How does my daily life fit into God's purpose?

That question led to some other questions:
Am I fully present with my children when they're awake? (Or do I prioritize my iPhone?)
Do I have mental energy to engage in conversation with my husband after our kids go to bed?
Do I put others first?
Am I investing in the community of people around me?
And, as it relates more specifically to blogging, does writing fit into what God has asked of me and called me to right now?

And, in these questions, I've kinda come full circle on this post. Back to a combination of purpose + parenting.

While waiting for answers and direction, I needed a break from writing. A break to allow more time to listen. To redirect. To learn how to love and parent and attend to my children. How to love and engage my husband and our family and friends. To learn how to turn off and unplug and rest again. And to see if there was any time left over for writing. To wait and see if it fits in my new purpose - the purpose of a life that isn't my own. The purpose that is the general laying down of your own life as you take up God's agenda.

And not that I have figured out all those things by any means, but I do feel like I'm in a place of renewal. Of having adjusted and gotten some of those questions answered in a way that allows me to write. And maybe sometime I'll share the answers. Or maybe not. But in the meantime, I'm hoping 2015 brings more time for doing a few things well.

Including writing.
But my life is not my own, so, we'll see.

Happy New Year, friends.

when you fail before you start

So, the other night, I was telling my husband how I've noticed some people in blog world do this "31-days" thing where they pick a topic and write on it for 31 days. I explained that I don't really spend much time these days reading blogs and didn't care very much about being a part of that 31-days-community, but that it seemed like a good challenge for me. I love writing, and though it's hard to find the time, maybe the goal of writing 31 days in a row about something would be good. I had been thinking about it for much of September, and even written a couple posts to jump start, assuming I wouldn't actually have time to write something 31 days in a row. (Does that defeat the purpose? I don't know. Probably. #imakemyownrules)

So, my sweet husband listened intently as I went on to describe my chosen topic along with my first few posts in more detail than he might have cared for. (He is a VERY good listener. Actually, he is a great listener. And he has patiently taught me how to be a better listener over the past 4.3 years. I didn't even know I was a bad listener before, but I was. Let's call my current listening skill level mediocre. #workinprogress)

Anyway, he was listening intently as I described my topic. He laughed, responded, encouraged me, threw out a few more ideas and then he said, "But it's already October 2."

WHAT!?

It's October?????

[Aside: I almost never know what the date is. As a former public school teacher, who wrote and/or saw the date 283 times every day, I can't tell you what a weird feeling it is to go to write a check (yes, I write checks sometimes), and then wonder what day it is, only to find it is is 3 plus or minus days away from the date I thought it was.]

And so, just like that, I had failed before I started.

31 days was a nice idea. But, it'll have to wait until next October. Or possibly October of 2024 2074, when I am certain that I will not have any small children to care for (at least on a minute-by-minute basis).

Until then, I've already written 2 of the posts. (Yeah, I got a huge jump start...)
And I'll publish those this week. And maybe I'll write a few others on that topic this month. Maybe not.

By the way, have you ever failed before you started? Don't leave me hangin' here...
"I'm never going to speak like that to my kids again..."
"I'm going to eat paleo..."
"I'm not going to use that credit card again..."
"I'm going to read my bible every morning..."

or, wait for it

"I'm going to work out 3 times a week."

Yeah, me too.
But, did you know there is grace for that.
We will never be able to do perfectly what we set out to do.
And so, there is grace.
Grace to start anew and grace to make it through the mundane and the ordinary, grace to achieve your goals, and grace to accomplish something great.

There is a lot of grace available.
Give yourself grace.
Start over.
And if you again fail before you start... grace.