conversations in the car...

calvary: "what are our bodies made of?"

me: "bone and meat."

hysterical laughter from harper and calvary

calvary: "really?!?"

me: "yep"

harper: "well, it's a good thing we aren't made of cupcakes."

me: "why's that?"

harper: "cause i would eat myself."

to my babies...

i pray you always know how much i love you.

she's quick...

i was reminded tonight of a conversation we had with harper yesterday while shopping. we saw a young girl who was just about, if not, taller than her mom. we told harper that she would never be taller than me, to which she responded:
"oh yes i will cause when you get old you'll shrink."

time just keeps flying...

on wednesday calvary turned 4 years old. 4. on tuesday he was only 3. it is so difficult to process how my children aging effects me. on one hand i am excited about what the future holds. what will they grow up to be? what will be their strengths? what will be their weaknesses? but on the other hand, i am sad about the time that we have lost...the things that i have not done to take advantage of the boyhood. have i held him enough? have i colored enough pictures with him? have i made up enough funny stories with him? sooner than i would like, he will have no interest in me holding him and coloring pictures and playing with army men will be distant memories and birthdays remind me of that.

i want to be the best mother in the world and i want for my kids to remember their childhood with joy and say that they know without question that their mother enjoyed being their mother. birthdays are a time of reflection for me. i pray that i smile a little more everyday, laugh at their silliness, engage in their world, and just treasure each day more.

calvary was a gift to me 4 years ago and the fact that he has been entrusted to me blows my mind. all of my children challenge me and expand my vision of the world in different ways. harper challenges me with her independence and calvary challenges me with his vulnerability. God is funny how he gives people characteristics that can be either a strength or a weakness. calvary's vulnerability leads him to be incredibly family centered. calvary wants us all to be together. it doesn't matter what we are doing; he just wants us to "do something as a family". on the other hand, that same vulnerability makes it difficult for him to understand and be understood by other people.
this fourth year has been a good one and i always envision celebrating with grandiose measures. calvary is a much more low key kind of guy and enjoys the simple things in life a little more than others...cough cough harper...

he chose to celebrate his birthday at the mountains and so we had a little party for him there with the cake that he had picked out.

on his actual birthday i had this vision of him waking up to balloons and decorations and presents. i tried to keep all the details a secret, so i waited until the night before his birthday to buy the supplies. unfortunately, when i opened the door to the car calvary rushed out of the house to greet me and the entire glory of my bounty was revealed. the balloons. the bike. everything was laid out for him to see. all because i had forgotten to get my diet dr. pepper out of the back before i started home. sigh.

we still decorated, even though i was sufficiently bummed, and set up all of his gifts. he told me he would act surprised for me and the next morning he did just that and was thrilled for all of his presents.

after we dropped harper off at school our friends came over to spend the day. adam is a new friend to calvary, but he is like a gift from heaven for him....and me. they have so much fun slaying dragons, setting up camp outs, and making other enormous messes throughout the house and the best part is that adam is so invulnerable that he tolerates calvary's vulnerability with relative ease...unless calvary manages to punch him in the stomach a few days post op for singing...understandably, moments like this cause a bit of strain for even the most laid back of people. he's a real man's man. a tough guy. and after spending most of his days surrounded by me and harper, calvary needs some male companionship. someone to burp with and shoot things with. stuff boys do. (calvary's friend, adam....he's a real tough guy)

after we picked harper up we waited for kyle to get home so that we could head up to mom and dad's house for the birthday date. we dropped off "the kids" as calvary called them and went to red robin for a celebratory meal. the song and ice cream was a bit too much for him, but i could tell he secretly enjoyed it because even though he ducked into my lap i could see his grin.

we then headed out to bowling and the arcade.

in spite of the fact that a little boy followed us around the arcade telling us how easy all the games were or how difficult they were, we really enjoyed ourselves. calvary was genuinely happy and it did my heart good to see him so. we wrapped up the evening with gifts and hugs from nana and poppa and jade.

i hope that the happy simplicity of the beginning of this fourth year is a parallel to the year as a whole. i pray that we see many more days of genuine happiness and i am glad that calvary has taught me a few lessons in the truth behind the adage that sometimes less truly is more.

april 14th...

"he was walking her home--holding her hand..."

one day my daughters will more than likely marry men that they love and when i think back on my life and the choices i made in the areas of boys and love i feel the overwhelming urge to pray a covering over the lives and choices of my sweet girls.
i have heard plenty of parents say that they have prayed or are praying for the spouses of their children, but it wasn't until i became a mother that i realized how something that seems so distant can become such a pressing prayer need now.
i dated a great guy while i was in my last few years of high school and beginning years of college. while we did not end up married, i know with confidence that the relationship was a success. he was a man of God who valued virtue (his and mine) above all other pressing influences. i have told kyle that i pray that harper has dating experiences like that. on the way home from dropping harper off at school yesterday morning i heard a song on the radio that immediately pushed my heart into prayer. the song was about a couple that started dating at eighteen and ends with the wife dying in her eighties. it is a song i have heard a million times, but this morning it moved me in a different way.
for the first time i thought of harper as the girl in the song and not myself.
i prayed immediately that God would consecrate harper (and baby #4) for the man that will love her with a love described in this song.
i pray that she knows the love of a husband that truly cherishes her as a gift. that she will be valued as a treasure and that she will never feel unprotected or alone in her relationship.
i can pray these things for her because God has blessed me with a husband who shows me an immeasurable amount of love that i feel unworthy of every day.
i have also known the emptiness, insecurity, shame, and worthlessness associated with making all the wrong choices in a relationship.
my heart's desire is that she marries a man who will love her like kyle loves me. i cannot imagine wanting anything more for my daughters than for them to be blessed enough to be loved like God intended them to be loved. and i may feel like i am undeserving of that love every day, but i do not question the worth of my daughters and i know that God has created us all intending that we know that love.

i age well...

today harper asked me if i would take her to nazareth...just after she asked me if i was a little girl when Jesus was alive.

spring break 2010...

it has been a long time since i have last posted. almost a month. i blame that on the awesome weather and the desire to take a very literal spring break. i also blame the fact that i have reached single digits in the weekly countdown to baby number 4. cue the paranoia and panic that i have experienced with EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY CHILDREN....and while i may want to look back and remember these emotions one day, the thought of documenting them requires me to think on them more...i also blame how insanely busy we have been over the past few weeks. kyle went out of town forever...well, i guess technically it was only 4 nights...but it felt like forever. thankfully, my friends and family stepped in and we enjoyed their company which helped pass the time quickly. harper had a reading contest at school which consumed almost all of our spare time. this is not an exaggeration. in a span of 3 weeks, harper read 3,809 pages. she read in the car. she read at the breakfast table. she read after dinner. she read before dinner. she read at the library (which we visited 2 times a week---go on, try that with oliver jack---i dare you). she read at the ice cream shop. she read to me while i showered. she read to me while i tried to sleep. unfortunately, she was not the top reader in her class. i'm not going to say that i find it unfair that since parents were allowed to count pages that they (the parents) had read to the child some of the numbers were inflated because that would be petty. i'm also not going to say that out of harper's 3,809 pages only 236 of those were read by me because she insisted on only counting her pages. no, instead i am going to focus on how proud i am of her...and slightly worried about the competitive drive that left me dragging her out of the library at 7:45 pm. we celebrated the resurrection of Jesus. thanks to harper's evangelism we were not to forget the true meaning of easter sunday. although be sure to know that we definitely enjoyed more than our share of sugary treats. we also took a trip to the mountains with our friends poppy, julie, and margo. i would like to say that it was fun. but after the initial day of gem mining, fossil digging, ice cream and hot tubs it was mostly a down hill battle between us and the monster that sometimes lives inside of calvary. i am still trying to forget the details. it was a week with the most promising potential that was devastated by the paralyzing realities. sigh. this weekend we have spent getting things together for the fourth installment (what were we thinking!?!?!) and recovering from our vacation. i'd like to say that things are winding down for us, but that's just not the case. on the horizon lies harper's kindergarten graduation, my baby brother's wedding, my 28th birthday (i'm only 27?!?!), our 6th wedding anniversary, and the birth of a child.

i'm going to try to be a bit more diligent to this blogging. after all, things will only be this easy for another 8 weeks. wink. smile. sigh...