Weddings are a beautiful joining of lives but they're also a Herculean feat for two people to become one. They're the beginning of a challenging but rewarding adventure of learning, of being vulnerable and of growing, of having sharp edges and rough spots intensify or be chaffed off. Today Ern and I went to a wedding and it was lovely and simple and elegant, the bride's hair all twisty romantic medievalesque-looking, sweet little yellow and white bouquets lined with kale, a twine fence with the names of guests hanging on it listed next to their table number. The reception was lengthy, lots of food including prime rib and cheese cake and many words, including thanks from the bride and groom. But more than what I saw, I thought more about the marvel of someone with all their complexities and needs and wants trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in someone else equally flawed-- and failing-- and learning that when that satisfaction is met Elsewhere the ability to forgive grows, the ability to truly love becomes.

Nature Walk

Today we took a walk through a park buried in the center of the city with a walking path that connects to others that would let you traipse over all of Canada. Our Edmonton part of it boasts a bridge over a river complete with a river boat. We took some pictures in the flowers and on Chinese lion statues. But sometimes it's just the trees that I can't help but feel kinship with and I'm not particularly green and don't think anyone would describe me as a tree hugger.
They whisper secrets but I still trust them with mine. They stretch out leafy arms higher and higher as if they could grasp the clouds in the endless blue.

Nature has a live, wild, complex beauty that nothing man-made can compare to. Nature's Maker is mysteriously beyond us after all, yet even more of a Comforter. It's the Creator who is the Savior. Yet we can see His glory reflected in His creation. The heavens declare it.

Media Overload

How is media able to suck us in, keep us hooked and make us consequently unsociable and not particularly productive? I know it has its place but TV, internet, and games on the phone are great time wasters and not the healthiest pursuits. Though I limit screen time, my kids crave it and act like I mistreat them when I don't allow them to have it. Some people argue to not bother trying to limit but let kids make themselves sick of media but I know from my own experience that I just keep coming back, so it stands to reason that they will too. Balance is hard.

Here's an interesting anecdote--Lukas videotaped himself reading The Big Ball of String. Print meets media. I might be able to handle that.

Joy of Life

This action shot of the girls by Lukas, big girl in front, little girl in back, is full of kidness. The child perspective on life, active, alive, enthusiastic, crazy fun, especially with somebody to share it w/. Sometimes I really wish I had that kind of joie de vivre and even more I wish I had it every day! After all, every day is a gift.

Why do my kids love water? It seems like they're always begging to go swimming or to play at a splash park, these great water parks that seem so odd to me as they proliferate a city that has a very short warm season and only one month that hasn't seen snow. I cringe at the cold water and sometimes wish I had their inhibitions.
Learning from doing, imagining, creating, discovering,recognizing what is true and really valuable takes a life time. I want to be saturated by the worthwhile and filled with purpose.

Rag dolls and rain

We had fun this past Saturday swimming at an outdoor pool now that it's finally hot enough and going garage saling. I bought the girls a sweet Cinderella rag doll that's Cinderella before the ball on one side and Cinderella after the ball on the other. As a kid I had one like it that was Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. The boys got a plastic bowling set which they had great fun with in the basement, messing up Daddy's stacks of freshly painted trim.
Sunday afternoon after church, lunch, and nap (for Lethei at least) we went to a wet picnic. It rained off and on the whole time, but we enjoyed sitting by the fire and listening to a story about fairies and eating all kinds of great nibblers like thick ham and cheese slices and strawberries and watermelon and carrots and cucumbers and fat roasted shrimp.
There's something mysterious and fantastical about the rain. It's all silver and misty, giving everything that Impressionist painting look. It's also romantic, I think, especially just a light rain,giving an excuse, if needed, to cuddle close to someone you love to keep warm and slightly dampening hair and clothes in an attractive, rumpled and more real somehow, way. Rain washes away veneers and dust and gives you a fresh start. It restores and promotes life and growth.
It's sweet to know the real and embrace it and yet to see the beauty of potential and possibility.

Dani Pettrey's Submerged has an exciting plot and the main character's struggle with God's complete forgiveness for her sin is heartwarming. The love story is sweet but not terribly sappy. The story's additional characters, while also appealing, do make for quite a lot for the reader to keep track of and detract to some extent from Bailey as the main character but they also lighten a story with quite a  bit of heavier material. All in all, I quite enjoyed this book and thought it an above average Christian fiction pick. The clever mystery especially makes the story more engaging and somewhat more complex and unusual.

Felicity has a secret hideout in the basement, or at least that's what the chalkboard says. She and the boys have so many adventures together.

There's something so sweet about sharing your lives with a buddy, a close friend, a brother or sister, a spouse. What's a secret without someone to tell it to, to keep it with?

Lego lessons

The boys love Legos. Liam especially could spend hours building things with Legos and playing in imaginary Lego lands with his little blue helmeted Lego man.
Like him, I've a tendency to build castles in the air, to live in the imagination, or some hoped for other existence that maybe I think might someday be real or maybe I know is pure fantasy.
There's so much to enjoy in the here and the now and while dreaming has its place, I hope I don't fail to appreciate what is in longing for what isn't or what I think might some day be. Funny thing about that tendency that if I keep it up even if I get what I think I want I won't probably be happy with it either. It might also be good for me to remember that it's probably not all I think it is anyway.
I'd take Liam over that blue helmet guy any day, hands down.

When Lethei misses her nap, she often has a melt-down at some point. Ernie took the kids on two walks today which probably didn't help. By bedtime she was so tired she was almost hysterical. And she begs for light so she's not sleeping in darkness. We leave the closet light on for her.
I too crave rest and a lighted path and am in need of the divine Parent's help in finding both.

A Little Creativity and Homemade Play Clay

The boys helped me make two pies yesterday afternoon, raspberry and strawberry. Actually, I've been doing a lot of baking yesterday, for me anyway. Sunday I took two quiche and an apple cake to church and I've made muffins and biscuits and cobbler all in the past couple weeks or so.

Today the kids and I made modeling clay, a simple recipe calling for two cups flour, one cup salt, two tablespoons oil and a half cup water, also several drops of food coloring. It makes a great play clay.

I've been thinking about getting a sewing machine and trying to sew something more than a simple mending job, which is virtually all I've done since junior high home ec. class.

There is something satisfying about creating something, perhaps it's part of the being made in the Creator's image. But nothing compares to the gorgeous people, plants, animals, landscapes He's responsible for, out of nothing, no less.

The Farm Thing

Today we took the kids to some relatives' hobby farm. On the way there, they were watching Bob the Builder when Lukas said, "Turn it off. I want to look at the countryside." A few minutes later, he announced, "Look! A big fat cow!" (you know you're a city slicker when . . .)
When we got there, the talkative Lukas told these people whom we really don't know well and are quite distantly related to, "This is it? This is a lot smaller than I expected."
But the kids had a great time feeding the horses dandelions, playing with puppies, throwing Frisbees for the collie to run after and sitting on the tractor, pretending to drive it. I was afraid half the time that they would break something or get hurt. Ern's cousin didn't help when she told me about a child getting in a horrible accident on the farm of some people she knew.
All the space was nice but it took us quite some time coming back before we found a place to eat lunch and when we were finally home, back to our little plot of land in the city, I found myself a little more content with our fishbowl status. It seems like it's always a give and take, making choices, sacrificing one thing for something else, so I think I'd better just think of the good in what I've got now and then in whatever God gives me next.

Glad for my blessings and trying to be happy for others in theirs as well.

parenting

My boys are rough and tumble, sometimes Calvin and Hobbes or Dennis the Menance-ish. They are warriors but they're lovers too and they give the best hugs, the kind that make you feel like you can fly. My girls are princesses but they're also fiesty and sassy and sometimes unfortunately manipulative or angry.

Ern and I have been praying more lately for our family in part because friends and family keep having babies recently and we're overwhelmed for them as well as for us in this great task, for our parenting, for wisdom and strength far beyond ourselves.
May they love life and live it generously. May they know God and serve Him fully.

Cares

Grace and peace to you.
What a greeting!
There are so many things to be concerned about and sometimes life only seems to grow even more and more confusing. I don't know about you but I feel like I have to make so many choices and then afterward I wonder if I made the right one.
And I worry about the choices other people are making as well!
Do I believe that I am in control of everything?
That it all depends on me?
Then why do I act like I do?
Cast
all
your
cares
on
Him
for
He
cares
for
you.

Good Fences

There is a reason Frost said "good fences make good neighbors" but as he also said, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." It's hard to live close and confrontational without scraping up against each other, more than once. Maybe in the city more so than in the country. Maybe more so in the summer than in the winter. Maybe more so when you have little in common and aren't close. Maybe more so when you are. But whoever lives next to you or with you, may you find mercy to help you know your boundaries and when to be a wall and when to be a door.

Yesterday we had a tea party, just the family. I put out some nicer and some sturdier tea cups, saucers, tea pot and sugar and creamer. I urged my boys to be gentlemen, but they gulped down the tea and the girls turned up their noses at it. Lukas kept asking to be excused before we were done. We had three courses: finger sandwiches, meat and vegetable pie, and scones, fruit, and cookies.
And while it was a lot rowdier than the church ladies' tea we'd had a few days earlier at the Rutherford House, it was in some ways just as nice or even nicer. Lukas thanked me for it. Lici told the boys all about how it was "just like" the Rutherford House tea, as she'd gone with the church ladies. Ern said it was fun.

If I'm always waiting for the kids to grow up before I pull out any of my nice china or we see a Shakespeare play or go to a concert, I've a hunch they won't be much interested in those things then. And think of all the fun we'd have missed out on.

Moonblood Review

Moonblood's author Anne Elisabeth Stengl obviously has a fantastic imagination. I really enjoy how she undergirds her interesting characters and what happens to them, with allusions to Christian ideas like the need for mercy and forgiveness, that absolving ourselves isn't possible. I also appreciate her allusions to classical concepts. I love the way this book deals with appearance versus reality and the nature of true beauty. However I do feel that there's just almost too much going on in this book--it's just a bit too complicated, with the different plots past and present, all the complex characters, and all the allegorical ideas. Still I appreciate this author and hope she keeps writing. I received this book from Bethany House in order to review it.

I told my teen class that I would reach out to my new neighbors this week. Now they'll all keep me accountable. I've been discouraged because these neighbors don't exactly look like my kind of people. But what's important is that they're loved by God and that I'm His person and He wants me to reflect Him. May He help me to be a light.

I had an ah-ha moment when I said something depracating about myself and a friend asked, "Are you fishing for a compliment?"
I hadn't really thought about it--that in fact to some extent that probably was what I was doing.
Isn't it interesting that putting yourself down is really not that different from bragging? It's similarly self-focused, self-oriented.

I taught, I learned

In the beginning was God.
W/o Him, nothing would be--except for Him.
Today I taught highschoolers about the inheritance of a Christian, the "for the good of [us]" life God gives us now and in the future, the promises no one can take from us, and that we can cling to no matter what happens. Today I taught elementary schoolers about the super power available to God's children, to enable them to be kind even to those who are not kind to them.
Today I learned again that God is faithful.
He was, and is, and is to come.

Why do my kids love to hear stories about Ern and me when we were kids? His checking out the haunted house story, his speeding in his wagon down the hill toward the busy street, my childhood tree house adventures--they fascinate the kids. If our stories are about us when we were almost the same age as the kids are now, so much the better. Even Lethei loves to talk about what is for "her age."
But they enjoy sharing in our adult adventures too. Lukas told everybody he talked to for several days about our tenth anniversary. He seemed to think it really exciting that his mom and dad had been married for ten years. What a day that was too! Ern had offered to share it with me but ended up spending most of the morning visiting a man in our church struggling with cancer and then we drove to his grandparents to visit with Ern's parents and some aunts and an uncle of his while they were sorting through his grandparents things (they've just moved to an elderly persons' home). We did manage to grab a burger at A and W for some quality not quantity (twenty minutes?) time alone together.
But it was a special day. Ern brought me breakfast in bed and gave me forget me nots and ivy (which I'd had in my wedding bouquet and he remembered) in a "tin" (the metal for 10 years) hanging pot. I gave him a book and a card. Then friends at church, after hearing about our day, offered to babysit the kids a few days later, while we went out for dinner at a nice restaurant with a gift card they gave us.
Now Ernie's been talking about trying to take a little get away some time this summer.
To let go of hurts and regrets, to remember the sweet, funny, and poignant moments, and enjoy making new, similarly complex memories, and pull the best from them as well, maybe I can learn w/ my kids. I just caught a fly in mid air! See, I'm not too old to accomplish new things and enjoy life, as God's giving it to me at "my age."