Thea at Almost 3 Months

First Snow of Winter....

This year the boys loved it outside -- stayed out playing together for quite awhile -- coming back in for hot chocolate every so often. Thankful that Brad sent me off to a Saturday morning church meeting with Thea and gave the boys the fun of backyard snow fun (with all the wrestling on and off of snow clothes and the circus of a toddler and preschoolers drinking hot chocolate).

 

Dancing with Daddy!

Not a Safe Lion, but the Good King

I feel very confused about how to make school decisions for Atticus. I have to choose which schools to tour and I have already turned in my charter school forms to be put in the lottery for the spring. And I have the dates written down to fill out the school choice forms for the other schools. So many decisions about neighborhoods and curricula and how it will affect their friendships, connection to their neighborhood, and anxiety about our deliberate decision not to homeschool and our inability to afford private school for four children. Oh, please help us make the best decision. I want my children to love learning, to love truth, beauty, goodness; to love each other. To love others. To love Christ with all their brain, all their heart, all their might in small things and big things. I want them to find what God has made them to do and to be and do it, be it full-tilt -- joyfully, diligently, efficaciously.

Pretty Ears!

This morning Leah & I took our daughters to get their ears pierced. I was so excited and Leah was so brave!! The girls hardly cried at all and they both look so pretty! Hooray! I hope they become wonderful friends as they grow up and have this shared moment (-:

We went to the Piercing Pagoda at the Mall of America. There are restrictive laws in Minnesota against needle piercing for infants and after much research including asking three pediatricians I chose this route. The woman was efficient, professional, and good with the babies and us moms. I was glad. Oh, and in case you want to know, the baby has to be at least 2 months old and have had their first set of vaccinations.

This looks "medieval" but in this picture no piercing had occurred -- the lady had just put a marker dot on Thea's earlobe. Yep. I think she cried less in the actual piercing than she did while I held her head for the initial preparation.
 

I Just Can't Help Myself....

 

Life Together

Making sugar cookies from scratch -- this seems so sweet and home-y and yet it is a great trial for me -- me of the let's-not-make-a-mess; me of the can't-handle-zillions-of-tiny-fidget-ings-extra-inefficient-five-hundred-hands. Aaahhh! I am not good with little kids...and yet I love my children and I want them to learn to cook and to have the fun of eating cookies they made themselves so I forge ahead very imperfectly with a full heart and forgiving children.

Sometimes you just can't get your exercising in without some creative use of time & space -- The boys love my work-out DVD. They will do the entire thing with me though it usually devolves into wrestling for them and some skilled choreography for me (our living room is not that big, guys!). Here I am entertaining the troops in a decidedly un-couth way of making pretend farts with every "sit-bend". Oh yes, I have sunk low low into boy-ness.

 

Last week I was able to get together with Anne & William Golliher & Leah and Rose Miller. This was the first time Anne got to meet Thea in person (-: