We had a party for Cash this evening in our backyard and here are a few of my favorite pictures of him from tonight:

The bounce house that my friend Corrine let us borrow was a huge hit with all the kids!

We were singing Happy Birthday to Cash in this picture.

He’s about to dig in.

Yeah, I think he likes it.

The party tonight got me thinking about Bauer’s 2nd birthday party. We invited a few of his little buddies from our playgroup at that time over to our house to celebrate with a cookie cake from the same place that we got Cash’s cookie cake and we had digger plates and napkins and the kids all wore construction worker hats.

I had forgotten that I made smoothies for the kids for Bauer’s party too. Gettin’ him started early!

Hopefully everyone knows who Tucker is by now. Cash’s cake tonight said “Happy 2nd Birthday Cash & BoBo.” BoBo is his little stuffed monkey that he sleeps with every night and totes around when we go places.

Okay so I was really excited when I found this picture to see that for Bauer’s party 3 Septembers ago, I was wearing the exact same pair of shorts and the exact same Old Navy tank top that I’ve been wearing all summer this year (and every summer in between). Tonight I was wearing my green shorts just like the khaki ones above and my gray Old Navy tank top in place of the purple one. It was chilly outside today, though, so I had a long-sleeve shirt on too, but I love that I can say I’m getting good mileage out of these clothes I love so much!

That’s Bauer’s buddy Nico in the background and Bauer’s buddy Tucker in the foreground. Tucker looked a bit better back then than he does now.

This photo has no significance to 2nd birthday parties, but I just found it when looking for the other pics and wanted to show you how cute my little 2-year old Bauer was when he was all dressed up for my sister’s wedding back in 2007.

I’m calling it a night, a good night.

Ms. Cheryl, who is one my mom’s dearest friends, and who wrote Comment #4 on my blog post about voting for Lauren’s video! Congratulations Ms. Cheryl! I will send you your Starbucks gift card this week. Would you mind emailing me your address when you get a chance?

Still no word on whether Lauren’s video won….I keep checking her website Writing from Scratch but she doesn’t know yet, as of 3:13 p.m. Central Time. I will post on here once I know, or you can check her blog yourself at your convenience.

Thanks for participating, everyone!

The boys liked being on the backhoe and tractor at my grandparents’ house when we visited NC a couple weeks ago.

Cash liked looking out the airport window for planes and he likes his new Thomas toddler backpack that we got him as an early birthday gift so he could carry it on our trip.

He likes his sweatband too!

I like my $9.50 Old Navy shades (and of course I like my tattoo). I thought I was going to buy some sunglasses from The Sunglass Hut so we recently ordered a SGH gift card from our Discover Rewards Program. However, I ended up not finding any I really loved at SGH and finding these ones I did (and do) love at Old Navy. So…all of that to say I have a $60 SGH gift card that I’m trying to sell for $40. If you know of anyone who’s interested, let me know.

Bauer likes this shirt he made at the space-themed VBS he attended earlier in the summer. He already has it set aside to wear this week for Cash’s birthday party on Wednesday night. Cash likes the new red shirt with Disney characters that my aunt gave him for his birthday when we home visiting family. I like my mom’s shirt, and I also like the cool old floor in my grandmother’s house.

We all like our new Snack Taxis. I posted more about them on the MealBaby blog today. “Edgy Veggie” is my favorite.

Bauer likes pretending to talk on the phone, especially if it’s a phone in a hotel room.

And TJ? Well, TJ likes getting our new house all ready for us to move into. He has been working so hard and doing a fabulous job. We have officially started packing and have less than 2 weeks to go!

We’ve got some cute video of Cash eating his little bowl of ice cream tonight at Sweet Tomatoes and saying he’s two when we asked him how old he is. TJ just put the video clip on Facebook so check it out!

As a way to celebrate Cash’s birthday and spend time doing something fun as a family, we spent 4 hours earlier today at Raging Waves water park in Yorkville, which is about 45 minutes away from our house. It was our first time there and it was a lot of fun!

We got home around 2:30 and both kids were asleep in their beds in no time! While they napped, I enjoyed writing up a little blog post about my friend Lauren’s great video that she entered in a contest and that might be about to win her and her husband a year’s worth of their mortgage paid….so make sure you don’t miss that post, especially if you want to win a Starbucks gift card.

I have this friend Lauren who is one of my favorite people in Orlando! And I really, really think she’s gonna write a book someday. But for now, I have to get my fix of her wonderful way with words via her blog, called Writing from Scratch. Well, on her blog recently I saw that she is in the running to get her mortgage paid for a year because of this video she made about life at home with her kids and submitted to a contest that a home-building company called Taylor Morrison is sponsoring. Not only is Lauren in the running, but her video is currently in 1st place out of the 10 finalists!!

I want you to see the video first of all. Lauren’s is the Week 2 video (second from the left) – “Memories Made From Scratch.” Here’s the link to the website where it’s listed along with the 9 other finalists.

The voting goes through Tuesday night, and each person can only vote once, but if you vote for Lauren’s video and tell me you voted in the comment section on my blog, I will pick one winner at random this coming Wednesday morning and send you a $5 gift card to Starbucks. How does that sound?

Wait – Let’s make the deal better. If you get a spouse, co-worker, family member, or friend to vote, too, make another comment here and tell me that they voted and you’ll have another chance at the Starbucks gift card. As many people as you can get to vote, is how many times you can put a comment here that says you got a person you know to vote and also how many extra times you will get entered in my fun little drawing.

Lauren’s work (and Lauren herself) is worth way more than just a $5 gift card, but that would be enough to get me to do something as simple as watch a cool video and then click the Vote button for a friend of a friend. I hope it moves you to do the same. The website does ask you to create an account in order to vote, but it literally took me less than a minute and there is no obligation to do anything once you have an account. It just lets you vote for the video. Also as another incentive, everyone who votes for a video as a part of this contest is also registered on the website to win your own mortgage paid for a year.

I love Lauren’s blog-writing skills so much that doing this little shout-out for Lauren’s video and doing my own little giveaway on my blog as a way to get more votes for her is just my way of expressing my gratitude to God that he made Lauren a writer and that I was lucky enough to know her when we lived in Orlando.

Don’t forget: Voting ends Tuesday night, August 31st, and Lauren’s video is the second one from the left here.

Thank you!

Cash HATED the sand!

I have been having some major second thoughts about homeschooling lately. If you would have asked me a few months ago, I think I would have said I was 99% sure that is the route I wanted to go, but over these past few weeks, something has started stirring in me and I can tell my heart and mind are changing.

It started just a tiny bit when I visited my friend Shannon in Florida back in June. She and I were talking about homeschooling and one thing she mentioned was what a great public school experience she had and how some of her teachers had really impacted her and influenced her life in big ways. I didn’t really have that experience in my school years, but the way Shannon talked about it sounded really nice. She wasn’t trying to convince me not to homeschool….if anything, it was probably more the other way around. I wasn’t trying to convince her, but I was feeling so sure of this being the route I wanted to go just a few months back, that I’m sure I spoke pretty strongly in favor of schooling at home. In fact, after the time spent with me, plus some other factors to be sure, Shannon decided to take her son out of the preschool she had him all signed up for this fall and keep him at home with her another year. So I guess we influenced one another more than we realized. I didn’t leave Florida thinking at all that I wouldn’t homeschool, but it did just give me a different perspective on sending Bauer to school, which I guess you could say was a seed that since then has started to grow further in other ways.

Even Bauer wasn't peachy-keen on it. He did enjoy the waves though!

We just bought a house in Naperville which is a big step for us because up till now, I think we haven’t really felt settled, and when you are not sure where you will be living when your kids get to school age, it is quite comforting to think you don’t even have to worry about the place or the school district since you plan to homeschool anyway.  Well, I am convinced that when we least expected the blessing of a home, God gave us a little present and said, “Here, I have something for you and I’m not gonna make you work for it or anything. You can just have it because I love you. If you had gotten that other house – the short sale one in Aurora that you tried so hard for 4 months to get – it wouldn’t have been the end of the world and I would have still loved you and good things would have still happened in your life living there, but this is so much better for you because I know what you like and that you want to walk places and still be near downtown and you need some more room for the boys to run around and grow, so here is the house I was holding just for you. Even if it doesn’t have a 47 in the address, I hope you like it!”

We do!!!!!! That deserved a lot of exclamation points! We are so thankful and happy to be moving to a new (and bigger) house in just a couple weeks. It’s not a new house, as in just-built (it was built in 1960-something, making it approximately 47 years old) but it is new to us, and it has been remodeled on the inside, and the outside has just been painted, and it has a new roof, and is about to have a new driveway and new windows! Whew!

And it is 0.3 miles from Trader Joe’s which will be just fabulous. Enough said about that.

Cash was a lot happier when we got back to the pool area of our hotel.

And now back to the homeschool debate in my head: Well, our new house is just around the corner from the neighborhood elementary school. I don’t know if the close proximity is the thing or what, but now that we are feeling a lot more settled in Naperville after buying a house (even though we haven’t even moved in yet), I am thinking how great it’s gonna be to get to walk Bauer to school every day.  No drop off or pick up lines, and I could practically see him at recess if I walked to the corner of our street and looked. Side note: when TJ was in elementary school, he got to come home from school every day at lunch because his house was right across the street from the school, and he would eat 1 or 2 peanut butter and jam (not jelly) sandwiches, a huge plastic cup of cows milk (ewww!) and some cookies. That is a story I’ve heard probably more times than any other from his childhood and I just like hearing it for some reason.

Bauer had never seen a Lazy River before, but he jumped right in.

You know I visited my friend Gretchen in Texas back in April so I could observe her as she homeschooled her two boys, and I just loved seeing her in their home classroom doing school. She was a big inspiration to me, especially because I feel like our personalities are similar in that we like having some structure and a rhythm to our days and it was great to see how that could look played out in the homeschool arena. I also thought it was so cool that one afternoon after lunch, we headed to one of Gretchen’s friend’s homes who also homeschools her kids and could spend time with others and let the kids play together when normally they would have been tied up at school.

He couldn't get enough of the waterslide!

How did I get from that excellent visit in April, where I first learned about Tikki-Tikki-Tembo No-Sa-Rembo Chari-Bari-Ruchi Pip-Peri-Pembo and have loved him ever since, to where I am today thinking I am most likely not going to homeschool? I think the main thing that has happened to me, or for me, is that I’ve started to realize that the most important thing to me is that I treat Bauer with love and kindness and respect. I don’t want to just do this occasionally but I want to fight like h-e-double-hockey-sticks to DEPEND AND NOT DEMAND, to ACCEPT AND NOT ASSERT, in other words to give up feeling like I always have to be in control of things, which I think is the underlying cause of my general frustration and passive-aggressiveness (which ends up looking a lot like anger) with the kids. I want to give Bauer a safe place to land, and while I had been thinking that meant for me to homeschool as a way to have the quality time with him at home (and also to protect him in some ways from whatever I may fear is out there at school), I think what it actually might mean is that I use the time and energy that I would have put toward planning and implementing school with Bauer to just letting go of trying to control him and instead just accept him and enjoy him and let him enjoy me.

I know that all might sound a little vague, like isn’t homeschooling something i can actually DO to work on a relationship with Bauer and look how great all the alphabet activities this summer have turned out, and how exactly are you gonna use your time and energy to let go of control, like that’s something you just decide to do and it’s done? Well, I can’t quite answer that yet, but my overall feeling is that choosing to homeschool Bauer would be setting myself up for failure. And I don’t mean I would fail at figuring out what to do with Bauer….in fact that is something I think I would enjoy and be good at and will actually sort of miss by not homeschooling him. The kind of failure I’m talking about is failing Bauer emotionally and relationally. And I feel like that’s the fast track I’m on if I just keep going like I am, trying to control, placing demands and expectations on the people around me, holding myself to an unattainable level of perfection and then taking out my frustration with my imperfections on my kids. I think Bauer needs the space and freedom from me and I need it from him if we are to bloom and grow well. I could see it getting ugly if I try to homeschool and Bauer nor myself lives up to my notions of what it should look like and how each of us should perform in those roles. And let’s be realistic, Bauer is 4 and I act 4 a lot of times, so really it’s just not gonna be perfect. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.

And so help me God, somehow I’m gonna spend my time and my energy and my strength making peace with the reality of that, which really means making peace with myself and with Bauer.

Cash was very happy to sit in the chair and watch for Bauer.

I think this is going to serve Bauer in the best way possible, that he can go to school each day knowing that I love him and can’t wait to see him in the afternoon when I pick him up and then we can talk about his day, instead of me trying to do a couple hours of activities or lessons with him to get it done and finding myself impatient and frustrated and taking that out on him, unfortunately, and then being glad when it’s over so he and Cash can get out of my hair and go play while I try to recover from what just happened. If you think I’m being a bit dramatic or exaggeratory, well I probably am, but I also bet if you asked Bauer if I’m hard to please and he actually understood your question, he would probably say yes. Let me stop right here and remind myself, though, as my wise friend Ellen who raised two boys herself reminded me recently, that I’ve certainly tempered the bad with lots of good, and that counts for something. It counts for a lot in fact! I don’t want to live like I just described above (caring more about the task of homeschooling than the relationship I have with Bauer in the process) because that isn’t life and what isn’t life can’t bring life to others. The way that Todd Cartmell, who wrote Respectful Kids, talked about parenting styles is either being a demolition expert or a gardener. I know I have been hanging out on the demolition expert side of the fence too much when what I really want to be is a gardener, a good gardener. I think for me that not homeschooling Bauer is a step toward the gardening side and I’ll gladly take that.

And maybe I’m beating a dead horse, but lastly, it sort of solidified the schooling debate for me when I thought of the fact that it would feel like I was punishing Bauer to keep him home with me. I think what Bauer wants is ME and the best way I can give him the best me there is at this point in my life is to give up in so many ways and let someone else teach him reading, writing, and arithmetic and I’ll teach him what unconditional love and patience and respect look like. I have come to the conclusion that the GOOD MOM he will hopefully get by me not homeschooling him will be better than if he got me as the GOOD TEACHER AND SIMULTANEOUS BAD MOM if I did homeschool him. I think in the back of my mind I was thinking if I homeschooled Bauer it would make up for the deficit that exists from the fact that I haven’t been there for him emotionally or relationally so much of the time. But really I don’t think it would make up for it at all…I think it would potentially make matters worse. I know I act crazy sometimes, but why would I do that?

The hippo baby slide was a thrill for Cash once I showed him how a few times.

I am very excited about the possibilities of the future. This year I will have Bauer at home with me since he misses the cut off for Kindergarten by 15 days, and I can’t wait to do our Library Day each Monday while Cash is at Parents Day Out. I really think we are gonna have fun doing that together. I also may do a few of the lessons in the book I have already purchased called The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading as a way to test the waters and see if he seems ready and eager to learn to read or not. I don’t want him to know everything for starting Kindergarten a year from now, but I do think it will be nice to at least begin teaching him to read, or if nothing else, to read aloud to him a lot this coming year before he goes to school. I’m excited that I’ll get to have some time with just Cash when Bauer goes to school, assuming we don’t have another baby by then, which I sort of hope we do. But even then, Cash will get a totally different experience of me than if I was homeschooling Bauer and I really think it will be better for Cash in that way too. I am excited that Bauer can be released of the burden I was about to place on myself and him, and so thankful that I’ve walked this road I have in order to be at the place I am today saying that I truly 100% considered homeschooling as a viable option, and I still totally admire and respect all my amazing friends who do it, but I won’t be joining the ranks for now. I don’t know what I’ll be thinking a month or six months from now, but this is where I am today and I thank you for listening.

And just in case you missed it on the MealBaby blog, I wanted to make sure you see what I saw in NC. Two sides of the same sign in front of a roadside produce stand….

Love it!

I could maybe forgive them this mistake.

But this?!

Then I started thinking this last one was perhaps a subtle attempt to remind people not to text and drive, or take pictures and drive!

He colored and cut out Weather cards and used White-Out for the snow.

We read a couple W books, and did you know The Funny Little Woman is by the same author as that fabulous book Tikki Tikki Tembo?

I also got Bauer a special W DVD from our library, which of course, he loved!

And here’s a fun Wax art project we did.

First you grate the wax crayons.

Then you trace circles onto wax paper and cut them out.

You sprinkle the wax onto the waxy side of the wax paper circles.

You smile as you go.

Then you place another wax circle waxy side down on top of the first circle and iron them together on a low heat setting. Repeat 11 times to get this.

Then tape them onto a window and let the light shine through to see how pretty they all look.

That was really a fun project. I had only planned to make a couple wax circles but Bauer wanted to keep going and going.

Bauer also enjoyed getting to weigh objects that start with the letter W. I had fun looking around the house for W objects and putting them in a brown paper bag for Bauer to reach into with his eyes closed and pick one thing at a time to weigh on the kitchen scale. He also got some practice writing numbers, and he was wearing his patch to help strengthen his eye.

Speaking of patches, check out Xavier the pirate Bauer made for the letter X.

Here’s his Xylophone…

and his X-ray (maybe White-Out wasn’t such a good idea in this case).

I wasn’t sure The Lorax was such a good idea either when I realized how long it is, but Bauer has fallen in love with the story and we’ve read it often during the course of X.

Wow! August 15, 1989. Almost 21 years to the day.

Feeling the burn.

Nice ribbon and farmer's tan.

And from today’s Naperville Sprint Triathlon…

Bauer and his buddy Branton cheering me on!

Actually feeling pretty good!

Nice medal and farmer's tan.

One cool thing about the race is that they put everyone’s age on their left calf in permanent marker. When else are you in a setting with a mass group of people and you know everyone’s age at a glance? Kind of weird but kind of cool. There were a lot of young 47 year olds, and some old looking 33 year olds.

It’s official, I do believe, that Bauer has given up his afternoon naps. Now I feel like I need to be taking them instead, mainly because I’m having to get myself used to not having a protected chunk of time in the afternoon during which I knew both kids would be asleep. That makes me tired just thinking about it.

However, I’ve made a decision in the last few days to go to bed early, which for me is between 10 and 10:30, so I can get up a half hour before the kids and have some protected time then. I am spending the early morning time reading and journaling and praying for help for myself and others. What I’m reading is The Message Bible, just the New Testament right now, but I’m going from start to finish like it’s a book. I do enjoy books, so I thought that reading the Bible in a different translation like it’s a book would give me a fresh perspective. It was Frederick Buechner who inspired me to try this out by something he wrote in the June 15 reading from his book Listening to Your Life.

Buechner is giving some practical suggestions on reading the Bible and numbers 3, 4, and 5 really stood out to me.

3. If you have even as much as a nodding acquaintance with a foreign language, try reading the Bible in that. Then you stand a chance of hearing what the Bible is actually saying instead of what you assume it must be saying because it is the Bible…..

4. If you don’t know a foreign language, try some English version that you’ve never tried before – the New English Bible, Goodspeed’s translation, J. B. Phillips’s New Testament, or any other you can lay your hands on. The more far-out the better. Nothing could be farther out than the Bible itself….

5. It may sound like fortune-telling, but don’t let that worry you. Let the Bible fall open in your lap and start there. If you don’t find something that speaks to you, let it fall open to something else. Read it as though it were as exotic as the I Ching or the Tarot deck. Because it is.

Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, that’s the feeling I get almost every morning when I read what Buechner has to say in Listening to Your Life. I think getting up early and starting my day with Buechner, God, and myself is really going to help me listen to my life. And hopefully it will give me more time for writing in the afternoons. That’s my plan anyway. We’ll be launching a MealBaby blog very soon so I’m working on some posts for that as well.

Yesterday afternoon, when Bauer wasn’t napping, he helped me prepare a Peach-Blueberry-Cherry Crisp that we could have for dessert later that evening. I didn’t take a picture before we dug in, but here’s what was left last night.

While the crisp was cooking, we took a family outing to Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things we needed, including some vanilla soy ice cream to go with the crisp. I thought I could buy just the vanilla kind, but realized I would have had to buy a mango-vanilla combo to get vanilla and I wasn’t in the mood to dig around the container to try and scoop out just vanilla for everyone. So I ended up buying this instead.

It’s like what you get at Red Mango. The pleasantly tart taste of plain vanilla yogurt with live cultures, and even though our family doesn’t consume cow’s-milk based products very often at all, I’ll have to say this yogurt was a good treat for all of us. Bauer just kept saying it tasted like yogurt (and he meant the non-frozen kind that he loves but rarely gets to eat).

Unfortunately our trip to Trader Joe’s led to the discovery that they no longer have the miniature shopping carts in the stores for the kids. Now that’s a fairly large bummer, and I’m a huge fan of Trader Joe’s to begin with. When we asked at customer service, they said a lot of people had complained about getting run into by kids with carts. I can see that, I guess, but they already took away the balloons and now the tiny carts, too? The cashier did give Bauer a row of stickers that was as tall as him, probably 47, and that was fun for the car ride home at least. But he’ll sure miss the carts and helping me shop that way.

At the moment (2:34 pm) Cash isn’t napping but he isn’t upset either. He’s been back in his crib entertaining himself and making all kinds of noise for an hour and a half (with a poopy break in the middle of that). He was so rubbing his eyes just after lunch so I figured he’d go right to sleep. I think I may have missed his tired window today. At least he’s happy back there, and Bauer is happy now too, as he’s just turned on the Woody Woodpecker DVD that I got him from the library for the Letter W. He finished his Quiet Reading Time a few minutes ago and is now enjoying some TV time while I finish this blog. If Cashie isn’t up by 3pm, I guess we’ll call it a day for naps and go on to something else.

Now for the something else you’ve been waiting for: The Letter V and all the fun we had with that.

Bauer used his body to make the letter V.

Then he used some craft supplies we bought at Michael’s to decorate the blue Visor he picked out.

Here you can see his finished Visor and the Vitamin Water he chose at Meijer in honor of the Letter V.

For an art project, Bauer cut out pictures of Vegetables from some old issues of Everyday Food Magazine.

Then for dinner a couple nights ago, I cut up a ton of Vegetables (I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I tried to start stirring these around in my big Wok)…

And we had Vegetable Ratatouille for dinner.

We read some good V books and Bauer LOVED Violet the Pilot.

He also loved making this little Volcano erupt using baking soda, vinegar, and food coloring.

I got this Volcano from the inside of a cereal box when I was a little girl. I’ve saved it all these years because I thought it was so cool, and I even knew where it was when I finally had a use for it!

For another art project, I helped Bauer make a Valentine for TJ. I’m still not sure why he put an extra A on the end of Dad, but he didn’t want help with spelling that word.

Bauer decided to make a Valentine monster on the back of the card, and after writing the letters EEKK, he asked me what it spelled, and so we named his monster “Eek!”

We finished off the Letter V with the V verse that Bauer learned last year when we were doing a verse for each letter of the alphabet. Usually I just write out the verse for the letter we are working on, and leave some letters or words out and have Bauer fill in the blanks with my help. But this time I decided to have Bauer illustrate the verse since it seemed pretty easy to do. He was quite hesitant to begin drawing, even after I’d written out each phrase and drawn the four blank boxes. So then I sat with him and we talked about what was happening in each phrase of the verse and how he could draw it. I was quite impressed. And just so you know, the solitary place where Jesus went to pray was the jungle.

And also just so you know, it’s 3pm and that little booger still isn’t asleep! Two hours and no nap! Oh well….I better go get him up, so I’m out of here.

The author spends a year working on what she calls her Happiness Project. Each month she tackles a different area of her life that she thinks she could improve in. I’ve just finished reading April on the topic of parenthood. One idea she puts forth is that of fog happiness, which is “the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all – yet somehow they do.” She talks about how having children falls into the category of fog happiness: “It surrounds me, I see it everywhere, despite the fact that when I zoom in on any particular moment, it can be hard to identify.”

I second that notion, for sure.

I also really liked these lines of hers:

“I had two healthy, affectionate little girls [for me, it's boys, of course], and I wanted my actions as a parent to rise to the level of that good fortune. I wanted to stop my quick bursts of temper – I indulged in that behavior all too often, and then, because it made me feel bad, I behaved even worse. I wanted to be more lighthearted. I wanted to take steps to preserve the happy memories from this time.”

I second all that too.

I want so much from life and it all gets so complicated sometimes with all these desires I have, but then it becomes so simple again when I remember words like these from Richard Rohr’s book Everything Belongs:

“There’s no answer, no problem-solving, simply awareness.” Rohr also thrilled me with his words, “Our private darkness is no great surprise. Who cares? Who cares where I am on the ladder of perfection? That’s an egocentric question. ‘Where am I?’ ‘How holy am I?’ become silly questions. If God can receive me, who am I not to receive myself?”

Anne Lamott put it this way in her book Imperfect Birds, which I’m now in the middle of going back through and writing out all my favorite parts, 104 of them to be exact, in my Goody Book.

I’m about a third of the way through doing that and it’s been hours of fun so far, and lots more to come. I really sincerely love more than almost anything in life that I get to enjoy and savor and re-read and hopefully one day become all the words that mean so much to me.

Here’s the part from Imperfect Birds:

Rosie kept asking Rae, through tears, just to please tell her this one time what the secret was. She had never felt lower, skinnier, uglier, more deservedly alone. “Okay, okay,” said Rae. “Here it is.” She wrapped the scarf around Rosie’s shoulders, then leaned over to whisper in her ear: “You are pre-approved.” A calm sense of relief had filled Rosie’s chest, like stepping out of the cold into a warm car.

For me, reading these words, and having the privilege to re-read them and think about them, and now to share them, is like stepping out of the cold into a warm car.

TJ surprised me with something that definitely made me happy, even after I’d had a horrible day with the kids yesterday. It wasn’t entirely horrible (going to Jamba Juice and the park with Jaime and her kids after church was good), but I was definitely in one of my “mean-Mommy” funks a lot of the day yesterday and so it was pretty fitting to get to read the chapter on Parenthood today from The Happiness Project book. The surprise was from Amazon and how crazy that it arrived to our house, via some white delivery van, on Sunday late afternoon! I don’t think Amazon delivers on Sunday, but God does. I didn’t deserve a present for sure, but I did feel very known and loved by TJ when he opened the package and handed me Shauna Niequist’s new book Bittersweet. And it’s light blue!!

Shauna is the writer of one of my favorite books from all of last year, Cold Tangerines. I’ve read a few chapters of the new book already and am happy to have it in my life right now. Thank you, and I love you, TJ.