Insecurity

YES, I've started on the storage room, O.K.?! But, that's all the information you're getting on that right now.

Insecurity.

It is an interesting thing. I am so ridiculously affected by it. In fact, I spend a large amount of mental, emotional, and physical energy trying to appease this monster in my life.

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You see, I'm growing gray hairs. I have these long, wiry, doingy white hairs growing right out of the middle of my part. I keep pulling them out, but I notice at least one every day. I am not emotionally ready for lots of gray hairs. I was also feeling slightly dumpy in the hair department in general, so I decided it was time to make a hair appointment.

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I called this cool hair place recommended to me by a friend. You know, some place a little edgy that can make hip hair. I was not prepared, however for my encounter with the phone answering woman at the hair place who was indeed edgy (in the extremely irritable sense of the word). After the conversation, I mustered up enough courage to actually go in there. Greg couldn't believe I still went after my encounter, but cool, edgy hair places are a little hard to come by in these parts.

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So, I went in and said, "Um, I want not real short hip hair." And she delivered, I think. I like it, but at my age who am I to define "hip"? I'm hoping Amanda with the hot pink stripe down the middle of her head of black, curly hair knew. I did not color it, if you're wondering. I supposedly have "great hair for hiding gray" at least so far.

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The sad thing is that hip hair has not conquered insecurity or "image management" as John Ortberg puts it in his book The Life You've Always Wanted. I still worry far too much about my "image." I still struggle to be one who is comfortable receiving God's grace through Christ because I actually NEED it. I really hate it when those faults and weaknesses actually show up, especially when someone else is around. So, I just keep hoping nobody notices the gray just yet.

Drive-thru

I've decided to share with the world (or at least those in it who read my blog) what I SHOULD be doing over the next week or so. I'm sharing this because nothing in me actually wants to do it, but everything in me does want it done. My purpose in sharing this is to expose it, to turn on the pressure, to MAKE ME DO IT!

I am supposed to organize the storage room.

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You've already heard about my organizing woes. The desk has got nothing on the storage room. Does anything about that phrase sound nice "STORAGE ROOM" - who wants to organize something called that?

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Anyway, I hope to share my progress over the next several days, weeks, months... No pictures, I'm not ready for extreme exposure.

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On a lighter note, I took Rosie, my bad dog whom I love to the drive-thru at Lincoln Perk today. She was very hyper in the truck, because 1) she rarely rides in the truck and 2) it's usually only to go to the vet. She began to whimper and kind of hop and dance next to me, a bundle of excited nerves all wrapped up inside a bad dog who's a little too big. The fun thing about bringing your dog through the drive-thru at Lincoln Perk is that we always keep milk-bones in a little jar to give out to any dogs who happen to come through.

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Well, since Rosie thought she was going to the vet, the first thing she did when my nice fellow employee friend opened the window was to fiercely bark at her. Thankfully my friend loves dogs and understood about the whole vet confusion. She reached across and gave Rosie (who was now standing across my lap) a milk-bone.

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Rosie thought this was the best thing she had ever experienced so far in her life, so she kept doing a hopping dance on my lap reaching her neck as far through the window as she could hoping for more. My friend gave her two more which means Rosie was so excited I couldn't even have my window down anymore to get my coffee without holding on to her collar or she would have jumped right into that place. When I finally grabbed two coffees (one for me and one for Greg who was at home with the girls) one at a time so as to keep my dog from launching through the window, I had to shove Rosie off of my lap, so I could see out of my windshield.

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All in all, I felt pretty cool driving around in a red, stick-shift pick-up truck with my big dog Rosie hop-dancing next to me. Rosie, well this was the best day of her life so far.

Memory Maker

Some days homeschooling just cracks me up, some days I love it, and some days it's just plain hard and I feel ready to quit. Today happened to be a great day that put a big deposit in the "I love it" category.

Emma started out by going to an American Girl's Class held through a home school co-op in Newton. She had a Victorian tea party today based on the Samantha books. She and I made Victorian Tea Cake (sponge layer cake with strawberry jam filling) for her to take along. She brought an antique floral tea cup, and came back with a big, satin hair bow that they made.

Well, after lunch with the beautiful hair bow donned, she and Abby proceeded to head out back to dissect two cow eyeballs. Really. We're studying anatomy and physiology this year in science and had recently studied the eye. Our book suggested getting cow eyeballs from a meat packer and we happen to have a great meat packer just a few blocks away. Although Greg enthusiastically secured the eyeballs from the meat packer and brought them home to our fridge (where I picked up the bag, mistaking them for bacon - just a bit of a shocker), he wanted nothing to do with the dissection. Maybe his own eye surgery is a little too recent.

As I was getting Gracie down for some rest time, I heard delighted exclamations: "WOW, Mom you have to get out here and see this lens I got out, it's hard! Here's where the optic nerve connected, COOL! Ew, the aqueous humor is really sticky! HEY, here's the retina with the capillaries, LOOK!"

After this bit of excitement, a wonderful woman from our church, Naomi, took us all out to a nature trail in Newton that we had never visited. She had told us at the beginning of the week that she would like to do this with us for Pastor Appreciation month. Today was absolutely beautiful here!

Naomi came over with little booklets she had made for each of the girls with their names written in them and a little poem that had been written about the Sand Creek Nature Trail attached on the front page. She is a nature lover and made sure the girls had backpacks to gather their treasures in along the way. She collected different leaves for them to have a variety of leaf rubbings to do in their books. She brought along a book to read to the girls that is also one of our favorites called God's Quiet Things.

We came home and filled my glass pumpkin with their treasures. Definitely a memory-making day!

Creative Us

CONGRATULATIONS, Emma on finishing your sweater! TA-DA!



Here is Abby's progress on the hat she's knitting for herself...






And our wonderfully talented friend Jenny started a sewing class with us today. She came over to our house where we set up four sewing machines on our kitchen table (we only have two, but Jenny brought one, and our friend Ellen is joining us for the class with her sewing machine). We had already picked out fabric according to Jenny's recipe for our very own personalized pillow cases. I made one for Grace.







I LOVED IT!! We had coffee, chai, hot cocoa, white chocolate chunk macadamia nut cookies, fabric everywhere, the ironing station, the pinning station, the cutting station, and the sewing station. We had Italian Cafe' music on in the background. And by the end...

Abby had a fun bandanna pillowcase

Emma had a fabulous horse pillowcase

Gracie had a sparkly ballerina princess pillowcase

and Ellen had an elegant grown-up pillowcase

And I don't even know what I'm doing; I really hope this becomes a bit of a habit. Thanks, Jenny!

Monday Blessing

Tonight was a blessing. It was just one of those spontaneous, beautiful day decisions to enjoy it that made us pack a picnic dinner and head out to a large park and campground nearby. John and Ellen (our youth pastor and his wife) came along. We ate and talked and laughed and kerplunked rocks in the water (my version of skipping rocks) and threw the football and got the football stuck in the tree and threw sticks to get the football out of the tree and slid and see-sawed and swung.

When darkness signaled the end of outside fun we came back to our house for real caramel-dipped apples. This is truly a bonding time and essentially levels the playing field for all involved in the activity of trying to eat a REAL CARAMEL-DIPPED APPLE. Strings of caramel swung gracefully from the tips of our noses down to the middle of our chins. Otherwise intelligent conversations were hilarious through stuck together jaws; it was great! Grace licked every last drop of caramel off of the outside of her apple and then placed her apple in unsuspecting Ellen's empty bowl, so she could go after the caramel stuck in the bottom of her own bowl. We played Yahtzee.

Now, I am tired and heading to bed reflecting on the blessing of this day.

Uninspired

This is my "I should be posting on my blog, but I'd actually rather read my new Cottage Living magazine that came in the mail today while drinking hot tea" post. Which means I'm feeling more loungey than inspired...

I realized that I have been tagged by my sweet cousin Katie from her great blog http://katie-memorablemoments.blogspot.com/. This means I'm supposed to come up with as many people to tag as I have letters in my middle name (I think). There was also something about rules and posting them so we all do it right, but I'm not very good at remembering those things so I'll sum up:

My middle name is ANNE, so I'm supposed to list a fact about me for each letter of my middle name, you know, a fun acrostic...

A llergic to mold and cats. Yep, cats even bring up the old A sthma (that, if you're counting, gets me two points for 1 "A")

N uts. I like them, all kinds, and I'm sometimes called this.

N ear-sighted, but not as bad as Greg used to be. Soft contacts work fine for me.

E Not sure what to say here, except that I really like that I do, in fact, have an "e" at the end of my middle name. Kind of sets me apart a little, I think.

Well, now that I have enriched your life with these facts, you have a handy way to remember each thing, because all you have to know is the simple acrostic "A-N-N-E" (all except for the "E" might throw you).

I am now tagging my sweet cousin Annalisa, sweet fellow-employee-for-a-day Tara, sweet Kristen who I don't think has been tagged before, and um, our new youth pastor John. The rules are: do what I did, but be more eloquent.

Autumn in Iowa

I just returned from a FABULOUS weekend in Iowa! I was absolutely blessed by my time in that beautiful state with dear friends and my sweet sister. I had the opportunity to be "the speaker" at Faith Bible Church's women's retreat. This is where we were before moving to Kansas. Greg was the youth pastor at Faith for about 7 years.

God is so good for bringing me to Iowa in the fall; it was breathtaking. As I drove through the rolling hills covered in gorgeous, inflamed tree tops within a soft green carpet on Sunday morning and listened to my favorite worship music, I thought there was no better worship service I could have attended that morning. Several times I was moved to tears at the creativity of my God. I was moved to tears that this Creator is in fact my God, my Heavenly Father. Then I drove by a series of small green hills with occasional creeks cutting into the landscape leaving beautiful crevices, perfectly etched.

To be honest, I was tempted to temporarily accept these scenes as truly heavenly until I rounded the highway curve to see a mangled deer on the shoulder where the still-present highway patrolman had just moved it. The scene was terribly out of place within my frame of mind. It was shockingly unfair as a matter of fact. I had never seen (I'm obviously not a butchering of my own meat, hunter-type) such a gory sight. I tried to reconcile my emotions...

I came to the conclusion that I am not in heaven yet; life can be painfully shocking. I also couldn't help feeling blessed by the scenery I drove through even after the deer. God's amazing creativity as revealed in His creation here on earth sustains me, strengthens me. I realized once again that here on earth the two co-exist, pain and sin with beauty and salvation. They don't go together very seamlessly - they allude to a home to come, my hope.