Sleepover

Here's what I love:

Two sisters who decide to have a Friday night sleepover in one of their rooms including making Christmas paper chains, listening to Adventures in Odyssey, reading, and listening to music. -Especially when they also happen to be my daughters.

Date Night

Abby finished knitting her hat - Congratulations, Abby!!

In the mornings I am going through a great product by Family Life called What God Wants for Christmas (www.whatgodwantsforchristmas.com) with Grace. Mom and Dad bought this for us last year to stash away for this Christmas.

Each morning there is a new little gift box for Grace to open that adds a new character to our nativity set and a new part to a poem for me to read to her that introduces that character and their part to play in the Christmas story. We are enjoying it very much, and Grace loves to play with the characters in the little stable scene included.

Today Grace opened Baby Jesus to join Joseph, Mary, and the angel Gabriel. Right away, after I read the poem to Grace, I heard her begin to role-play with the characters. I saw her put Gabriel right next to Baby Jesus' manger bed. "I'll stay here and watch you," Gabriel (in a very Grace-like voice) said.

"Where are Joseph and Mary, Grace?" I asked her.

"Well, they're here." I noticed Grace had the two of them over on the yellow chair. "They're on a date."

Kelly's Deep Thought

I love the passage in Matthew 23:37 that is also repeated elsewhere in Scripture where Christ talks about God's love for Israel. He shows God as a loving Father longing to tenderly care for His children. As children of the New Covenant because of faith in Jesus, we can also be children of our Father and cared for in this way...

"How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings..."

Greg talked about this passage (the Luke version) on Sunday and actually said, "God protects His chicks." (Referring to His care for His children)

My deep thought in response...

That would be an awesome Women's Ministry t-shirt (albeit slightly out of context)-

God protects His chicks!

Winter Wonderland

SNOW! We woke up this morning to a glorious, beautiful blanket of snow. The girls all bundled up to get out and play in it before it melts away...

We have some serious Christmas spirit going on with snow on the ground the weekend after Thanksgiving and my Christmas cactus about to bloom. I love this thing! I just received it as a gift last year, and I am absolutely amazed at how it knows when Christmas is coming. Last year at Christmas time it was blooming beautifully, and now after a whole year of waiting with nothing but green cactus to look at (although it's a nice green cactus), now, it is filled with red buds again. It's quite symbolic, really, like a year-long advent calendar. Anyway, it makes me happy!

And now for the rest of my exciting news... Greg finished our beautiful bed!! Yesterday, a good friend from church came to spend the day with the girls, so Greg and I could have a day together. We took the truck down to Wichita to go...

MATTRESS SHOPPING.

I truly really hate mattress shopping, but when you need a mattress, well, you have to go mattress shopping. The mattress salespeople know this, so they don't care that they are actually more obnoxious than used car salesmen, because if you do indeed need a mattress, you'll be coming.

Our mattress salesman was an incredibly friendly fellow named Troy. Troy was so friendly that he followed us all around the furniture store, really. I think Troy wanted to play tag or something, because Greg and I kept trying to run away from Troy, and Troy kept chasing us so that he could be really friendly. We had things to discuss that we didn't necessarily want Troy to overhear, because Troy had exceptional hearing and had lots of strong opinions and not much concern for whether anyone was actually talking to him.

Greg and I ran away to the living room section and sat down on a couch and chair to try to have a secret meeting. In a few minutes, there was Troy to see if we were okay, he didn't want us to feel neglected. "O, neglected is NOT what we feel," Greg told him. Then Toy sat down in our little living room with us. He leaned back in the chair and made himself comfortable, I think he really thought he was invited.

"This is a nice set, isn't it. We can..." Both of us started to snap.

"We're just sitting here, actually; trying to discuss our mattress decision. You see, Troy, we have stuff, too much stuff. I'm trying to clear out our storage room, and right now we don't just want more stuff. We need a mattress, and as for this deal you're offering of $100 in furniture when we make a $499 purchase, we've looked all around, and there's nothing here we want. Could you just take that $100 off our mattress purchase?" I knew the answer; I already heard Troy tell someone else that was not possible.

The idea, see is to make you spend much more than 100 extra dollars in other furniture purchases, because VERY little in that place cost $100 or less. We almost fell for it; we looked all around thinking about how maybe we should have a cushier chair in the living room, and with $100 off, that chair would only be $299. The problem is we weren't feeling the need for a chair before we got in there, and we certainly hadn't budgeted for one. They were forcing an impulse buy, and it made me mad.

I looked right at Troy when I said those things. Then Troy looked down and was quiet for a long moment, obviously greatly struggling deep within. It was quite dramatic. "Well, what I can do is give you 10% off your mattress purchase, if you'd rather have that."

"Thanks, Troy, we'll take it."

We're quite happy with the set, and I love the new bed my talented hubby built, and the rest of our day was delightful. We went out to lunch and saw an amazing movie callled Bella. After the movie, I was so touched I had to go sit in a bathroom stall at the theater for a bit to have a good cry. For more on the movie, you'll have to visit Greg's blog - coming soon.

So far we're all living happily ever after.

Thank you

Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done, In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mothers' arms, Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, And still is ours today.

For Your amazing love that seems always to me, when I think about it, too good to be true;
That it is true, in spite of me, even because of me.

That You are faithful, always faithful, in pain, faithful, in hope and joy, faithful, in loneliness, nonetheless faithful, in confusion, faithful, in bitter disappointment, faithful, in doubt, faithful, in great provision, faithful, in need, faithful...
For You know pain and joy. You know me, and still, You love me.

For Your grace that loves me in the midst of my sinfulness and selfishness and reaches down to me, through Jesus - because of Jesus, to offer to me a relationship with the God of the universe, with You. It shouldn't be, but it is, and that is grace.

Thank You; I am amazed.

A little Grace

Grace's latest quips, starting in bed way too early on Sunday morning:

"Mommy, Mooooommyyyyyyyy! I can't see!! Mommy, I can't see!!!!"

Enter very tired, slightly irritable, and a touch worried Mommy, "Grace, what do you mean you can't see? Look at me; you can see me."

Grace, with fingers pressed over closed eyes, "Mommy, I can't see when my eyes are closed."

Later that morning in the middle of church and in the middle of a beautiful song being sung by our choir, Grace got up as tall as she could on her knees next to me in our pew. A good friend of ours had just sung a solo in the song, and Grace wanted to see. Stretching as high as she could at a quiet, rather poignant moment in the song, she let out a huge belch from her soul. Her head was perfectly positioned right between the older couple sitting in front of us, so that each of them got one perfect earful. Abby and Emma got the giggles something fierce, so I looked straight ahead as if nothing unusual had happened to keep my composure. After church, I looked right at the lady in front of us and said, "It wasn't me."

Today at lunch, "That is the goodest lunch I ever seen! Thank you, Mommy!"

Later this afternoon she described something as "Gimungus!"

And finally, always one to cover all her bases, she called me to her room after she had been put to bed tonight, "Mommy, I need milk and brefek in the morning, with cereal. Remember that, O.K.?"

Carpe Diem

I haven't made any progress on the storage room since my last post; I am sorry...

But we did have a fabulous fall day yesterday. It is quite nice when God condescends to give a hint of insight to the weathermen who actually get it right, thus allowing me to make plans accordingly. I noticed that we had one good day coming. One. On this day it was supposed to be perfect: sunny, cool but not a bit cold, a calm breeze, and gorgeous colors still hanging on to most of the trees. The days before were gray and windy; the days after looked cold and windy.

We did it... The whole Carpe Diem thing. We took that day, and we lived fully within it. We doubled up on school on Monday so we could spend all day yesterday in Hutchinson. We spent the morning at a fun free zoo, ate lunch at a big park, and spent the afternoon at the Dillon Nature Center. It couldn't have been more beautiful. My thinking led me to believe that this could be one of the last full days that we could comfortably enjoy being completely outdoors 'til spring.

Highlights of our day included:

• visiting the llama (in the petting zoo) that spit right in Abby's hair over a year ago


• watching the otter dance for us while he tried to dry and fluff his soggy tail


• getting to know an attention hungry goat that reminded us a bit of Rosie


• Grace crouching down in front of an aquarium that held a turtle who pressed his little face up against the glass as if he wanted to tell us something. Without missing a beat, Grace said, "What, turtle?" and pressed her ear right up next to the glass. "O, thank you." "Mommy, the turtle said he loves me." I think he probably did.


• seeing the most majestic looking bald eagles I've ever seen up close
  
• picking out little treasures from the gift shop (which, of course nullifies this actually being the totally "free" trip I proudly told Greg we would be taking. O yeah, and gas too)


• feeling as if we had stumbled upon a magical fairy-land at the nature center. We followed a "hidden stream" surrounded by a carpet of golden leaves with perfect fairy dwellings in niches everywhere we looked.

After our day, we capped off the evening by watching Chariots of Fire with Greg. We've been reading about Eric Liddell in one of our readers for school; I love that movie. The girls enjoyed it too, believe it or not. They followed it pretty well (except for Grace; she was in bed).

As for pictures of hip hair in response to my comments, I'm feeling a little insecure about that, seeing as how I think ALL of you have hipper hair than me. This one is hard to see, but once I get my batteries recharged in my camera after yesterday, we'll see.