In no particular order, because I am tired and ready to go to bed, here are the pictures from today's fishing adventure. Keegan was in a weird mood and suddenly became a big ham for the camera and I took advantage of that as much as I could. We had a great day.
There are some repeats on here but for some reason it won't let me remove them.
This is Rowdy, our fishing buddy. He belongs to the good friends who generously let us use their lake.
Holy Week makes me cry. Those of you that know me well know I cry often anyway, but Holy Week really does me in. I think it's because it is the only week of the year that I am truly confronted with the humanity of Christ.
When I pray to or think about Jesus it is never as a man, but as God Incarnate, all powerful and mighty, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and so on and so forth. The problem with Holy Week is that while all that is still definitely present, the less thought of MAN part of Christ emerges. The man that had friends. The man that laughed and goofed off with his friends. The man that loved compassionately and without condition. The man that could have defied death forever who instead chose to die the most horrible, painful, humiliating death imaginable. And the part that really gets me is that he endured all of that suffering on the off chance that people would believe in him and be saved. People that mocked him and scorned him, and even people that he had never met or that had even come to be, he died for us to have a chance, just the chance to choose God over this world. Those are odds that I wouldn't take, but he did.
Those odds remind me of everything I have that I wouldn't want to give up, and of all the things that I am provided in this life that Christ never had. I have a beautiful family. Christ didn't. (Unless you are a French monarch, then you can feel free to argue this point. And unless you are a history buff or a conspiracy theorist this aside is probably lost on you anyway.) I have a community that I belong to, I can walk the streets without being mocked, unless my hair is particularly tragic that day. I have never been spit on. I have never been truly betrayed. I have a permanent home. I have friends that understand me and can sympathize with me. Jesus gave the chance to have all that up to try and reach a world that rejected him, and still does to this day.
And if that's not enough to dwell on this week, the worlds rejection of Christ reminds me that even though I claim Christ as my own, as do many others, that doesn't keep us from screwing up in huge ways. There are times when it is hard to distinguish Christians from the rest of the world. We fail. Every day. Colossally. As a whole we run the gambit of sin. We murder, cheat, lie, steal, have sexual sin, drink too much, maintain addictions, manipulate and slander, and even worse, sometimes we do it in the name of Christ. Like he has anything to do with our own selfish sins.
And then, just when I start to get really depressed, the circle connects and I am reminded that because of our sin, Christ died on that cross for us, for people that mocked him and scorned him, and even people that he had never met or that had even come to be. He died for us to have a chance, just the chance to choose God over this world. Those are odds that I wouldn't take, but I am glad that he did.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:5
Matthew 26
Matthew 27
Matthew 28
Sophie at her friend Sorsha's party. I could never get them to hold still long enough for a picture together. :(
This is Lindsey, the girl Sophie wants to marry one day.
The kids and my dad. He is crazy about them, and they are crazy about him.Sophie has been listening to the Easter story that we have been telling. It's gotten a little garbled in her little three year old mind. I know this because her prayer tonight went like this:
"Dear God, please don't let God die and have Judas give him bad spankings with that whit. Thank you for my family. In Jesus name I pray, amen."
We may have to go back over a few things.
I'm having some troubles getting my camera to load pictures. I have some to put up but it's being ornery so I'll get them up when I can.
The weather here has been beautiful. The kids are playing outside every day and we have been to the park many times. Keegan is the king of the tornado slide. He runs himself ragged going up the stairs then sliding down and sprinting from the end of the slide back to the stairs again. Sophie busies herself by befriending every toddler at the park whether they want to be her friend or not. She's an insistent little thing, I'm not sure where she gets that!
We have been doing Resurrection Eggs with the kids as Easter approaches. I'm omitting some of them since they are still so small and most of it seems to be lost on Keegan, but Sophie is picking up quite a bit of it. She brought me some play coins the other day and when I asked her what we had just learned about 30 pieces of silver she told me about Judas. It was tentative and vague, but she's getting it.
We dyed eggs the other day leaving Keegan looking more than a bit colorful. His idea of getting the eggs out was to plunge his entire fist into the cup of dye. We had a lot of fun, both Keegan and my nephew Tobin toppled over their dye cups leaving some new floor coloring on my mother in laws kitchen floor. Luckily she and I are of the same mind, that it's just stuff, and she didn't even bat an eye. It's nice to have that sort of folk as family.
We haven't bought Easter clothes for the kids. Jacob doesn't see the need for it and when my only reason to buy them was so that we could take pictures of them it did seem a bit silly. A new pair of jeans would get more use, and to be truthful a new pair of sweatpants would really make the most sense. Is our society ready for Easter Sweatpants? Hmmm...
Keegan continues to tease us with his potty training efforts. He wants to go all the time. He will sit and strain and turn red in the face and nothing will happen. Until he gets his diaper back on. Then he poops. Sigh.
This weekend we are building a fence around our backyard. I am so excited to have a place where the kids can run around while I am working in the garden. It's nerve wracking to have them with me as it is since the road we live on is busy enough to be a major concern. I'm always afraid that if I take my eyes off of them for one second that I will regret it forever, which makes gardening a lot less enjoyable I'm sure you can imagine. Once it's done Jacob and I are building a raised bed for my garden this year (yay) and putting in a cheapo swing set for the kids. I am looking forward to a happy summer outside with the kids.
Poor Jacob has spent this week preparing for the fence to go in by removing my old garden. That doesn't seem so difficult until you realize that the old garden is lined in a double row of mortared brick that is buried two feet underground and two feet above ground. I think it has a brick bottom as well. I have no idea what the people that built this were thinking, or what it was originally for. We always thought it was just one line of bricks above ground, imagine our dismay when the relatively easy job of pulling up bricks turned into a substantial excavation job. "Conveniently" I pinched a nerve in my back this week. While he was a busy beaver with a sledgehammer in the yard I have been slouching around the house with an icepack and some pain killers. However, I think I would rather be out there with the hammer because this whole nerve thing is not a good time.
The kids are growing like weeds. They both are getting so tall and have stayed so skinny that finding clothes that fit them is a challenge. Watching Keegan run around lately has made me realize that truly I don't have a baby anymore, I have a little boy. I'm not sure how I feel about that and quite frankly I have avoiding thinking much about it because it makes me cry. I guess that tells me a bit of what I think about him getting bigger.
However, they are a lot of fun right now (when they are not fighting). They are both learning so much so fast, and hearing Keegan mimic Sophie is a hoot. They have conversations about things, show each other things that they have found and make each other laugh. I'm blessed that I get to be part of their little worlds.
So my mom informed me yesterday that it has been five weeks since I blogged, not that she was counting or anything. Let's catch up, shall we?
Spring is fast approaching here, the first flowers are starting to bloom and it's been warm enough for us to play outside, go for walks and just enjoy the thaw. I despise winter with an unholy passion so it's been a good time for me. The kids have been playing outside and the unexpected side effect has been a much earlier bedtime. I had forgotten how much it tuckers them out.
The officer that Jacob was filling in for at the schools returned from Iraq safely. (Thank you, Jesus.) Once he got back into the swing of things he reclaimed the schools and Jacob started third shift again. He is happy as can be, third shift truly does fit his personality. While Jacob enjoyed working with the kids at the school, he hated the hours and how slow it could be so he is happier at work now than he has been in a while. We are slowly readjusting to life with dad asleep all day, though it's hard for the kids not to yell and thump around the house.
Sophie is on a marriage kick. For a long time she wanted to marry her friend Lindsay. In fact they are so smitten with each other that they can't sit next to each other in gymnastics anymore because all they do is giggle, talk and hug and kiss each other. Jacob and I continue to explain that girls marry boys but she will have none of that. In fact when I was explaining that God made girls to marry boys she stopped me and said, "I will ask God. God, can I marry a girl?" Then she dropped her voice down as low as she could and said "Yes." She lit up like the sun, looked at me and said "God said YES! I can marry a girl!"
Through sheer tenacity Jacob and I have convinced her that she needs to marry a boy. Her suggestions were Keegan and Daddy. I told her that she couldn't marry them either, that God had already given me to Daddy and that Keegan had a wife somewhere out there, too. Her little face just fell, tears welled up in her eyes and she wailed "There is NO ONE for me to marry!!!"
Keegan is talking in complete sentences which makes him seem less and less like my baby boy. Momma calls Sophie Pete and Keegan Re-Pete because whatever she says he will repeat instantly. It's like living with a constant echo. He is by far more stubborn that Sophie was. I didn't know that was possible, but apparently it is. He is getting very interested in going potty though he still has never gone. Jacob and I are very excited at the prospect of a diaper free home! Momma bought him some Elmo big boy underwear for Christmas and now that warmer weather is here he will be running around the house in that soon in an effort to get him to go to the bathroom. If you knock and a scrawny little boy in Elmo underoos answers the door, ask him if he needs to go potty.
Spring break is coming up and I am going to try to get out and clean up the yard a bit. The kids are big enough to take out with me now and stay close so hopefully this will be easier this year than last. Sophie and I already planted some flowers in a pot to keep in a window. They bloomed last week and she was so proud. Keegan is just interested in the dirt.
In an effort to blog again soon, I am going to stop now and pick this up again later.
At my Momma's house we have been playing a lot of this game she got for Christmas. It is for ages 8 and up so naturally Sophie is learning to play. She does pretty well except that sometimes the games go on for over an hour and she gets antsy and wants to quit. I can usually talk her into staying and finishing, but the other day she was so antsy that I finally told her that if she didn't settle down I was going to kick her out of the game. She looked right at me and said "You would kick me? That is so rude." Then she calmly finished her turn.
When Keegan gets tired he tends to flop on his face and lay in the floor whimpering like a kicked dog. This is most distressing to Sophie. A few days ago as bedtime was approaching, Keegan was doing just that... laying on the floor bemoaning his existence. Sophie was trying to get him up, pleading with him to come play. It went something like this:
Sophie: Keegan, do you want to come play with me?
Keegan: Mphhhhfff
Sophie: Keegan, do you want to watch a movie with me"
Keegan: MMMMMMFFFFFFFFFF (swats in her general direction with one stubby arm)
Sophie: (getting more determined now) Keegan, do you want to play kitchen with me?
Keegan: NNNOOOOOOOOOOOO. MMMppppfffff (another, more adamant swipe of the arm)
Sophie: Do you want to race?
Keegan: ...... Yep. (arises from the floor majestically and stumps off in his weird little run/shuffle as fast as he can)
Sophie: (looking very smug, runs after him)
Today I swear I had visions of The Christmas Story running though my heads as I watched the kids pretend to be Atticus, my mom's dog, as they were eating their breakfast. As you can imagine, this was with their hands in their laps, utensils forgotten and their faces planted squarely in their food.
Bedtime prayers with the kids are usually very sweet and always very interesting. Keegan only wants Daddy to pray with him, and he very diligently repeats in his Keegan babble every single word that Jacob says. Jacob asks him every night what he wants to pray about and the answer is always his bear and "Desus".
Sophie only wants to pray with Mommy. I make her say her own prayer before we pray together, and the resulting talk with God is usually pretty awesome. The other day she prayed that God would give Jesus a very special hug for her. She has prayed about monsters and things that scare her. Her sweet little voice has lifted up her friends in prayer, prayed for healing for others and herself and in the next breath thank God for her butterfly sticker. But last night I was more than a little confused when she thanked Jesus for Samson and Buster and told him she wanted to be brave like them. After she got done I asked Sophie who exactly Buster was, and she said "you know, that little girl who saved the Jews." We have been reading about Esther, the little girl who saved the Jews. At least she remembered that SOMEONE saved the Jews, be it Buster or Esther.
