Truth for the Trenches

I think about things a lot in the middle of the night. Crossing from one warm room through a chilly hallway to another warm room, rocking John and placing in back in his crib to make the chilly trek again. Then laying in bed trying to fall back asleep the thoughts and ideas come flooding in! Last night was the brillaint idea to take a family photo in front of the Christmas tree, with John in his Christmas pj's. Well, we have these perfect ideas that are never perfectly fulfilled. At 5:45a John peed through his jammies! Having already washed them once from a previous incident we just put his dirty ones back on for a quick picture (don't worry he got a bath immediately after)! The lights on our tree have a short in them so we kept having to hit the tree to make them come on. It isn't the best picture but it is a reminder to me that dissapointment over small details can ruin an entire day. Christmas cannot be joyful because everything is perfect...we are celebrating a perfect

Michael asked me what the twenty year old me would say to me now...let me paint this picture for you. In my 20 something age college years I never slept. I worked hard and played harder, I thought it was a thrill to stay up for 24 or 36 hours regularly, it was an adrenaline rush and after awhile it wasn't even a challenge. But, now i'm tired...not the sleepy kind of tired where you have worked hard or played hard and can't wait to crawl in bed but the kind of tired you get when you never stop. The kind of tired you get when sitting down isn't stopping because your to do list is running through your head, the baby might wake up, your husband is just about home and your cell phone is ringing and it is hard to ignore. The twenty year old me would say I am a wimp, that I am not being efficient, that I am not playing enough, that I have plenty of hours in the day to get everything done. But, I find myself fighting against the 22 year old who stayed up all night. I have lea

Four years ago today I got to marry someone amazing! Around this time I start thinking back over the past years and what has changed. I think that this is the great thing about celebrating events from the past: it causes you to think back and reflect, which can be a hard thing to do regularly. Last night we joked that 4 years didn't feel like long and at the same time it has felt like 80 years! We have learned so much, we have grown immensely in who we are, in our views on family, love, ourselves, priorities and God. We are not who we were 6 months ago, 2 years ago or 5 years ago when we met. We have learned to change and grow together, to work through the hard times and love our differences. At our wedding one of the pastors quoted John Piper saying, "Marriage exists to magnify the truth and worth and beauty and greatness of God." So many of us define marriage as something to make us happy, or the next level in life, or they think they deserve it be

"Give me grace...to reject as delusion a great name here or hereafter..." I read this in a book of prayer, The Valley of Vision and it got me thinking about what I want to give me a great name. Something I been realizing lately in this time of transition is my deep desire to be the perfect wife. I mistakenly view my worth in whether my house is perfectly clean, or I cooked a great dinner, not being stressed out and emotional, or having all the laundry done...and the list goes on! The other huge error in this is thinking my husband loves me for having all these things done perfectly. I asked him the other night to help me figure out my cleaning schedule because in a new house with more time I was wanting to balance things well and I wasn't sure how to do it yet. His response was that this was the time to figure out how to balance things, not to think of the perfect schedule to accomplish it all. He said I needed to start doing and evaluate the process for a little wh

In April we moved into a new house built in 1930. We had seen this house for 3 months before it went on the market and loved it before we walked through it. We had a particular area we wanted to be in and this house was smack in the middle of it! This is the house we want to live in for 50 years, to raise our family in, to grow in, to open up for friends and family but it is a house that needs more work than I let myself see before I moved in. So when we moved from our small 7 year old home leaving our bright shiny new appliances and bathrooms behind I thought I was up for the adventure. I quickly realized that I took comfort in my clean, new kitchen, that showering in a pink tile bathroom built in 1930 didn't feel as relaxing as my clean white bathroom built in 2003. My thoughts were taken over with how quickly we could renovate this house, how quickly it could be painted, decorated, carpeted...I wanted it to feel new, quaint, like a Pottery Barn magazine full of charm and ver