Truth for the Trenches

Sundays are quiet at our house. After church we stick close to home for chores and easy family time:  Laundry, cooking for the week, the pool, a bike ride . Our favorite Sunday tradition has become pizza dinner and a family movie. After a long week and a busy weekend it is a great way to finish off the weekend: snuggled on a couch together, enjoying the story, an Aldi five dollar pizza and sometimes folding that previously mentioned laundry! Whether it is Friday night for your family, Saturday morning after chores or Sunday, like ours...this week's feature of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse will have you all wanting to press play again. Have you seen it yet?! In the first five minutes you see working parents balancing jobs, parenthood and still flirting. Miles has a conflict about school with his father because school is hard and he is not with his neighborhood friends. He argues about leaving to go back to his old school. The father-son dynamic plays out i...

"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...