2010 February

How a 3×5 index card changed my life

February 28, 2010

You know that I work full time outside the home, right? I’ve whined shared about it here often enough.
Last week it took me away from home and my boys for four full days. And four days in toddler time is basically an eternity.
But after I got home, wrassled my boys, wrapped arms and legs around [...]

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Love me a man who

February 25, 2010

Love me a man who has some baseball-mitt sized hands.
Love me a man who knows more about my homeland than I do.
Love me a man who loves him our boys.
Love me a man who sees heaven in a cinnabon, a Sunday afternoon nap, and me without my make up.
OK, your turn…

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Guest post: a day in the life of my doppelganger

February 24, 2010

I can’t wait for you to meet, Alece.
She’s the shorter, green-eyed, cool-tattooed version of me. And she’s spent more time in my homeland the last decade or so than I have. I try not to hold that against her.
When we met the first time she shocked my socks off by dropping some serious [...]

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It takes guts to be a mom

February 22, 2010

Motherhood terrifies me.
Especially when I am standing at the daycare door.
I don’t know how Hannah did it. Her courage makes my stomach want to drop out the bottom.
I am sharing about Hannah, this fear, and it’s antidote on my friend Jessica’s site today. She writes at Muthering Heights and is one of the co-hosts of the [...]

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I write because

February 18, 2010

I write because it’s one of the times I feel most like myself.
I write because, like others, I need a place to re-tell my story and process it’s twists and turns. I trace my fingers over the memories of the day or last year, reading the raised braille of the faces I have held, the places I [...]

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When grace is the meal, not just the prayer before it

February 18, 2010

There are a lot of things about my dad’s parenting I would change if I could go back in time. Instead, I take those memories and wring the lessons out of them that I want to be sure to unlearn as I journey through parenthood myself.
But, some days I am surprised.
Some days something beautiful surfaces.
…Keep [...]

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Ten things I learned from being snowbound for nearly ten days

February 15, 2010

So, you’ve seen it on the news, you’ve read about it online, you’ve followed the tweets. Now, here’s our insider’s perspective on what six straight days stuck inside due to back-to-back blizzards looks like and what we learned.
1. Table tents are an awesome way to spend a day

2. In a [...]

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Parenting ain't always pretty

February 12, 2010

Sometimes parenting is a sonnet.
Filled with moonlit, rocking chair, baby skin-to-skin moments.
But sometimes, it is just not.
Sometimes there are no words to beautify the exhausting moments of parenting. There is only a new kind of carpet cleaner cracked open for the first time and a pile of dish rags that have failed to remove the [...]

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I am most myself when

February 11, 2010

I am most myself when I am buried nose deep in the well-thumbed pages of a favorite, familiar, beloved book.
I am most myself when I am rocking, cheek-to-cheek, breathing in the sweet breath of one of our slumbering boys.
I am most myself when I am sitting in the back row of a worship service, letting [...]

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