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My First Gluten Free Thanksgiving

And it was downright delicious.

We were created to eat!
The eating experience is as much a part of living as breathing.
The natural cycle is to eat, become satisfied, take a break—then eat to get satisfied again.
There’s no getting past it.
We are wired to get satisfied from food…
~Trim Healthy Mama, p37~

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I love to eat.
And in my very honest moments, I have to admit that giving up food and wine felt like more than I could manage.
What I eat and what I drink are little moments of joy throughout the day—the things I think about, plan around, daydream about.
… No one changes their life until the pain level is unmanageable, and in all sorts of ways for me, the pain level had reached the unmanageable point. …
I felt like I wasn’t living in the same world everyone else was living in.
It was like choosing to live with the volume turned all the way down, or going to the beach but not being able to put my feet in the ocean.
My senses were starving. …
There has to be a way to live with health and maturity and intention while still honoring the part of me that loves to eat, that sees food as a way to nurture and nourish both my body and my spirit.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p137~

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Asher Timothy is 3

How it’s possible for this sweet boy to be three years old is beyond me. Yet everybody insists that he must have turned three long ago because he is rather mature for such a young guy. And thus it is, my little boy who brings happiness to everyone and seems to carry eternity in his eyes, he’s a timeless gift of blessedness. I am so humbled, delighted, privileged, and thankful that he is my son.

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This is perhaps the heart of parenting: despite my aching, desperate baby-love, it’s my job to help him into being a big boy.
It’s my job, my honor, to walk him, quite literally, from baby to toddler to boy to man.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p179~

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Three Years of Home

Three years ago today, we left our first home and moved to our own home ~ one we designed ourselves, had built by a friend, and which was not complete when we moved in. But we have spent the last three years nurturing, training, and fellowshipping with one another in this home, and we have worked to finish some things in the house along the way. But the best part? That this house is a place we have made our home, by God’s grace and provision. We designed this house to be a place of hospitality ~ primarily for our family, specifically for our children ~ but also for friends, brethren, neighbors. Just last month we had thirty people from our new church over to eat and sing with us, and we’ve had four different families over for meals and a few playdates too. Just in the last month. Because the Lord is good! And because we have a home which we want to use for His service, blessing His people, and nurturing the people He has put in our care.

Home.
A place of rest while we are on this earth.
A safe place for our children.
A place to love and be loved.
A place that is beautiful.
A haven.
With enough money, anyone can create a pretty house.
But it takes intention to create a home.
~Myquillyn Smith, The Nesting Place, p181

THEN (2011):

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NOW (2014):

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One of my top priorities for my home is for it to be a place of beauty. Notice I didn’t say I want my home to be perfect. Also, I really don’t care for it to be expensive. Beauty is something altogether different. I’ve yet to meet a woman who wants her home to be ugly. Enjoying beautiful things is part of being human. It is how God made us.
~Myquillyn Smith, The Nesting Place, p68

Proverbs 14:1
The wisest of women builds her house,
    but folly with her own hands tears it down.

If you stay anywhere long enough, it will start to accumulate some shadows.
And those shadows make it no less beautiful. It makes it something like home.
It anchors you there in ways that a steady diet of pleasantness never will.
~Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine, p235

Proverbs 24:3-4
By wisdom a house is built,
    and by understanding it is established;
by knowledge the rooms are filled
    with all precious and pleasant riches.

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Life in Little Moments

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I realized with clarity that this—this pausing when the whole world keeps on going—is living.
~Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Mama, p23~

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There was no contest: looking into my children’s eyes beat staring at the screen of my smartphone. Hearing my loved ones’ laughter won hands down over the incessant ding of incoming emails. Seeing empty space in my calendar for laughing, playing, and relaxing soothed my depleted soul.
~Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Mama, p37~

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Keeping our home, Together

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Do not sigh while you are washing the dishes. Do not have a pity party, and do not teach your children to act this way, because they will learn from your example. If you work cheerfully and use the time well, you will teach them to enjoy their work too!
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg215~

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Some find the idea of working with children impossible. This is a wrong perspective to have. Children do not need constant entertainment and play. They need to be learning from you. Even on big project days, they can and should be learning from you. With the right attitude from you, they will learn that work is satisfying and fun. You just need to plan carefully to make the process conducive to learning and fun.
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg291~

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Managing the kitchen well makes everyone’s time in the kitchen more productive and enjoyable. When the kitchen is well-kept, creativity flourishes.
~Kim Brenneman, Large Family Logistics, pg282~

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Lower your expectations and realize that as long as we all choose to walk around clothed, the laundry will never really be finished. If we live fully in a home, there will be messes. Why does that surprise us and make us feel guilty? As long as we eat, walk, and need places to sit down, the kitchen sink will have a few dirty dishes in it and the living room will never be clutter-free for long.
~Myquillyn Smith, The Nesting Place, p50~

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Longing

I know that most of us are longing for something. I know that longing is part of the deal, part of living in the not-yet-heaven. I know people who are longing to marry, who are longing to be healed from disease, longing for their children to come home, longing for the financial pressure to release. I get that longing is part of how we live. But today I feel angry and boxed in, like the system is rigged against me and everywhere I turn, someone else’s body is blooming with new life, while mine still, again, is not. …That’s why it’s hard, I think, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I love that line from the Bible, but it’s so incredibly difficult sometimes, because when you’ve got reason to rejoice, you forget what it’s like to mourn, even if you swear you never will. And because when you’re mourning, the fact that someone close to you is rejoicing seems like a personal affront.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p127~

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I’m still hoping for a happy ending, but if there is one for us, it will be a little off-kilter and not nearly as tidy and poetic as I’d hoped. It will carry inside it a whole lot of tears and longing, and a few good lessons learned watching the lake one Saturday afternoon. I’ll keep celebrating the good news with each friend and each new baby, until maybe I’m the only one left in that dwindling circle. And I’ll ask for help and tenderness every time I find myself crying in the bathroom. And most important, I’ll choose to believe that sometimes the happiest ending isn’t the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.
~ Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet, p129~

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yummydeliciousness

I just have to share with you about my reintroduction to sugar after five months without.

I mean really, if you’re going to go off a diet, you might as well go nuts, right?! :lol: This is what Salt & Straw called their “ice cream flight” and I got to pick four flavors. I ended up with coffee/bourbon, almond brittle with salted ganache, freckled woodblock chocolate, and sea salt with caramel ribbon.

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That is some SERIOUS DELICIOUSNESS!!!! :icecream:

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They Live(d)

Sometimes there are moments that make me catch my breath. Like this morning when my husband and I were in the kitchen getting breakfast ready, and we glance into the living room to see three living children lying on their tummies side-by-side reading books together. It is a moment that I see somewhat often, and yet every time I just want to freeze it in my memory forever. It stuns me by its particular beauty.

There are other moments that make me catch my breath too. Like opening an envelope to find a card that says my babies are thought of and remembered by name. The particular beauty of that stuns me too.

As my friend Kristi says, if you talk with me about my nine babies who live in heaven, “you won’t be reminding me that they died.

But you will let me know that someone else remembers that they lived.”

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These Precious Gifts

We mothers, like everyone else who struggles under the weight of sin, tend to forget the gospel, and our ignorance of the hope we have in Christ spawns rotten fruit such as identity crises and discontent. We need to remember that God is no less good to us when we find ourselves in a battle of wills with a preschooler in the checkout line at the grocery store than He was as His Son dragged a cross up a hill that Friday two thousand years ago. God mercifully intercedes in those moments and shows me that His ways are above my ways. By God’s grace I can resist the temptation to treat my children as interruptions to my will for my life. Instead, God enables me to treat my children as precious gifts He is using to shape me into His image according to His will for my life.
~Gloria Furman, Treasuring Christ When Your Hands are Full, p55~

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