Bending Without Breaking

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Little Moments

We had this one incredible year where our world moved a little more slowly. Things were busy enough. I didn't have a lot of time for outside relationships and activities, but there was family time galore. There were many days where we finished school and chores, and threw the big quilt down in the front yard to relax and read together, many days where the weather wasn't good to get outside so we snuggled under the covers in my bed and read together. So many good snuggles!

We don't get as many snuggles in now, and that is a little bit hard. But we have to be sure to look for the little moments when we can get them, and remember to be thankful for them. One thing I used to LOVE to do with Carter when I would drop him off at preschool was letting him sit in my lap and "drive" through the carpool line. When we were down to two cars in front of us, he would switch to the passenger's side to get out. I have re-established this tradition with Addie. She sits in my lap and "drives" as she counts down the cars in front of us. I relish the feel of her warm little body, the smell of her sweet hair as she chatters, "Oh no, four more cars, three!"

She grabs my face and says, "I have 101 kisses for you Mommy!" and goes to town, kissing my cheeks, forehead, and ending with a few butterfly kisses on my nose. I return all of her kisses and say goodbye and that I love her and will see her soon and I watch as she skips down the sidewalk, chattering to everyone she passes. She is so happy and growing so quickly, and I am just thankful for those few minutes of driving together.

We are retraining ourselves to seize the moments that present themselves...

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Figuring Out Me

A wise friend and I recently chatted about New Year's resolutions. She had decided not to make any -- instead of resolving to be something she is not, she was going to work on accepting who she is. Brilliant, I thought.

At the age of thirty-one, I think I am finally beginning to know and understand and accept who I am. I can sew, but I just don't want to. I was in the middle of sewing a Halloween costume for my son when I realized that I hate sewing. There, I said it. It seems like the domestic arts are making some sort of faddish come-back, and I felt compelled to be a part of it. But I just don't want to. Why waste my time trying to be something I am not, when there are other aspects of me that I am that need working on? And why care if anyone looks down on my not developing this skill, or any other particular skill?

At different times in my life, I have chosen my hobbies, hairstyle, shoes, boyfriends, manner of exercise, and many other things because of what is popular. It is only in retrospect that I see that driving need to fit in, but I think I may be getting over that. And really, I'm not sure that others are as concerned with my choices as I used to worry they may be.

So, along with my friend, I resolved not to resolve. I just began to think about who I really am. I am a wife and a mom, a reader, a writer, a beginning jogger (not good at it but I want to be), a music lover, a cook and many other things. I'm not sure about my political affiliation. I have trouble identifying with the major parties so I think I might be something more minor. Some things I am out of necessity -- like laundress, vacuum operator, toilet scrubber. Others, like the writing and jogging, I am out of enjoyment and because of the way God designed me. For whatever His reason, He did not design me to love sewing, canning, or women's groups in general (I can handle Bible studies but ladies' nights out in large groups are not my thing). I have finally accepted this and begun to explore how I can develop the talents and desires He did place in me instead of wasting a large portion of my life forcing myself to pretend to be something I am not.

And, friends, it is good...

"We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do." -Ethel Barrett

Friday, January 28, 2011

Best Chocolate Cake -- EVER!

I want to share this recipe because not only is it THE tastiest chocolate cake I have ever made, it is super easy! I one-and-a-halfed the recipe to make my son's birthday cake (see previous post) and used buttercream frosting to decorate (side note -- ALWAYS add a bit of almond extract to buttercream frosting -- it just makes it so much better!). This one is for my mom's birthday celebration tonight, and is topped with fudge candy icing. The secret ingredient is coffee. You just can't go wrong with this one, unless you hate chocolate, in which case, I do not know how to relate to you! :)

Beatty's Chocolate Cake (from Barefoot Contessa):

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
3/4 cups good cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup buttermilk, shaken
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup freshly brewed hot coffee

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 359 degrees F. Grease 2 (8-inch) round cake pans or 1 bundt pan.

Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer filled with a paddle attachment and mix on low speed until combined. In another bowl, combine the buttermilk, oil, eggs, and vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry. With mixer still on low, add the coffee and stir just to combine, scraping the bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Pour the batter into the prepared pan(s) and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean. Cool in the pans for 30 minutes, then turn them out onto a cooling rack and cool completely.

See how moist it looks? It tastes that moist too. It's just YUM! If you are using a cooked fudge icing as I did today, do not forget to scrape the pan and share the scrapings with your little ones so they don't feel left out.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

8

I shake the dye in the bottle and spread it evenly through my hair, clip it all up, set the timer for 30 minutes and head back to the kitchen to finish prepping food for his party. The gray has begun showing heavily. I don't feel old enough to have an eight-year-old, but he turns anyway, triumphantly, noisily, joyfully eight. And the clock keeps ticking, and his hands look like big boy hands, any trace of baby fat gone. All that cursive writing must be making them leaner. He races ahead to bigger and bigger things, and I look forward and backward at the same time. It's bittersweet...

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

A New Page Quietly Turns

Silence.

That is the sound in my car as I drive away from dropping him off for his first day. He skips a grade and is just slightly smaller than the other kids in his class. My heart skips a few beats. It's not easy to trust your most treasured ones in the hands of others.

I remind myself to trust those treasured ones in the hands of the One who created them. He planned these days before I ever thought of them. He knows their needs and cares. And He knows me too. That is the beauty of letting go...

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Change

"For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many changes have happened in our little family between the beginning of December and today. There have been ups and downs, smiles and tears, prayers and pleas, and many, many discussions between my husband and me.

It is no secret that I have struggled with depression. I am a bit introspective and have been told at various points in my life that my river runs a little bit deeper than most. There have been times when I have come close to drowning in my own river. I am also more introverted than I ever thought myself to be, and I am recharged by time to myself, quietly reading and drinking coffee or even doing housework with my ipod plugged in. These are not all of the reasons we have decided to change, but they do play into it.

My husband and I took a large step back and began to talk about our family and the things we have learned and whether it was wise for us to continue down the road of home educating. We decided that for us, it was not. It was an excruciating decision for us to come to because I had begun to think very narrowly that I had found "the right way" to raise my children, and for his part, he really loved what we were doing, though he had not fallen into the narrow pattern that I had.

I thought if I just persevered that on the other end of this journey there would be a strong young man who cared for his family and worked hard and chose a wife who would stay home and raise godly offspring. I thought if I continued that my own daughter would choose the same path and follow in my footsteps some day, schooling her own children and raising them to do the same. And there may have been. But I no longer think that it is my job to tell them what they have to be, but to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and do my best to teach them to follow the prompting of the Holy Spirit and His leading. And Lord willing, they will still turn out to be godly people because of our Savior's amazing grace. And they will be free to follow the Lord where He would lead, even if that means they do not choose to live the life that I have lived.

I look back on my own life and the huge mistakes I made, and I realize how God's grace is the primary factor in where I am today, even the ugly parts. I think I may have begun to discount that grace in the lives of my own children and feel that it was my job to control all aspects. I did not realize that I had begun to follow a path that was narrower than the narrow way that Christ asks us to follow. It is only in retrospect that I can see that I added to the gospel.

I do not say these things to say that home educating is wrong or that I regret it. I will never regret the year that my children were with me almost every minute of the day. I learned so much about myself and about them during that cherished time. I view my role as a parent differently and in a more serious light than I ever did before. I truly believe that God led us into that season and that He has led us out of it. I believe that He convicts some people to persevere and follow through and that they are following Him in doing so. I remain supportive of home education because I know the value that lies in it.

I have realized that no one can ever have it all. As Emerson's quote at the top of this post states, there is a sacrifice for every choice we make. And we have chosen a different road than the one we were on. We have not handed over the reigns of their rearing to the schools they will be attending, but we do realize that they will spend less time within our sphere of influence and that this will change our family dynamics. But my hope and prayer is that our time together will be even sweeter for the time that we spend apart.

May God bless the changes that we all go through as we endeavor to move in His ways. He has allowed us so much freedom and for that I am thankful. May I never forget that the grace that is so present in my life is also present in the lives of my children. And may I never forget that any "gospel" that tells me that I cannot rest until I have done things a certain way is not THE gospel. I have begun a habit of running things through the grid of Jesus's words. If the interpretation of scripture does not line up with what He taught then it is the wrong interpretation.

Jesus did not tell me that I could not rest until I lived up to a certain standard. He said, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28, emphasis mine). It is in those very words that I rest today and will rest this week as I give up the honored title of "homeschooling mom" and return to "just a mom". May we all find His rest to be balm for our weary souls.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Christmas Clean

In my mind, as a child, Christmas meant perfection. It meant that the world stopped, Mom cooked, I spent days smelling fresh pine and watching lights twinkle in the tree and anticipating the gifts to be unwrapped on Christmas morning. It meant that all was well and no one was hurting.

When I was first married, Christmas meant a lot of nesting, decorating, cooking and exhaustion. I wanted the house to look like something out of Pottery Barn or Martha Stewart Living, neither of which is bad, but we didn't have the budget to make that happen.

Now, Christmas still means a lot of hard work, but it means so much more. Pain and suffering continue at Christmas for many. While we focus on being jolly and eating great food tomorrow, two women in my church are suffering from cancer -- one is recurring breast cancer and one is colon cancer that has spread rapidly. My own heart continues to break from depression that does not seem to want to lift. People around the world are still oppressed, children still hungry, babies still aborted.

So, if the world goes on at Christmas, are we pretending by making all this merry? I don't think so, unless we are only in it for the gifts. As I scrubbed the blinds on the window over my kitchen sink last week, I pondered deeply why I only do things like scrubbing blinds at Christmas. There are certain types of deep cleaning that I reserve for the holidays. Why not other times of the year? I watched the dingy gray collection of dust from the year come away as I used Clorox Clean-Up and hot water with vinegar. I watched the patches of white appear in contrast to the dirty slats that I had not yet attacked, and I knew I would be scrubbing the same filth off again in a year. And yet I feel the need to prepare my home for the celebration of the Christ child. I thought about my heart.

My heart is so like those blinds. I know it is a dark and sinful place. I work very hard to clean it up but no matter how hard I work, the same dingy filth comes back. I can't keep it off, no matter how hard my best efforts are. I need someone else to clean it for me. Let every heart prepare Him room. I want to prepare Him room, but I need His help to even begin. Tomorrow, as my children rip into their presents, I will remember why the church took this pagan time and claimed it as it's own. This celebration that has been so convoluted, not by the fairy tale of Santa, but by the desire for the world in my own doubting heart, is about my need for a Savior.

Here is a poem that my mentor shared with me. It sums up, I think, the point of joy on Christmas:

God Sent us a Savior!

(author unknown)

If our greatest need had been information

God would have sent us an educator.

If our greatest need had been technology

God would have sent us a scientist.

If our greatest need had been money

God would have sent us an economist.

If our greatest need had been pleasure

God would have sent us an entertainer.

But our greatest need was forgiveness

So God sent us a Savior.

Thomas recognizes Jesus after seeing His scars.

Merry Christmas!