Because I Have Boys

I have a few things that I do to save the moments in life that have my heart or have me laughing. One of those things is to write a catch phrase and a date on a wine cork from a special event. Such as, "blackberry fireworks." Catch phrase to capture that we drank a special bottle of Blackberry wine from a Hermann winery on the 4th of July.

The second thing is this gallon sized glass jar with a lid that shines as the sunlight hits it on my counter top. It is in this jar that I have cut into small pieces beautiful brightly colored card stock to write funny moments that happen with the people I share my life with, i.e. kids, friends, neighbors, mail men(jk).

I have several funny moments in there in which my little boys were just gross. Hilarious. But gross. I can't even share them on here; although, I started to once and decided that it was in your best interest that I didn't.

So back to the funny moment at hand. My phone is laying on the kitchen table where the boys and I are sitting. They are eating their lunch and I am working on my computer. My phone vibrates as it receives a text message, and Eli says in a very serious manner, "ooh did your phone just fart?!" He was so serious that it had to go into the jar.

I wrote the gross moment down on a beautiful piece of card stock paper and sat back down at the table. A moment later I realized it. THESE...were the kind of gross things that were going to fill my beautiful, shiny, glass jar to the brim and be written on my beautifully colored card stock. Because I have boys. :)

Crowd Control

It hit me yesterday. My family is like a birthday party. It's fun...just not in the balloons, cake and ice cream kind of way. In a loud way. The kids have a lot of fun. But as one does, it gets loud and then another joins in the fun and it gets louder. You see where this is going. It's like a birthday party when another kid shows up to join the fun. So....how do I harness this fun and tame it?

Our Secret Place

Around Christmas time I had an appointment with my counselor and she was explaining to me how we need to live from our secret place with God. She asked me to remember when the last time I felt totally safe and secure; to recall all of it's descriptors like sounds and smells. Ultimately, I remembered a time from my childhood. There were a few things that really stood out, like laying on a cool floor in the heat of summer in front of a fan blowing in my face, and waking up from afternoon naps to the smell of pine-sol because my mother had been cleaning while I rested, and the sound of my father singing a special song that he only sang to me.

I realized that, THAT was what my secret place felt like and that no one else on this planet remembered it the way I did. And with that realization, came the calm clarity that everyone's secret place with God also feels a little different from the other. Our God is a personal God!

What does your secret place look like, smell like, and sound like? And what are some of the things you do that your children might relate to their secret place?

Talking to myself....

I will often softly converse with God as I'm doing work around the house. The other day as I'm doing some cleaning Garrett is at my side and I didn't even realize I was speaking aloud until I hear him say, "mommy are you praying?" I politely replied, "yes," and continued with my prayer. As I thought on that later in the day, I realized something. My children....hear me pray. Not just bed time prayers or meal time prayers or the, "Oh God" kind of prayers when you almost rear end the car in front of you(that never happens by the way). But they hear the real deal conversations with God. And I excitedly thanked God for the confirmation that I got from Garrett that day; that I am doing something right as a parent!