Daily Meditation

This is the thought I am cultivating in my heart today.

"Where there is no joy, what is the point? A soldier can endure the mud, blood and pain of war by visualizing past or future joys, but a child without joy is a lost soul. Likewise, one can endure a dull or painful occupation, knowing that there is a sanctuary of joy waiting after hours, but when the sanctuary is joyless, what hope can sustain him? A mature wife may cope with a joyless marriage by consoling herself in the hope of afterlife, but a child can't so resign himself. A husband may deal with a joyless marriage by losing himself in the rewards of occupation or hobby, but a child has no outlet that can compensate for loss of relationships. Relationships are part of the adult world, but relationships are all the world to a child. An adult without refreshing relationships may still be successful in his career. He can read, engage in hobbies, or just endure loneliness, but a child without relationships is emotionally ill." --No Greater Joy, volume three (emphasis mine)

Eden and The Dinner Table

Quote of the Day:

"Getting sent out of that garden is like having to get down from the dinner table for not using manners. I don't like that" --Reese, age 4

Budget Class

This morning during our school time I asked Cole to help me prepare the budget (our

"month" starts on the tenth). Those of you who read this blog regularly know how behind I am on our finances. I decided that today was the day to begin ironing out the wrinkles. I seem to never get it done because of the kids interrupting my concentration, so I decided to throw them purposefully into the mix and see what happened.

The first thing I did was get out the Monopoly set and pay Cole one month's salary, in mixed bills. He was amazed and kept exclaiming about how MUCH he had in his hot little paws. I was thinking, Just you wait and see....

The next things we set out were the ten-key, a piece of paper, and a pen. I asked him to tell me as many things he could think of that we would need to pay for over the course of the month. He surprised me with some (he remembered insurance on his own) and I surprised him with the vast NUMBER of the others. Soon we had a good long list, and his face was starting to fall when he looked at the money in his hands.

I wrote our salary number on the piece of paper, and away we went. One by one we went through our list, subtracting out all the necessary expenditures. After each one was recorded on the paper, Cole subtracted it on the ten-key, read me the new number, and then "paid me" for the bill. The closer we got to the end of our list, the more melancholy he became, finally saying, "Mom, I don't think we're going to have enough for gymnastics or the quilts (a future project)." I encouraged him to not give up too soon, and when all was said and done, we did have just enough for both the gymnastics class AND the quilts!

I was surprised at how many tangents a simple budget discussion created. Cole learned how to calculate ten percent, how to perform simple functions on the ten-key, and how to read numbers in the thousands. We discussed where and how a tithe might be given, why it is important to save a portion of every check, and what the difference is between health insurance and disability. We also worked hard to prioritize our expenses, making sure that the basic needs were satisfied before moving on to any luxuries.

I'm thinking now that this jointly affair should become a monthly occurrence. Having a helper certainly got me out of my finance rut, and I loved being able to see Cole's whole world expand with every new topic. He definitely has a new perspective on the daily workings of the checkbook!

On an unrelated note: A few days ago, the boys asked for some sliced cheese with their breakfast. They hadn't been eating more than a minute when Reese suddenly arranged his slices in his hand and said, "Got any 3's?" Cole immediately followed suit and they spent the next 20 minutes or so playing Go Fish with their cheese. I think it is hilarious how intently they are studying their "cards"!

Now That I Am 30...

....Must I give up my torn jeans and scuffed brown clogs?

March

So March is already here, which means that I have sufficiently used up the "I have a newborn" excuse for wearing yoga pants every day. Strangers are starting to look at me, well, strangely, when I explain to them that my baby was JUST born, since he is huge and smiles and laughs at them in the grocery store. Time to shake a stick at those lingering pregnancy pounds that are still following me around like a naughty shadow!

I am an emotional eater, anyway, so pregnancy for me is pretty much a free-for-all. It's always a touch disappointing to go through labor and delivery and then discover there are STILL 30 pounds to run off.....

This week I took the bull by the horns and waved goodbye to my All Nutella, All The Time diet. I have moved on to eating meals packed full of goodness and nutrition--breakfasts of roasted yams (drizzled with a little maple syrup of course) and hardboiled eggs, lunches of asian ginger broth with tofu, peas, and brown rice, and dinners of chicken and barley with broccoli, or Brittany's black bean and salsa soup. Yum! I hardly feel like I'm getting cheated, and the scale is down three pounds in three days. Only 27 to go...

Happy Birthday Reese!

We are celebrating Reese's 4th birthday today. That means that the last Leap Year was the year he was born--and he was just one day shy of being a Leap Year baby. My actual due date was February 29th, and I giggled to myself all during my pregnancy whenever I told someone I was due on Leap Day and their response was, "When is that?"



When Cole was nearing his second birthday, Justin and I decided that maybe it was time to have another baby. Cole himself had been such a surprise, born just 9 months and 11 days after our wedding, and it had taken quite a bit of finesse to scramble around and reorganize our life as newlyweds to prepare for a new little life. Now, nearly two years later, we were settling into our routines and thought it was time for Cole to have a sibling.



That first month, I didn't get pregnant, and I remember feeling devestated. Certainly babies were not things that could really be "planned"! The timing was obviously out of our hands, and we wondered if this time, we would be forced to wait.

But no--the second month came along, and we discovered--elatedly--that a baby was on its way. Now, when I think back and remember my disappointment that first month, I feel almost panicked, realizing that if we had conceived right away, we wouldn't have gotten REESE!

Here's some fun Reese-filled trivia for you.

*Reese is the only one of my boys that is a Pisces, like me. If it hadn't have been a Leap Year, my due date would have been March 1st--which is the same due date my mother had when she was expecting me. That's a little weird.

*Reese was my shortest labor and my largest baby--nearly ten pounds--a fun combination that enticed me to try an epidural the third time around.

*Reese has the fairest skin of the boys (white like his mama) and looks the most like the Baer side. Cole told me once (when he was 3 and Reese was a baby) that only he and Daddy could go in the restaurant, because they were dark, and Reese and I needed to stay in the car because we were white. I was speechless!

*Reese began speaking actual words at the astonishing age of 7 1/2 months, but he didn't walk until after his first birthday. I think he figured that there was no where worth going, since Mom was usually where the food was. At just over a year, he could put away an entire Costco hot dog and would ask for more. By eighteen months, his confessed favorite food was "meat". He could eat steak with the best of them! I would take him to playdates and all of the other kids would play so hard that we couldn't get them to eat....and Reese would eat so much that we couldn't get him to play. Ah yes, a boy after his Mama's own heart....

*Before the age of two, Reese had discovered two of his favorite things were drawing and building Legos. Not the big, bulky, toddler Legos--the real deal, folks. He would sit before a pile of pieces and create the most wonderful machines, spaceships, monsters. And the thing is: they would actually LOOK like what they were, and have functional parts. I still can't build anything worth beans out of Legos, unless I have a pattern I'm following. And as for the drawings--he would scribble something on his paper, study it for a few minutes, then suddenly gasp, and yell, "IT'S A.....(fill in the blank)!" He would proceed to fill in the details to finish out the whale, or carrot, or whatever. His creativity unlocked something inside of Cole, who up until that time would never try something unless he knew he could do it perfectly. Cole had always refused to pick up a crayon or marker because he recognized that he didn't know how to draw a car, or a hat, or a dog. So he wouldn't try. Watching Reese create out of nothing, and find such joy in it, finally gave Cole a desire to try without worry of failure. To this day, two of their favorite things to do together are draw and play with Legos.

*As a toddler, Reese also had a habit for creating more-succinct names for things (in my opinion) than their actual names. My two favorites to this day are "Hawkyboarding" for skateboarding (in honor of the revered Tony Hawk), and "Suicycles" for motorcycles.

Reese's birth was unique. He came quickly when no one even knew we were in the hospital. My grandfather had just died a few days prior, and his memorial service was planned for the 28th--the day Reese was born. When I suspected I was in labor, I didn't bother calling our families, because I knew they would be unable to make the trip to the hospital due to their obligations at the service. By the time we arrived at the Childbirth Center, in the wee hours of the morning, we discovered that delivery was imminent. I still remember phoning my parents, waking them with my call, trying to explain to them that Baby was HERE! I finally had to hold the phone up to my crying newborn before they would believe me.

Reese's birthday is sacred to me because I can't celebrate the birth of my son without remembering my grandfather. I think of them both whenever I hear Jack Johnson's song "If I Could", about the baby that was born just as his friend lay dying. The lyrics say, "one goes out, one comes in"....

So Happy Birthday, Reese: We are richer for having you in our lives. And Papa, we are thinking of you too, and someday we will introduce you to this wonderful boy!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY REESE!

They're Here, They're Here!

My Christmas present was delivered today,
courtesy of the US Postal Service...

Five baby chicks, each of them just 2 days old.

Justin says if we want to name them, we should choose Foodie names, like Fryer and Drumstick, to remind us of their eventual purpose. I don't know that Cole really understands, because he wants to name one of them "Wheat"!

These sweet little ladies are the perfect end to my year, as God has been teaching me great things lately about the sanctity of life.

Last winter, He led me through a journey of ancient Old Testament scriptures concerning food and ritual. I was astonished to see such abundance of life in passages I had read so blindly for years. I saw the beauty of God's protection in scriptures about restriction; I found freedom in the celebration of Sabbath.

And then, unbeknownst to me, as I was praising God for loving me as a parent and giving me safe boundaries, he was creating another child within me, yet again expanding the limits of my little tent....

Teaching me ever more about trusting His timing, and having faith in the goodness of His gifts.

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." --jeremiah 29:11

On a basic level, I am thankful for the food these chicks will provide. On a deeper level, although I am not looking forward to explaining their death to my boys, I am thankful for the opportunity to share that experience with my children. I hope that they begin to see, as I have, that sometimes One has to die, for us to truly live....