Be Careful Little Lips What You Say

I overheard Ethan have the following brief interchange with his Uncle Walter who has been learning Russian:

U. Walter reading from a Russian text: "See, now that word is a verb."

Ethan: "What does it mean?"

U. Walter: "I don't know."

Ethan: "Then you better be careful how you use it."

So true. So true.

Daddy Does It Best

The boys, but especially Ethan, have been captivated by the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. Nathanael has read the first two books to them at bedtime over the last few months. Nathanael reads with great expression and enjoys giving each character a different voice. The boys love it, and from what I can hear from the kitchen, it's pretty impressive.

Recently, we found the third book in audio format at the library--a version read by the author and a cast of actors. Ethan rushed to put it on as soon as we arrived home. He listened for a while and then sauntered into the kitchen and said, "This one's okay, but Daddy does the best voices."

Now You Are Nine

Ethan, it seems like yesterday you were a chubby-cheeked, bald baby who charmed everyone you met with an easy smile. Your eyes sparkled when you grinned from ear to ear, and you lived up to your name which means "happy" and "steady." You're the boy who's always up for anything from playing dress up with cousins to trying new, exotic foods. You are equally pleased out playing soccer or sitting at the table drawing a sketch. You have a hard time choosing your favorite subject in school because you love them all (except math, that is).

Your love for God is most commonly expressed in a sensitive and compassionate heart and an authentic desire to do what is right and good. I love to watch you worship on Sunday mornings at church. You like to sing, but you express your praise best by beating out a rhythm on your lap or the chair in front of you.

This year your Dad took you to Medieval Times as your birthday gift. When you found out that you would be going, you pulled me aside and asked if your brother Micah could come, too. You really wanted to share that experience with him and didn't want him to be left out. The two of you talked non-stop when you got back from your outing--taking turns telling all the details. And that's another thing I like about you: you love to talk! Your Grandpa once told me his mom had to converse with an imaginary friend at the dinner table because her three sons wouldn't talk. I don't think I'll ever have to resort to that!

We love you and are blessed to be your parents! This year your birthday fell on Good Friday, so this post is a little belated just like your birthday celebration. Happy Birthday!

Excellent Sermon Series

Last week, I shared about Lent and my desires for personal transformation in a deep way this season of sacrifice in my post "Making Space." At our church here, Church of the Resurrection, the pastoral staff is preaching a series of sermons during Lent called "Conversations with Jesus," centering on the life-transforming encounters of individuals with Christ in the Gospels. This series has been especially challenging for me, and as a follow-up to my previous post on Lent, I wanted to share an excellent sermon from this series by Father Kevin Miller, titled "Finding God in Your Wilderness" based on Jesus' conversation with the Devil during His temptation in the desert found in Matthew 4.

I hope you will find it as challenging and comforting as I did! You can find this sermon as well as the second sermon in this series here.

Weekend in Ohio

Two weekends ago, we visited Nathanael's sister and family in Ohio to kick off the beginning of Nathanael's spring break from seminary. We had a lovely time filled with good food, lots of games, and great conversations. The cousins thoroughly enjoyed playing together, and the adults even found time to sit around and talk while the kids played--pretty amazing considering there were seven kids under nine years old running around. I managed to get a few photos of some of the activities, but most of the time my camera wasn't handy when I wanted it or I'd forgotten to take it along. Thank you, Jeff and Julia, for a lovely weekend!

Pizza-making with Chef Jeff!

Dutch Blitz was the kids' favorite, but the adults managed to play several games of Settlers of Catan when the kids were in bed. I lost count on how many different games the kids played this weekend. My kids learned several new ones including Dutch Blitz, Battleship, and Rummikub.

Little Lillian can totally hold her own in Blitz. Don't be fooled by that sweet exterior! She's a serious game player; it must run in the family. I refuse to play Blitz with her mother, Julia, who beat me repeatedly Christmas of '98 when I visited Brazil to meet Nathanael's family for the first time. It didn't leave a good impression=), but it's all water under the bridge now . . . or is it? Maybe we'll have a little rematch when they visit us in April...

Making Space

Until a few years ago, I had no concept of Ash Wednesday and my only understanding of Lent was "fish on Fridays." I observed, with evangelical skepticism, the Hispanic girls on my volleyball team in high school who couldn't join in the post-game hamburger on the way home from Friday night matches. It wasn't until I was a mother that I became aware of a longing to give my children a deeper, more rooted understanding of the centrality of Christ in life . . . as Life. Although I didn't grow up in a liturgical church, I began to discover the riches of the Christian calendar and a rhythm of life and faith that grows from living accordingly.

Over the past few years, we've adopted several Lenten practices including fasting that we have grown to love and cherish as desirable and necessary avenues for growing deeper in our faith and closer to Christ. Our fasts, both individual and familial, have varied, and we've failed to keep them perfectly. However, even in the failing, we've discovered so much about ourselves and our need for Christ's atonement on the Cross.

This past week we attended an Ash Wednesday service for the first time and were so blessed by it. In the homily, the priest shared the origin of Lent and gave a brief overview of why we fast. He described the act of fasting as sacrificing to create space for relationship with God. When we fast, we open up room in our lives for God by taking the focus off ourselves. Eileen Button describes the transformation in this way:

". . . the practice of Lent can be a valuable discipline. It's difficult to grasp what our sense of entitlement does to our bodies and souls. Our culture worships at the feet of pleasure. As we 'shovel it in,' we can become desensitized to our needs--the real hungers in our lives. Observing Lent can help us wrestle with the causes of our perpetual consumption . . . Lent invites us to jump off the hamster wheel of consumption and experience the pinch of abstaining from thoughtless indulgence."

These past few weeks, even before Lent, I was painfully aware of my propensity to self-medicate. As I began meeting with a small group to deal with some painful issues from my past, I could feel almost an instinctive need to avoid the pain at any cost. While my desire and the point of the small group is to take the pain to the Cross, I consistently tried to bury the pain in old habits. As I became aware of this pattern, I'd cut out that indulgence only to replace it with another. Apparently, I have a hierarchy of pain-numbing mechanisms--if food doesn't work, then TV will; if TV fails, there's always shopping . . . and on and on it goes. Of course, the irony is that none of these things satisfies; they only create more pain.

This year I see it more than ever--my need to create space through sacrifice, to trade in self-medicating for true satisfaction. It means feeling more than a "pinch" of pain; it means dying--dying to self. It means sitting with questions, and pain, and unfulfilled desires. This is a truly terrifying place to be, or at least it would be, if I were in it alone. Could there be a better time to walk through a difficult situation than Lent--when we watch our Lord walk willingly through horrific physical pain, not to mention the spiritual and emotional agony of complete separation from His heavenly Father, and death? All this, so that the empty space in us can be filled with the one relationship in which we can be truly satisfied. My prayer this Lenten season is to unmask the wide open space of my soul that's been hidden (at least from me) by self-medicating and to see God, who emptied Himself on the cross, become my only satisfaction.

If you've never considered practicing Lent, here's an excellent article from an Evangelical perspective on why we may be missing out.

In A Simple Way I Love You

Love doesn't always have to be complicated. Sometimes love can be simple. Over Valentine's Day, I realized that sometimes the simplest expressions of love are enough--no grand overtures, no Martha Stewart sensations--just small things that say: I love you.

Valentines: Little scraps of paper, snippets of ribbon, and leftover stickers carefully crafted together into something beautiful for someone we love. A Sunday afternoon spent with cousins creating silly and serious sayings to put on our cards.

Cupcakes: Love doesn't have to be from scratch. Cupcakes thrown together late in the day from a box mix and a spray can of frosting met with great approval from two little boys.


Chocolate: Nothing says "I love you" like chocolate! (Just kidding . . . ) When I saw this "Marital Bliss Bar" it immediately reminded me of my relationship with Nathanael, so I bought it and hid it away until Valentines Day. My husband daily models love in its simplest form--sacrifice. He sacrificially gives of his time, service, sleep, and support in little ways day in and day out. All those little sacrifices get translated directly to my heart as love. Thank you, Nathanael!

P.S. I did let him have the whole chocolate bar . . . okay . . . minus one little square that I stole before bedtime.

Love Simplified

I'm a perfectionist. It's my job, as a perfectionist, to make life more complicated than it needs to be. When I make a grocery list, if I make a mistake or it looks sloppy, I crumple it up, throw it away and start over. When we go out with friends, if I say something embarrassing, it casts a shadow over the entire evening. My journals are empty from page two on because of some tiny error in entry number one. A perfectionist is usually in constant inner turmoil precisely because there is a HUGE gap between what the perfectionist hopes to be and what she actually is--an imperfect person.

This inner turmoil knows no bounds. It extends to all areas of life--including love. Love, like the rest of life, is complicated for the perfectionist. Perhaps because it is here, in this area of love, that the perfectionist really, really wants to soar. She wants to give love perfectly, but she fails and sometimes, devastatingly so. Oh, how I fail! It's one thing to throw out your grocery list when you've spelled "Doritos" incorrectly, but what do you do with a relationship when you've misspelled "love" over and over again, when sin and selfishness stain. How do you start again?

And of all the people the perfectionist struggles to love, it is herself that she loves least of all--if at all. She can't see past the failure for the schism between expectation and reality is far too wide and unforgivable. Furthermore, since she barely likes herself, she finds it almost impossible to believe that anyone else would like--let alone--love her (and if they do, then they must not really know her).

Dark thoughts on a Valentine's Day. Yet, these were my thoughts yesterday as I stumbled, snapped, and snarled my way through the day. At the end of the day, I was waving the white flag of surrender, ready to pull the covers up over my head with this mantra echoing across the empty places: "I can't do it. It's too complicated. I give up." But a sister called. She listened as I spewed forth all that had suffocated, stifled, and sent me spiraling down all day long. She offered the kind of encouragement that most perfectionists and self-loathers shrug off as misinformed, but I listened. I listened and looked amidst the lies, all those thoughts that I had believed all day long and most of my life, for the tiniest bit of truth. At the core of all those lies, was a half-truth: I am not perfect. True. I am not perfect.

The problem is that I have taken that truth and attached all sorts of lies to it--all kinds of misaligned effects with this one cause: my imperfection. I'm not perfect, and therefore, unlovable. I'm not perfect, and therefore, my children will have serious struggles and need serious therapy. I'm not perfect, and my husband will eventually get tired of putting up with me. I am not perfect, and therefore, I'll disappoint my friends, so it's better not to have any. I am not perfect, and therefore, I cannot be happy.

These half-truths sound a little ridiculous when written out, but inside my head and heart, they are subtle slingers of guilt, despair, self-condemnation, and pain. Sometimes it takes a long time to dismantle the lies that we've believed--especially those ingrained from birth. Regardless of how long it takes, the first step is always to recognize the lie and begin to put truth into its place. We can't always do that alone; we may need sisters, prayer ministers, friends, parents, spouses to help us see our way clearly to a very uncomplicated and simple truth. Yesterday, on a pretty messed-up Valentine's Day, God gave me a glimpse of the Valentine's message He'd like to send me. It's pretty simple: You are not perfect, and I love you.

But God demonstrates His love for us in this:

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8

The Journey Begins

This morning our friends, Mark and Luciana and their daughter Isa, boarded a plane for Peru where they'll meet their second daughter, Rosa Maria Cecilia, who waits for them in an orphanage in a small town up in the mountains. For Mark and Luciana, the journey to adopt started several years ago and has been fraught with heartaches and disappointments as they've jumped through all the hoops only to face closed doors. As they received the news that Lia was to be theirs, it felt like the end of a long journey, but the journey is just beginning for Mark, Luciana, Isa, and Lia. It is a joyful journey to be sure, but not one without unknowns and question marks. They have graciously allowed us to share in their joy and in their journey through prayer.

If you would like to follow their story and pray for them as they meet Lia in Peru over the next five weeks, they have started a blog to keep us all up-to-date: rosamariacecilia.blogspot.com

Luciana at the shower to celebrate Lia's adoption.

South of the Border

On Sunday while the Ruch cousins were over for lunch, we happened to glance out our back door and saw these two geese waddling through the yard. Someone said, "I thought geese flew South for the winter." A voice chimed in, "These are Canadian geese; they are south." I guess it's all relative. They were fun to watch as they made their way across the snow.

Snow Ice Cream

Tuesday morning as reports of the oncoming blizzard were on every radio and TV station, my sister-in-law Margie called to remind me that blizzards are a great time to make snow ice cream. I had never heard of snow ice cream. Snow cones . . . yes. Snow ice cream . . . no. I found what seemed to be a fairly easy recipe online, stocked up on the ingredients and awaited the fresh snow that would be arriving that afternoon.

We didn't make the snow ice cream until Friday night. Risking everything, I decided snow ice cream would be dessert for some friends (with a 6-year-old-daughter) that were coming for dinner. After dinner, we collected some fresh snow and whipped in evaporated milk, sugar, and vanilla. It wasn't bad. It tasted kind of like soft serve vanilla ice cream, but a pan of back-up brownies would've been nice.

Got snow ice cream?

Of Blizzards and Babies

The predicted blizzard did blow through on Tuesday evening. Winds gusted up to 60 mph, and the storm dumped 20 inches of snow on us. It was a sight to behold from inside, of course, and we were fortunate not to lose power during the storm. We experienced "thundersnow," lightning and thunder in a snowstorm, for the first time. It was eerie to say the least.

Early Tuesday, while we prepared for this storm, my sister-in-law Katherine, a week overdue with her sixth, was at the hospital to be induced as scheduled. Four of her five children waited there in hopes of being able to greet their new sibling immediately after birth, but as the day progressed and the labor didn't, they came over to spend the night with us. They arrived with about an hour or so to play outside before the storm really kicked in.

As the winds grew stronger and the snow drifted, we wondered what the next couple of days might be like stranded in the house with six kids. We hoped we had bought enough food to feed us all and hoped the power would stay on. Keeping everyone warm could be tricky. After the kids were all tucked in and asleep, we turned on the news to catch stories about main thoroughfares in Chicago that were shut down with cars bumper to bumper, stranded as they tried to get home from work. Cars were running out of gas, and owners were abandoning them there. My sister-in-law Margie was already without power.

And still no baby . . .

We received updates about Katherine's progress throughout the night as the wind howled and children slept. At 4 a.m. we received word that Katherine was experiencing bleeding and would likely need a C-section. We prayed and waited. At 6:30 the phone rang and as Nathanael answered it, the kids appeared in the doorway eager to hear any news. Stewart told them via speaker phone that they could rejoice that Becket John had entered the world, and both Mommy and baby were doing well. There was no going back to sleep after that!

As we gazed out of our window, what we saw was truly amazing--snow everywhere drifted up almost as high as the van with twenty inches of virgin snow over the entire backyard! Everything was still in the bright sun. We realized it would be quite some time before it would be possible to take the kids to the hospital--much to their disappointment. However, a hot breakfast and sending them out to build forts and play "capture the flag" seemed to ease the wait.

Nathanael shoveled for four hours and freed the driveway, but not the sidewalks or a path from our back door to the car. The snow plow hadn't come up our street either. So, even though our car could go down the driveway, it couldn't go out. Finally around 2 p.m., a friend drove his Land Rover up our street to pick up Nathanael along with Becket's eager siblings to go to the hospital after waiting all day long.

The kids have been in and out from playing in the snow many times since yesterday, and I can barely keep up with the wet clothes. They are having a blast in the remnants of the biggest storm of the decade. And today, after our street had been plowed late last night, we went to visit Becket and parents at the hospital.

He's very cute and . . . a little bit famous! Katherine and Stewart were featured in an article about blizzard babies in the Chicago Tribune today. You can check the article out here.

We praise the Lord that Becket arrived safely--blizzard and all.

Blizzard Warning

Last night we learned that we are expecting a blizzard in our area starting sometime Tuesday afternoon and continuing through Wednesday. I've heard reports ranging between 12 inches and 30 inches of snow. Living by the motto, "always be prepared,"(read: always be over-cautious and anxious), I immediately got online to find out what one needs to do to prepare for a blizzard. While more seasoned Midwesterners may laugh at me, I set out this morning to get supplies for being snowed in without power. And I wasn't alone! Both Target and the library were busier than usual.

I have two concerns if we get stuck inside: survival and entertainment (not necessarily in that order). I stocked up on a fresh load of books including a few Playaways, audio books that run on batteries, hang around your neck, and hook up to your earphones. We also, quite embarrassingly, checked out an insane amount of dvds which will be of no use if we don't have power. As we walked out, both boys barely visible behind armloads of movies, Ethan commented, "I hope people don't think we normally watch this many movies." Me too, Ethan! At Target, I bought water, a flashlight, and plenty of batteries. I resisted the urge to buy a really cool camping lantern, but I did pick up several days supply of Diet Coke--no one wants to be trapped in a house with me if I am going through withdrawals.

At home, I felt a sudden urge to organize. Somehow, being stuck inside seems much more palatable if your surroundings are pleasant. I organized the pantry, decluttered the homeschool shelf, did several loads of laundry (if you have to put on 20 layers of clothes to stay warm, you want them to be clean), and took out the trash and recycling. I even worked in a trip to the gym to work out. I tried to do a little longer workout since I might not make it back there for a few days. (A girl can hope, can't she?)

As Nathanael left for class this evening, wearing only a sweatshirt for a jacket, I forced his winter coat into his hand along with a flashlight with flashers. I would've gotten a blanket and some non-perishables to send with him just in case the blizzard hits a day ahead of time, but he "didn't hear me" call out to him to wait a moment. I'm sure he receives my over-cautious, controlling, mother-like behavior as love. Don't most men?

Anyway . . . I've gathered the candles, the flashlights, and a book of winter poems, so I think we're set.