one of our pastor and his wife's four daughters left last week for europe with a group, college girls studying abroad for the summer. we did hear news from her today, she and a friend were heading into london on a train that ended up being diverted. she wrote from "the church which is only a block and a half away from the Welwyn Garden City train station...God is watching out for us and I feel looked after and protected. He is very good and has given us a "way of escape in every situation we've encountered...".
my sister and her family live in a small town in holland, running a camp/ conference/ translation ministry; i talked to her husband today.."it's a crazy world we live in", he said...crazy, alright. the enemy is alive and well, wreaking havoc, living in the lies he's succeeded in getting people all over God's earth to believe. but his time is limited - though it may seem long to those whose hearts belong to the Lord - God will come, redeem, make new, dry tears, be our eternal light and song. may we be able to see incidents like what happened this morning with a broader perspective, while we pray for help in the immediate, may we keep one eye out for the return of our King, for the peace and the feast, for the end of night and dark and sin.

well, per comment #3 at the post below, i guess i've been tagged...thanks, bridget :). as far as i understand, there are two (or more?) parts to this business..first, to answer the question in my own words; then, to pass this dealio on to, let's see, eight other bloggers. i'll do my best..let me know if i missed something here..

Five Things I Miss From Childhood...

1. Hours and hours to curl up and read. I was that kid who lugged home the limit from the public library weekly and spent loads of time inbetween lost in another world between book covers, chewing on the end of my ponytail. These days I have to steal moments when a good read crosses my path..from my husband, my kids, my house, my errands, my friends, the good ol' tyrrany of the urgent itself. I miss the long stretches.

2. Ease of relationships. Kids make instant friends (or for that matter, enemies..but it's possible to make a quick turnaround in this case, which is another thing I miss)..where two or more are gathered, play will ensue in relative simplicity. Kids are too immature emotionally, mentally, to waste time figuring out if they have enough in common, if a future together is, well, in the future, if the new kid has enough time...i love seeing this with my own kids, and it makes me realize how complicated things can get in this area as we become knowing adults, living more in the past and worrying more about the future than just being in the moment, all too often.

3. The pure goodness of eating an orange push up on a summer day. They just do not taste as great nowadays to me.

4. The feeling of freedom in riding my bike everywhere. Now if I ride a bike, it doesn't feel like freedom. Driving my car feels like freedom, somewhat. Riding a bike feels like exercise.

5. Spending the night at my Grandma's house..us girls would pile on her big bed, smear vaseline all over our calves and feet, eat little frosted or jelly filled cookies and watch t.v...Love Boat, Joker's Wild, Little House on the Prarie (never once suspecting that I would grow up and move to the prarie)...getting ready for bed in the soft orange and pink seashell wallpapered bathroom...sleeping on the fold out beds in the spare room with the old typewriter on its little metal table, the aqua blue sit up table, and the closet full of Polizzi and DiCicco family photo albums...waking up to her making us breakfast..the toast with fruit and nut bread, fresh squeezed orange juice, her perfect creamy scrambled eggs. What I wouldn't give for such a retreat these days!
****************************************
Here's the tag part:

Remove the first person from the following list, bump everyone up one spot and put your name in the number 5 spot.

Blessed Beyond Belief
http://blessedbeyondbelief.blogspot.com/

Thro'a Glass Darkly
http://saija.blogspot.com/

Blogin' Idiot
http://blogin_idiot.blogspot.com/

Those Who Can...Do Teach!
http://thosewhocan.blogspot.com/

JustAdjust
http://justadjust.blogspot.com/

...and add four unsuspecting people to this list -

Jenn
http://jdungca.blogspot.com/

Kristin
http://www.brian5.com/madness.php

Brian
http://www.brian5.com/drivel.php

Methy
http://www.groovedallas.com/cainfm/methy//

four year old lucy, leaning over the arm of the couch this morning to get to the library book box and having a bit of a hard time - "I am getting TOO OLD for this!"

i have a few friends i call when i'm on a walk, so that i can walk farther. it's amazing what i can accomplish in the productively healthy realm when i'm distracted. i talked to a friend tonight who is in the post marsupial but still highly vigilant stage of raising her first child, currently a two year old. he's amazingly fast and infinitely curious, and has, like most two year olds i've known (including my own), way more confidence than capability. he, in fact, came crying to her with a new bump forming while we were talking about just how different we christians are here in the midwestern u.s. than some in, say, the pacific northwest, the middle east, beijing. i let her go, and called another friend who is pregnant with her first, cruising through her second trimester, dealing with her role in helping her husband raise his 11 year old from his first marriage, volunteering with high school kids who show some spiritual interest, driving home from a board meeting. we talked about marriage, and summer planning when there's an ex-wife involved, how long after the expiration date you can really use ground chuck (i said about one day), and getting together soon, before or after the barrage of family trips and visits she is about to navigate through this month.

if you know me, you know that i have a tiny hang up about my relationships with other people. i tend to get caught up in slightly negative thinking that my friendships are all mostly shallow, that i have little to no community going on in my life, that i am hard to get to know..or something. i find, though, that if i reach out past these feelings, call someone, put a letter in the mail or shoot an email through cyberspace - connect - ...inevitibly, i am blessed with varying degrees of mutuality, of sharing some human space, of getting great feedback on yes, we are all in this muck together-ness. it doesn't really take much to encourage me, but often it takes me awhile to realize that it does take me looking up and around, opening my hand, offering or asking. trusting. as i'm learning...

anne lamott, speaking of her writer father, said "i think he believed that our job, the job of a writer, is not to get up and say, "tomorrow, in battle, most of you will die..." instead, a writer must entertain the troops the night before."

i'm finding that i tend to be more of a reporter lately than a writer...if the ship is sinking, i want to blow the horn, blast the siren, swing the floodlights on the most threatened area...i haven't wanted to try to entertain the troops the night before. As much value and life as I see in storytelling, in painting beautiful and insightful and even entertaining tales, my heart has been heavier than that for much of the last few months. I'm praying for more balance, to start to see more things half filling the cup rather than all the things that are draining it dry, to grow in laughter and love, and to take the sorrow and difficulties in stride. We all encompassing hyper analysts can get a permanent deeply indented line between our eyebrows if we aren't careful...

one word for you - carpetball.

...so, five months later...

i actually forgot for awhile that i had a blog. and when i came back to the realization, i visited and found that two friends had been here in the meantime...so i guess i'll start up again (no telling how often i'll post) and see what happens.

five months in a few words, just to catch you up - chad's birthday, had toe surgery, reading stepping heavenward by elizabeth prentiss, trip to michigan and chicago - meeting my niece and taking the kids on the el, through the loop, in a cab, and to the art institute, along with mother's day brunch at ann sathers -, experienced kansas finishing up homeschool fourth grade, jesse, public school first grade, and lucy, christian preschool; did not improve my terrible typing, started leading a small group of fellow moms in a study through the book "shepherding a child's heart" by Tedd Tripp, went on a scavenger hunt, planted a garden, rearranged my kitchen, found a 1952 copy of Patricia M. St. John's book 'Treasures of the snow' - a childhood absolute favorite of mine I plan to read to my kids, right after we finish Kate DiCamillo's 'The Tale of Despereaux', tried again to learn to knit, went to family camp over memorial day weekend with friends... some highlights. through all of this, i've been really seeking out God in all the cracks and crevices, working at making myself aware of Him through my days - no small feat, but He is full of grace.

so linford detweiler is playing in my hometown tomorrow, while i am stuck in kansas thinking "there's no place like home". oh, the irony...

when i was a kid and had all kinds of time to indulge my library nerd desires, i went through a phase of reading through all of Jill Krementz's books in the series "a very young..." (skater, musician, circus flyer, etc..). i loved the oversized picture books, the real life documentary style accounts of kids who had special talents or were just born into artistic or performing families, and were allowed and even encouraged to persue their calling with abandon. i learned about what kind of time and focus it took to follow such a specialized discipline, i daydreamed about what it would be like to eat and breathe an art form, an athletic goal, a life very different than mine - waiting shufflefooted for the big yellow school bus under the towering pine tree day after day with the neighborhood lot.

last week i browsed our library's website to look for those books, to share them with my kids, to remember. turns out they are out of print, and out of stock. bummer! so i did the next best thing, i checked out the only two books by Jill our library does have in circulation, and the first one arrived today. (incedentally, i absolutely love the service our library provides of allowing you to check something out online, then mailing it to you for free - but whenever i employ this wonder, stacks of books end up arriving at my door at once, burdening our cheery mail carrier. i feel badly about this. maybe i'll start having one of my kids wait around by the curb with their wagon...) anyway, this book is titled 'How it Feels to Live With a Physical Disability'. it's a work that allows kids with physical limitations of a wide variety to tell their experiences, in their own words. it's eye opening, to say the least. one thing that struck me, really struck me while sharing this book with one of my kiddos today was something a girl who had lost her eyes to cancer at a young age had said. she was thirteen when this book went to print, and in talking about how she liked various subjects in school, she articulated, "Art doesn't have any meaning for me." i just...couldn't imagine.

well, my kudos to Ms. Krementz - for those glimpses in dreamy afternoons years ago, for thoughtful insights via the USPS and our fine city library this week. given such gifts, i don't mind still being a nerd...

after much recommendation from two unassociated friends, i finally brought the first of jan karon's mitford novels home from the library. nearing the end of it, i am so glad that i lugged home the next three in the series on top of it. after wrestling with some heavy reading on motherlessness and trying in vain to keep up with my beth moore study, i'm finding jan's stories just about as refreshing to the soul as it gets. and i'm guessing that the timing of my getting around to breathing mitford air wasn't entirely in my hands...

so today is our tenth anniversary, we've officially been married for a whole decade. that's a long time on one hand, and on the other it has flown. i look back and wonder how we got here so fast. i also look back and am very thankful that we've made it this far...we have been through a lot together. as i review the years and all that has happened in them, i am struck most by the fact that i experienced them not alone, not with another, but with c, the one and only. we have done a lot of our growing up together, we have glared over the great divide at each other more times than i care to remember, we had kiddos right away so have never known our family to consist of only the two of us...but in all this i see the hand of God, i have learned a lot, i see the next ten years getting better and brighter, and the ten after that more luminous still. it's hard to see that sort of light in the day to day, in the hard knocks and the rush and clatter but it is there. I, for one, am glad to have days marked on the calendar to stop and take notice, stock, and a deep breath of fresh perspective before diving in again.

btw, we have two down and scratchy with chicken pox, so we've cancelled the sitter and we'll be staying in tonight. life goes on...

so my jesse turned seven on monday, and tuesday he woke up covered head to toe in chicken pox. i woke up to hear his brother tell him "you have a TON of bug bites!"
i called the school to excuse the absence, and it turns out only seven out of the eighteen in his class showed up that day, everyone else home spotted and itching. it has now spread to the other two first grade classrooms, and the teachers are having an interesting week with only a handful of students, assignment packets piled high on the school secretary's desk for parents of polka dotted pupils to pick up (say that ten times fast). last night when we were going through the long calamine applying session, i joked that i would connect all his dots with a marker so we could see the picture. he just looked at me funny. hey, if they're going to keep me up at night, they've got to endure my lunacy.

one pox patient down, two to go. hopefully we'll be all through this by the holidays...

they say these things happen in threes. i have no idea why, but it's (often enough to make you wonder) curiously true. in the past two weeks, i've had three friends who have had to deal with sad baby news. a routine checkup turned instant hospital admittance for failure to thrive, this mom having had severe post partum depression to deal with which may have accounted for the slow start her precious girl has gotten off to. an ultrasound which produced quite a scare in another friend, and she waits after more tests to find out if her fears are confirmed, she asks for prayer, she hopes she will be up to this challenge that will surely break her heart. and the last, and rawest...a boy who grew and thrived safely through three trimesters only to be lost to his parents and sister during his entrance to the world...unimaginable tragedy. they are leaning on the everlasting arms, but they are devastated.

rich mullins sang "we are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made..."

we are most frail in our infancy, helpless, suspended by a thread yet that thread is held fast by the hand that brought us into being. it's just a little hard to see it, sometimes...

(conversation with almost seven year old jesse this morning over cereal...)

"do you want to take the bus or for me to drive you to school today?" (my grammer is nothing to write home about before say, eleven a.m.)

"take the bus, but i have two things to tell you about school."

"what are they?"

"well, the first thing... ...i forgot the first thing."

"ok, what was the second thing?"

"mom, they don't have to be in ORDER."

...

i don't get it. why, after the close of the first presidential debate, does the conversation immediately turn to possible voter shift - did people feel more safe with kerry, or with bush after hearing them debate for 90 minutes? who seemed more composed, relaxed, nonalarmist? who stood taller, smiled more (or less), followed the majority of the legion of rules concerning the debate itself? and how do all the answers to these questions affect voter opinion? were the undecided swayed one way or the other by relatively insignifigant etceteras and warm fuzzy feelings in response to one 90 minute show? what about the record? what about the facts over years and decades? what about the brass tacks - voting records, books authored, testimony from those who were there, who know well, who have stood by over time? are we so much a consumer minded culture that we can change an opinion on something so vital, so paramount as our choice for the next, in effect, world leader on the basis of one hour and a half of not so much new information, but just seeing the opponents sharing a stage for the first time? i believe that in the global landscape, there is no more important job held than our president's, and i find it hard to believe that the vote we cast, our small part in the democratic process that holds such far reaching implications could be decided on what amounts to little more than triviality. we knew where they stood on major issues before last night, and i doubt anything said in the next two debates is really going to bring out a new insight into either candidates proven character. undecideds, maybe instead of watching for a smirk, listening for a stumble over a word or perceiving an inflection, you ought to crack open a history book, chase the paper trail, check the track record - so that you can truly make an informed choice.

here,
here,
here,
here,
and here are a few places to get started...

"pictures painted hastily don't tell nothin' 'bout the heart" - victoria williams, who made some excellent music to listen to in the car.

i'm heading to nashville in a week with seven other mothers of preschoolers for the annual MOPS convention. i'm looking forward to time with these fine ladies, road trip fun, encouragement to pass on to our own MOPS group back home, and sending postcards to my kids..you have to understand, i haven't been anywhere by myself since before they were born. so chad will be running round the clock daddy day care for four days, and i have no idea what to expect the house to look like when i return. pray for us, as we're driving through the night on wednesday...

i've been struggling lately with some health issues, some financial issues, definitely some discouragement issues. i'm beginning to think that God is trying to get my attention, and i'm also starting to respond in a bit of wonder - He has something for me! something wise and wonderful, something helpful, something loving and right. he is my father, my protecter and provider, my rock and fortress. so today i'll try to remember to work on that trust issue, with a little patience thrown in for good measure. and soon i hope to report that he has filled me a good measure, and even overflowing - "pressed down, shaken together, and running over..." - and i see as i check my reference that those verses are all about giving. with the measure i use, it will be measured back to me. do unto others.

hmmm...

spent the morning with three four year old girls and their moms, the beginning of an impromptu tuesday morning preschool. my friend is a teacher by profession, stay at home mom by choice, and has lots of displaced energy as a result, thus - tuesdays with mommies. today we explored the kansas history museum where not only can you walk through displays of life sized buffalo, train engines, and roadside diners - you can also have a puppet show, dress up like laura ingalls, and play a real drum in a real tepee. they had a ball, and we had a good time watching their excitement and interaction. kids the same age have some striking similarities just because their birthdays are all around each others'; and also some stark differences because of the enviornments they live in, the way their parents relate, the stuff they watch (or don't watch) on t.v., and the God given bent in each of them. i see myself in my daughter, i feel protective of her vulnerability even as i allow her independence and teach her to deal with life as things happen to and around her. i'm feeling the pangs even now of her growing up - i can still hold her all i want to, but the day will come when it's a grown up hug instead of a preschooler squishy-tickle-squeeze on my lap, a twirl around and around on the grass in a park, a tucking into bed hearing her pray those precious and amazing little girl prayers. i'm glad, i'm blessed (not always in the day-to-day, but definitely in the pause-and-reflect), i'm in awe of this treasure and responsibility.

not bad for one tuesday morning...

ok

...this is the card that my almost seven year old made of his own volition for his sister on her fourth birthday, which was yesterday.

sometimes this overwhelming adventure is all worth it, and much more...

she found herself alone a lot; solitude grew on her as she passed through childhood like leaves on a tree in the springtime; grew thicker and fuller until by the time she turned twenty she only felt comfortable under the umbrella of it. she would venture out, but when out she was not herself, she wore her mask and lowered her voice; shook her hair around her face and quickened her pace. back in her little world she could relax, could pretend it was all she needed, that she had all she needed in herself. it was a mirrorless void where she played her melancholy music loud enough to drown out any possible argument, any seeming still small voice that might alert her to the gnawing she had detected deep down in her soul. she hung in the balance, she was breathless half the time. she could not know then how he would find her there, invade her careful circle with his brightness and love so pure it would break her heart in two; could never have known the way he would pick her up as she wept for the first time in many years, how he would put the pieces back together as he stroked her hair, kissed her brow..had she been given time to prepare he would have found only footprints in the snow fleeing out the open back door, but she would be eternally grateful for that holy suprise.