No Bumbling

Christ, bleeding, agonized and brutalized, dying for unworthy me. My pastor brought us there yesterday, to the side of the hill on that dark afternoon when He suffered intentionally, willingly, and thereby broke death's power and brought freedom to the ones who choose Him, the ones He has chosen.
He told us the ugly, unusual story of Hosea and Gomer, the sickening story that weaves a golden thread of beauty right through the middle when Hosea loves Gomer and takes her back, because that's God loving his people and taking them back, shamed naked betrayers.

Suddenly I saw that God's love is the reason our lives should be extraordinary. A life so redeemed dare not bumble along in mediocrity. God's love sparks extraordinay trust, extraordinary obedience, extraordinary self-sacrifice. Even the normal moments of tending three little ones while they munch donuts and gulp juice after church...even these have been redeemed from puposelessness and despair. Even the hour of exhausted quiet before bed, even the hour before lunch when school books clutter the counter and I pick the dish towel off the floor and rehang it on the stove handle for the 37th time and baby girl pulls at my legs wailing to be carried around so she can see the world from a higher perspective and couch cushions bog up the living carpet and the fire in the basement woodstove needs more wood and the clean laundry pile mounts as I pull another load out of the dryer, even this hour deserves joy and fervency and songs of gratitude. There is no place in a life rescued from deserved death for wasted time, half-hearted attempts, sluggish self-indulgence.

God poured out his love for me. I am free to strip off every weight that slows me down, especially the sin that so easily trips me up, and run with endurance the race God has set before me.

If your goal is to clean up after yourself right away instead of leaving a mess for later, but you find yourself slinking off to indulge in some reading after supper instead of first doing the dishes, make sure you're slinking off to a Charlotte Mason book about forming habits. She'll prick you right back to those dishes before the food has time to harden on the plates.

My daughter's budding fashion sense

First, the hat. She wears it all day long. It coordinates with every outfit.

Then this morning she found her favorite striped shirt among the clean laundry.

She has no favorite pants, so at one point this morning she wore the hat, the shirt, her favorite pink socks, her favorite pink shoes, and a diaper. Wish I had a picture.

I'm sensing a bent towards bright colors.

Also towards warm and comfy. Her fleece jammies are her other favorite outfit.

And this jacket. It only comes off with tears.

wearing skin

"Everybody's wearing jammies except Raindrop. She's wearing 'kin." -Peanut Butter

'poon, 'now, 'ticker

"I dropped my 'poon," Peanut Butter says at the supper table last night.
"Your poon?" I ask.
"Nooo. My ththththpoon," he corrects me.
I laugh and smile and accept his correction, and he smiles a little bashfully and then switches tactics.
"No, I mean poon. It's a poon."
"It's a poon?" I query.
"Yup, it's a poon." When he's not caught off guard, he'd rather insist that his way is right than that he's saying it wrong.

He makes me laugh, and I love his way of talking, with nary an "s", even though he can make the "s" sound. Sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's a lisp, but almost always it's dropped off the beginning of words. "Look outside! It's all 'nowy!" "This 'ticker doesn't 'tick." "I put it away 'ticking out so I would know where it was." I don't want him to talk like this forever, so I draw his attention to it when I think of it, but it's endearing, all the same.

Eyes wide open

210. bed posts

211. smooth sheets

212. warmth

213. sharp pencils

214. pink

215. upcoming vacation

216. smell of leather

217. birds chirping so loudly outside they can be heard through closed windows

218. crunchy snow

219. brown mud

220. soft round cheeks

221. sweaters

222. yarn

223. parents-in-law

224. shiny black shoes plopped in my lap by friends' daughter during comedy night ("see my shoes?" she whispered)

225. hot crusty bread

226. stone walls

227. chipmunks

228. song

229. vegetable seeds

230. paper

"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you!" -Our Town, Thornton Wilder

16 gallons

of maple elixer, dripping generously from 15 trees in the woods behind my house. Like Thornton Burgess's Peter Rabit, I run and jump a little on my path between the trees, because it's 45 degrees and feeling like spring. Because buckets, neglected yesterday, brim with clear sweetness today. I thought February was the longest, dreariest month of the year? This year spring touches us early, and I relax my worry that our March vacation will take me out of the country during the most generous maple week.

Basement woodstove stoked to its hottest means windows upstairs can crack open and let some freshness into our closed winter home.

Maple season, my heart flips with love and fills with singing.