Two Sides of Austin

You certainly couldn't accuse Austin of having a one-sided personality.  While I was changing Esther's diaper in preparation for naptime this afternoon, Austin was sitting on his bed and suddenly started spouting out a few of our memory verses: "Even a child is known by his doings."  "No one can serve two masters."  Then he hummed a few bars of "Jesus Paid it All."  Warm fuzzy thoughts about God's Word being hidden in his heart and "out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks" filled my mind.  But then I was brought back to earth by remembering the conversation Austin and I had on the way home from the county fair not an hour before. "Austin, what was your favorite part of the fair?"  "The animals." "Well, we saw cows, chickens, goats, sheep, and horses; which did you like best?"  "Oh, I like watchin' the cow that was poopin'.  It was goin' on the hay!"

What I Did During My Summer Vacation (or, Pictures of the Basement at Last)

The basement project that took so many evenings of our summer is finished at last, I vacuumed down there this morning, and took the camera down this afternoon.  Finally!  It is a pretty neat space, if we do say so ourselves.

First, Zach's music room.  His man cave, to use the vernacular.  When we were finished painting and rearranging furniture and taking out various things that really should be stored somewhere else, we looked at each other and said "can you believe how big this room is?"  What a difference.  If you're reading this and are not acquainted with my husband, you'll soon know him a bit better.

The TCU Horned Frogs and the Texas Rangers are Zach's sports teams.
He did an awesome job with these logos.

Did you know my husband loves coffee?  I mean, really really loves coffee.
That's a coffee bag on the wall.  He thought they would make cool
wall decor.  And they do, in fact, look pretty good.
Oh, and notice the curtains.  They were nasty, water-stained things
that had been on the windows for decades, probably.  I washed them and
dyed them dark brown and they're as good as new.

More coffee bags.  The one on the right is my favorite because of the
colorful picture.

Now my school room.  My friend Emily wrote the other day about the importance of surrounding her children with beauty, light, simplicity, and order in their learning environment.  Pondering our space, hmm...I think we get about 2.5 out of 4.  I would love to have a room filled with natural light but I will choose to be thankful that our home is spacious enough to dedicate this room, albeit it in the basement, for such a specialized purpose.

The kitchen table that my mom bought after college (her college),
repurposed yet again, plus our memory verses, days of the week,
number chart, and calendar.

The other corner.  Shelves are pretty empty now but I know
that will change.  Ten letters on our tree--we're almost
halfway through the alphabet.

And one last picture...that little door you see in the last picture is a closet under the basement stairs.  A newly organized closet, of which I am a little bit proud.  You would have to have seen a before picture (which doesn't exist) to understand how nice this is.  Ah, organization makes me happy.

Nothing Like a Good Book

Esther has discovered her first favorite book.  The choice: Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What do you Hear? by Eric Carle.  Good choice, little one, Mommy likes it, too.

Sometimes she looks at it by herself.

Sometimes she crawls up in my lap and bounces excitedly because she's going to hear it out loud.

And sometimes it's a good bedtime story.

Just Feeling Blessed Today...

...to be mommy to these two.

R is for Rainbow

We are still doing Letter of the Week activities and this week's letter was R.  Inspired by my friend Miranda's rainbow cupcakes, I decided to make a rainbow cake as a special treat after we finished all of the week's activities.  I was expecting it to just look like colored layers of cake but somehow it turned out rainbow shaped! (Mysterious but awesome.)  Austin helped me count out drops of food coloring and mix the colors into the batter.  As we worked he said "Mommy, this is my favorite treat in the whole world!" about ten times.  Sweet boy.

"Wow, is it my birthday again?"

A Bit of Babyhood, Snipped Away

Esther got her first haircut today.  We went back and forth about whether it was needed or not, but her hair grows straight down into her eyes and was getting quite long.  We want her to be able to see, after all.  So we went for a little trim of her bangs.  She sat very still while Laura did her work and didn't make a sound.  Such an easygoing baby.  I mean, big girl.  (Sniff, sniff.) She looks so different now.

Before

During

After

Ikea = Love

Funny, I have read two blog posts in the last 24 hours about Ikea; now it's my turn to write one I guess.  We went to Ikea on Tuesday, a long-awaited trip.  It's clear out by the Pittsburgh airport, an hour and a half drive on a good day, so as you can imagine we don't get there too often.  (It would be dangerous to our bottom line if it was any closer.)  We went to look for some shelves for Zach's half of the basement but you don't go to a store like that and just look at shelves.  I had also had my eye on the Expedit bookshelves, which I originally had in mind for the basement schoolroom but realized the cheap Walmart bookshelves would do fine down there so I set my sights on something new for the living room.

And what a wonderful day it was.  I could browse in that place for hours.  Let's just say we did not exactly come home empty handed.

For the living room, I went completely expecting to buy the Expedit shelves but in the end we got Billy bookshelves.  We were able to achieve the cube-y look I liked with extra height (more space) and the ability to expand the system easily in the future.

Living room before:

One down, three to go:

And the finished line-up:

Ahh, so beautiful.

Then for our splurge of the day, we decided to buy a table for our hallway.  This is what we had before:

Not much, huh?  Small and way too easy for Esther to get hold of the phone.  It's a wonder she hasn't dialed 911.  So we replaced it with this:

Large, lots of storage (I'm thinking hats, scarves, etc. in the bottom during the winter), and the phone is now out of Esther's reach.  Lovely.

Oh yeah, Zach's shelves...we bought those too.  No pictures yet.  But we have been faithfully plugging away at finishing up our basement project and when we do there will be pictures.

The Past: Ponder, Preserve, Purge

Forgive my alliteration, but those are the words that have been floating around in my head.  Zach and I have been trying to finish up our basement project lately.  The painting is done so we've turned to organizing the stuff that will ultimately go in the painted rooms as well as the stuff that is stored in the basement.  Stuff that for many years was stored in our parents' houses but is now here with us.  In my case, my mom brought several boxes four years ago when we moved in to this house.  I sorted through it and got rid of quite a bit at the time but I thought it was worth another look now.

So last night we put the kids to bed and headed downstairs to tackle some boxes. One box that at first glance appeared to contain only K-12 yearbooks actually included a large pile of miscellaneous artifacts from high school through college: "yearbooks" from camps, TCU Symphony programs, newspaper clippings and my ticket stub from the 1998 Sun Bowl, to name a few.  (Proof that my parents were cooler than I realized at the time: they let my 18 year old self and four friends drive all the way across Texas by ourselves to go to that game, where we dressed up in purple togas and saw our Frogs defeat USC.)  Another box contained all the journals that I kept from about 6th grade until mid-college.  It's quite a pile; I don't think I was a very profound writer but I was certainly prolific.  That box also contained a large quantity of correspondence: letters, cards, postcards from friends and family, mostly from high school and the first few years of college.  It was surprising to see how many actual letters my college friends and I wrote each other during the summer.  We all had email addresses (one had to for school) but the use of pen and paper had not entirely died out.  Hard to imagine any of the college students I know now writing a letter to a friend over the summer.

Looking at all this stuff, as you can imagine, unleashed a flood of memories, good, bad, and indifferent.  There were some letters from friends I met in college, dear sisters in Christ, who showed me how vibrant life in Christ could be, and I was prompted to give thanks to God for putting them in my life.  There were birthday letters from my Grandpa Jones that I am sure I didn't fully appreciate at the time I received them, but he's been gone for nearly ten years now and I'm moved by the little things he thought I'd enjoy.  There was a card from my mom that must have accompanied a finals week care package; she said she knew she was being a bad influence on me but it was hard to send carrots through the mail.  I think I remember that care package; I'm pretty sure there was a generous quantity of Oreos. :-)

But there were also things from my past that didn't bring smiles to my face.  Seeing the things that my teenage self thought important to save, I realized how much I lived for the approval of others.  Like the books from camps.  Our church camps usually ended with yearbook-signing-type events.  (I'm pretty sure we called them something other than yearbooks but I can't remember what.  Any help, Megan?)  I remember reading and re-reading the comments from people whose approval I craved, especially if they were male.  I guess it made me feel better about myself but from this side of high school I see the discontent and small view of God behind my actions.  I can't look back with regret; a sovereign God directed the path that brought me to where I am now, but how thankful I am that God has "[made] known to me the path of life; in [His] presence is fullness of joy" (from Psalm 16). That kind of stuff was easy to get rid of.

All my journals, though...I didn't even touch them last night.  I predict that if I were to read them now, about 90% would be painful recollections of high school crushes and putting my hope in the wrong things.  While I doubt there is much I would actually want to keep secret, I think there is little that would edify a future reader like my daughter.  I hope and pray that Jesus is Esther's first love from a young age and that she will be thereby spared much of what I thought and felt as I sought the approval of man.  But the other 10% of those journals might hold memories worth keeping, like what the first days of high school and college were like.  So someday (soon?) I will go through them and extract the good, and as for the rest...anyone want to come over and make smores over a nice little fire?

Off to School

I sent Austin off to school this morning, of a sort, Vacation Bible School.  Our church doesn't do a VBS but a friend told me about a local church holding one that has a class for 3 year olds.  Austin LOVES going to Children's Ministry at church so I thought this would be a lovely break in our routine for a week.

And I think it will be a wonderful experience for him, but there was a surprising amount of emotion at drop-off time this morning.  All from me; Austin had his usual "this is gonna be fun!" attitude and hardly blinked when I said good-bye.  But as I walked out of the sanctuary and turned around to glance back at him (he was sitting calmly on the pew, just looking around at all the people) I thought "Can this be real?  Is my baby boy old enough to be dropped off at 'school' of any kind and left for the morning?"  Part of me, most of me, knows he'll be totally fine but of course there's another small part that wonders how he'll do on his own for three whole hours.  (That wondering mostly revolves around whether he will go potty as needed when I'm not there to tell him to do it. :-)  Gotta love this stage.)

Although I've enjoyed some extra time to myself this morning while Esther naps and have gotten A LOT more done than usual, I felt so strongly this morning that I would not want this to be the whole future. Sending my kids off to school every morning and not seeing them all day.  Wondering what they're learning and who they're playing with.  Missing the little lightbulbs that go off when they figure something out.  Seeing the excitement when we do a new activity.  Goodness, I'm making myself tear up just thinking about all this. There are many, many reasons why we are choosing to homeschool, but simple time with our kids is certainly not the least among them.

Speaking of time with my kids, it's time to get Munchkin #2 out of bed.  One-on-one playtime with my baby girl is a rare thing and I'm going to enjoy it in the next hour before I get Austin.

It Won't Be Long...

...before this girl is walking on her own.

Hide and Seek

Zach taught Austin how to play hide-and-seek last week.  It’s Austin’s favorite game now; he wants to play it every time we’re outside.  Here’s how a typical game might go.

Austin:  (while wriggling under the castle slide) Let’s play hide-and-seek! 

Zach:     Okay, but you’re supposed to wait to hide until I count.  I can see you right now so that’s not hiding, that’s just being. 

Austin:  It’s okay if I hide here.  Count to 10. 

Zach:     Okay. (closing eyes) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8… 

Austin:  Daddy!  You have to count by the tree!

Zach:     (going over to the tree) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10!  Hmm, where could he be?  (exaggerated searching around our small yard)

Austin:  Here I am!

So, we’ll keep working on the rules. J

Videos from This Week

The kids have been awfully cute this week...