My Ebenezer

Noah filled up a superstar card this morning. He can earn superstars for outstanding behavior or attitudes, and when he earns 12 on his punchcard, he can turn it in for something special.  In the past we have gone bowling, mini-golfing, or out for ice cream as a family.  This time, we got a fish!  Meet Johnny Appleseed (that's the fish).  And that is the face of one excited little boy!

In my previous post, I alluded to the fact that before we had kids I thought I had All The Answers about parenting and that now, well, I don't.  Our church has been offering a parenting class on Sunday afternoons, and it has been most eye-opening.  Embarrassing actually, as I mentally replay all our mistakes and shortcomings, which have conspicuously displayed themselves in my children's lives like the proverbial elephant in the room.  Large, smelly, and generally hard to ignore.  Funny how my mistakes make themselves evident in my kids' lives. Today's lesson was on giving too many freedoms too early to children (called "parenting outside the funnel"), and then the little cherubs end up ruling the house and doing whatever it is they please.  I only heard bits and pieces of the lesson, because I was in the nursery with the littles, listening when I could on the speaker.  But in between refereeing squabbles (did you know it doesn't really matter who had i

I'm sitting here at the computer with about a million other things to do; grocery store circulars waiting to be perused and marked, lessons waiting to be planned, rooms to be cleaned, laundry to be done, but I want to write instead.  I think that's how I know that I'm coming back from wherever it was that I have been; I want to write. The days slip past me fast/slow, and my boys are getting so big and I am missing it by not recording it.  I've taken about 5 pictures in as many months, and guilt knocks on my door about that.  But I'm not letting it in!  I look back on my own childhood, and there certainly aren't pictures documenting every week in those dusty albums.  Do I weep about that? No!  So we press on. "What do you want to remember?" I ask myself.  These things: That parenting is the hardest thing I ever begged God to have the privilege of doing.  It is mind-numbingly, pain-stakingly, wits-end kind of hard.  And I laugh because I had All Th