My Ebenezer

Surprise! I'm an introvert. Bet you didn't know that! (She said sarcastically.)  Usually I'm a stay-at-home type of person, loving nothing more than the comfort and privacy of my own home in my comfortable clothes, not talking.  But sometimes I make exceptions, and this week was full of those! On Thursday evening I was invited to an essential oils party (think Tupperware or Pampered Chef, but for DoTerra Oils instead).  I don't normally attend these things, because they are typically full of people I don't know, and full of pressure to buy things I don't really need or want at prices I don't want to afford, but I made an exception this time.  The party was hosted by our babysitter, Cherie, and I thought I might actually like to try oils.  At the very least I have a lot of questions about them, so I found myself at 6:30pm Thursday evening at an oils class.  It was very informative, and I'm praying about whether to order some and give them a try.  Josh...

I woke up at 2:30 this morning in excruciating pain.  Sometime in the 4 hours I had been asleep, I must have slept wrong.  That sounds so mellow and, well, painless: "I slept wrong." This morning the fact is that I cannot turn my head to either side, or even hold my head up in proper alignment without feeling something akin to a sharp electric shock which radiates down from my neck to my left shoulder blade. Driving Seth to VPK this morning brought me home in tears.  Picking Eden up is enough to make me shriek.  Josh hugged me, and I died a little, or so it felt. Does it surprise you how frail the body is?  That what you do in 4 hours of just  sleeping can cause days of incessant pain?  This was my first (okay, maybe 3rd) thought I had when I realized my life was going to be altered today.  How dependent on God we are!  How very un-I AM are we! Some Scripture I'm dwelling on this morning, as I struggle to even sit up straight: "  ...

My sister Lori and her husband Greg came to see us unexpectedly last week!  Earlier in the week, Lori emailed me, asking if we would like a visit.  They work closely with a group called Church Army, which was trying to help victims of Hurricane Irma.  They wanted Greg to come down on a survey trip to help them determine how Church Army could be used to help out. Boots on the ground, that kind of thing. So here they are!  Their schedule has not allowed for very much time to visit, but we're thankful for what we can get.  I'm so thankful that they were here!  It's so rare that my family is able to come down and see us. Josh, the kids, and I went to an RV exhibition at the Towns Center on Saturday night.  Though we arrived after they had closed (oops!), we were still able to view quite a number of RVs.  We aren't interested in buying one yet (no place to store it, expensive to maintain, no time to use it, etc), it's my dream to take a month or...

In this post, I'm going to show you 3 photos that were taken today (actually, by now it was yesterday), which may or may not sum up a normal day for us.   Today in Chemistry and Physics class (did you ever in your life think I would teach Chemistry and Physics???) we were studying the different states of matter.  One of Noah's favorite parts of the Apologia curriculum is all the experiments and hands-on activities that are suggested and embedded in the reading assignments.  Today one of our experiments was to make sorbet out of fruit juice, using a couple of ziploc bags, ice, and a boatload of salt.  It turned out great, and Noah loved it! Now, as a side note, the above is one of those pictures (actually all three of these are) that people post on Facebook, and then everyone and their brother looks at that and says, "Oh, what a nice day they had homeschooling.  I wish we did fun projects like that. He looks so happy and content.  Why is my homeschoo...

Well, since I posted about the lack of damage from Hurricane Irma, Josh has had no less than 5 phone calls about ceilings falling down and failing roofs.  Strangely, they don't necessarily seem like they're tied to the hurricane.  Whatever the cause though, it has meant that Josh is gone more hours during each day so that he can in some cases replace entire roofs. There's something about your husband being gone over the supper hour when you have small children that makes a day seem really long. (I understand there are tougher circumstances to live through, such as a deployment, but what I said is no less true.)  I usually look forward to Josh being home by 5, so that there's some relief for me during The Witching Hour (any mom of young kids knows what that is; it's the hour you're trying to get supper on the table.  It turns normally mild-mannered kids into whinier, clingier versions of themselves).  And then feeding them dinner all by myself makes me feel lik...

This is a view from our front yard into the street where we live, or rather, the lake that the street became.  This was Monday afternoon, after the storm had passed through in the wee hours of the morning. In one of my favorite movies, there's this line, "I've just sucked one year of your life away....Tell me, how do you feel?" (Extra points for you if you can name that movie.)  That's how I feel in the wake of Hurricane Irma; like it just sucked a week and a half of my life away.  From the way-in-advance notice and hype and predictions of the storm, to the actual event, to the subsequent cleanup and waiting for power to be restored, I just spent the last week and a half in an eerie other world.  Truthfully, I'm ready to come back to my life and never hear the name "Irma" again, but before I do, I need to stop and remember the many blessings and faithfulnesses (is that a word?) of God through the storm. 1. Protection from major damage.  My hus...

So apparently there's this storm... Hurricane Irma is on the horizon to possibly hit Florida this weekend, and everyone is preparing.  Gas stations had lines and in some cases were running out of regular and mid-grade fuel.  Wal-mart's bread aisle was empty, as was the canned food and bottled water aisles.  Candles and batteries were also gone.  Thankfully I was able to find what we needed at Publix, and hopefully they will be restocking shelves in the next couple of days.  I thought today was a little early to prepare, considering the meteorologists don't even know yet if we will be affected.  It turns out, people were starting to stock up on these things last Friday, so I'm actually late to the party. Josh is not planning to evacuate, and I am still undecided.  We stayed around when Hurricane Matthew came though here last year, but that one ended up being just a category 1 and wasn't a direct hit.  A category 5 would be a different story ...

I had every intention of getting up to exercise this morning, but when it was actually time to do it, I laid in bed 5 more minutes.  And then 5 more. And then 5 more.  And....you get the idea.  Then it was time for my shower, and as much as I don't normally put stock in the idea of "me time," this getting ready in the morning is my final taste of silence and Thinking My Own Thoughts that I have until the kids go to bed at night.  I cherish it a lot.  And so, when Seth knocked on my door while I was drying my hair to tell me that Noah had eaten a potato chip (he makes Josh's lunch every day, and grazes on lunch food as he goes) and he wouldn't give Seth one.  Tattling, my pet peeve. And meanness, my other pet peeve.  I didn't handle it well.  To my shame, I burst out of my room yelling something about Never Being Allowed To Eat Chips While You Make Lunch Again (yeah, that sounds logical and mature! Way to go!) and then slammed my way back into the ...

Sometimes I look over at Noah and cannot believe he's 10.  When I cut his hair and I see his shoulders, broader than ever.  He's growing up (this sounds trite) right before my eyes. We began 5th grade last Monday, on the 28th of August.  Fifth. Grade.  Lord, I pray for grace to continue to mold this boy into the man You'd desire him to be!

Today I woke up 25 minutes late, which is a problem on a Sunday. (I make it my policy to only set an alarm on weekdays, so that I have 2 days in the week to sleep past 6:15 am.) I somehow got everyone out the door in time for church, but it wasn't pretty.  It seems like our fuses are extra short on Sundays. Maybe it's just us...  It does give me the opportunity to rely on God's grace more, and to confess that we are weak people in need of constant mercy. We taught junior church and had charge of the nursery (which was just Eden) during the main service, and tonight the ladies started a new Bible study group on the book of Exodus. I think it will be a great study if I can find the time to complete the homework each day.  After church, we took a new guy and his sister out to Wendy's for a little extra fellowship.  They are young (early 20's), originally from Hong Kong, and just getting started here in Jacksonville with new jobs.  We enjoyed getting to know them...

This photo is pure gold to me!  Eden had her first taste of an Oreo cookie the other night, and this was her face as she was eating it.  Does this not just perfectly express all that girls feel when they eat chocolate?  Is there any more contented expression?  I have felt this exact emotion each and every time I have ever put chocolate into my mouth.  She gets it; I just love having a girl!

Confession: Last week I subscribed to the newspaper, and read all the pages for the first time in my life.  For someone who normally lives under a rock, and had been for the most part content to do so, this was a big step.  It all started with a book I read on recommendation from Josh's family, The Vanishing American Adult , by Ben Sasse.  It was an excellent read, and I found myself alternately saying, "That's right!" and getting nervous about where the author projects the country is going on its present trajectory. Some of my take-aways: 1.  While I don't normally identify myself as a millennial (I was born in 1980, right on the tail end of generation X), I saw some of the same mindsets in myself that were shown in a negative light in this book.  Namely, that adults of this age have had easier lives than any generation in history, and that that comes with a price.  To put it bluntly, we are wimps.  This is not complimentary, but highly accurate. ...

I have about a dozen blog posts sitting partially written in the no-man's-land of my drafts.  They're not "good" enough for me to post. Not upbeat enough or pithy enough or coherent enough to hit the publish button, and so they sit and I forget all about the events that were going on at the time.  I've been thinking about this fact; that I feel a certain obligation to entertain you or inspire you when I write, to make it worth your while to come read what's on my mind.  The truth is though, that that's not really the point of this blog.  I need to be remembering my daily life so that I can see (even if it's in retrospect) the Lord's working.  I think instead of viewing this blog as a place where I write these really cool Mom Blog posts worthy of re-sharing on Facebook ("Ten Reasons I Gave Myself Permission to Relax" or "Stop Being So Hard on Yourself" or some other such popular mom mantra these days), it needs to be boring somet...