A Photo Re-Cap: Graduation and Turtles

As promised here are the highlights of last week (namely, Ava's preschool graduation and our garden visitor!)....

Me with the girls right before Ava's preschool graduation. Oh look, Ella is smiling nicely! 

Dad with Ava

Grandpa (Scott's dad), Aunt KK (Scott's sister Caitlyn), Ella and myself waiting for graduation to start

The graduates on stage! Those hats were the cutest darned things...white plastic bowls, glued to cardboard that the kids decorated with paint and then red yarn tassels added to the fronts. 

One of several songs. This one about being a "star"! 

Ella, Aunt KK and Ava

Remember I told you that Ella has an aversion to smiling nicely for pictures...In case you needed more proof! 

About as good a "family photo" as we get these days!!! I look tired,  Scott looks very serious and at least one of the girls is making a crazy face! 

The turtle.   I looked out my window on Sunday morning, and though my eye sight was not great because I had yet to insert my contacts  I could tell there was something in the garden from our second story bedroom window...Low and behold, this was the something!!! 

Brave Scott pulling it out of the garden...Look at that mouth! I think he was part dinosaur!! 

The hole left where carrots were supposed to grow! 

A close up! 

His "ride" back to the retention pond. 

A final close up! 

An evening at the local driving range...Scott got to hit golf balls and the girls and I got ice cream! This is one of my favorite recent pictures.

Hope you enjoyed a sneak peak into our recent lives...Hoping to post an update about my brother and his baby before the end of the week. 

Blessings! 

Graduations, Turtles and the Stuff of Life

My oldest child graduated from preschool this week!

Small stuff in some respects, I mean, after all, I didn't even go to preschool...and thus did not receive the pomp and circumstance (hats and all) followed by a cookie reception, gifts, cards and flowers from parents and grandparents, videos, photographs, curled hair and new shoes.

(Boy...now that I mention it, I kinda wish I HAD gone to preschool!)

It was a fun, delightful, glorious time. The kids were adorable and Ava shined brightly in her yellow dress (the pictures are not uploaded yet, but I promise to share them soon!). Come to think about it, she started the year with a gray and yellow dress... there must be something about yellow...I think it's her blond her and smile that fill the room with sunshiny brightness that prompts me, when I'm shopping, to pick yellow dresses for her...

This was her first day of school. She was timid, nervous, unsure what to expect. If you remember me telling you, she has always been my clinger. Not wanting to part ways, crying through the first six weeks of preschool at 3 years old (at which point I pulled her out), crying in nurseries, staying by my side at play dates...

Until this year that is. It's amazing how far we've come, how much a young child can change, grow and mature in one year. 

At the beginning of the year she clung a little more tightly to my neck when I dropped her off, cried many days when we had to go to MOPS at church (because I had to leave her with the kids in the nursery), and was not a huge fan of Sunday School.

By the end of the year she easily let go of my neck in favor of the huge hugs her teachers were waiting to give her when she walked through the door (THANK you Miss Jean and Miss Lynn-- I couldn't have asked for better, more loving teachers for my timid girl this year!), by the end of the year at MOPS she was hi-fiving the childcare workers, and well, she still doesn't LOVE Sunday School, but it's not as much of a struggle anymore.

Blessings in my life, accomplishments in hers. Thankful for them all. 

She has few qualms about starting school in the fall (though THAT is completely different story for mommy!), and is a pretty confident kid who seems ready to take on her 5 year old world.

Truly, if I could share one word of advice to any mom who is fretting about their child's social readiness, struggling with them not wanting to be dropped off in nurseries, or in which preschool has been a struggle...I can now, with full confidence, say give it time-- three months, six months, a  year. SO much changes in a year.

Sometimes the things we think we can fix in our children in all actuality do not need fixing...they need waiting...they need patience. Patience on our part in which we accept them wholly for who they are and give them space to grow, socialize, and mature at THEIR pace.

The truth is, they have their own internal timelines...points in which they will blossom, become confident and be ready to march into the milestones in their lives. Pushing them too hard, too soon causes unnecessary struggle and tension in their lives and yours. While they are cultivating confidence in their lives, we need to be cultivating patience in our own (one of my BIGGEST mommy struggles).

It has been a big year for Ava...If you have a chance to talk to her in the near future, she will likely tell you about the very long Tangled (Rapunzel) wig that she purchased with the Toys R Us gift card she got from Grandpa for graduation (a wig that is already full of snarls and irritating mommy...but that's another story!) and then she just might go on to say...

"And I can hula hoop (for like 5 minutes straight- no lie!), braid hair, balance a book on my head, ride my bike without training wheels and go back and forth across with monkey bars all by MYSELF!"

She wouldn't be making any of that up... and it's all happened within her 4th year.

Great job kiddo!

She will be 5 in less than two weeks (ACK!) and I can hardly wait to see what is around the corner. What will her "I can do it all by myself" list look like 365 days from now...I can only imagine and I am patiently (at least trying!) anticipating it.

Speaking of birthdays, here she is on the second last day of preschool when the teacher held a birthday celebration for all of the summer girl birthdays (boys were the week before!). We have a family birthday party planned next weekend and princess party planned the week after that!

More to come on tomorrow, hopefully tomorrow, (and including pictures!) on the crazy week we've just come out of...funny things, like finding a huge snapping turtle burrowed into my vegetable garden bed this weekend...to more sober things, like finding out my brother's baby girl has a very serious illness... So serious that she is being put on a wait list for a liver transplant and she is only 3 months old. 

The hard and the happy all happening within minutes of each other...all the time it seems. Thankful for a God who can handle the hard and the happy all at once even when I'm not sure I have the capacity to do so. 

Blessings to you all. 

Happy Memorial Day!!! 

Unfinished Business

   

  There is a lot of unfinished business in my life. You?

     Unfinished books (LOTS of them), 1/2 written blog posts, partially filled notebooks full of writing ideas, lists of movies I should see and books I want to buy, photo albums started, delicate laundry intended to be washed with the Woolite I need to buy, basement and garage organizing projects begun  and recipe binders stuffed with colorfully photographed dinners pulled from magazines and intended to be filed. How about the house projects we started on a feverish whim well over a year ago and somehow haven't been able to get back to since.

     Unfinished business drives me crazy...it peck, peck, pecks at the back of my brain demanding some attention. I keep trying to throw it some treats, to quiet it down, but nothing seems to work... it follows me around like a stray cat hoping to be appeased with some milk...I keep shooing it away. 

     When it gets really irritable it starts to throw not so nice criticisms my way...

      If you were more organized...

      If you structured your life differently...
  
      If you could just get your act together...

     If you were a better mom, wife, friend, sister...


    And then I get crabby. And discouraged. And frustrated.

      If you just had a better attitude about it all..it plods on.


  That's about when I pick up a shoe from the pile (and I do mean PILE) in our disorganized mudroom to throw at it...At the animal of unfinished business who likes to taunt me with its lies.

    It's funny, as much as the "stuff" that tends to lie around our house drives my husband nuts (you know, the craft supplies, shoes, discarded children's clothing items, magazines, coupons...etc. etc.) he typically is WAY better at perspective. You know the perspective needed to say, "Hey, what's really important here?"

    So like yesterday (and today) when I started in on the "Yadda, yadda, yadda," and the "Yadda, yadda, yadda" and oh did I mention the "Yadda, yadda, yadda."

    (Poor guy!)

    He raises his eyebrows like I do with the girls when they've gone on far to long about something insignificant and says, "Lis, what do you expect. It sounds like you had a great day with the girls. You went for a walk with them and read books to them and spent some great time with them. Is the rest of this stuff really important?" 

    "Well, um, yes...I mean...photo albums and paint colors and delicate laundry and (big stab to the gut here) blog posts...Of course they're more important than bonding with my children!"

    (That last bit was sarcasm...just in case you missed that!)

    Of course that stuff isn't as important. Of course it can wait for another day. Or year.  Or decade!

    Of course it's also easy to believe that iota of truth on a practical level, but living it out, being peaceful about where you are and how much "unfinished business" you may have in your life on any given day while you are raising children, well, that's a lot harder to do. 

    So friends, here's the only encouragement I can offer you today...If you're frustrated by all that you are not getting done...try to list the things you have done.

     If you're thinking you're the only one not getting it all done...rest assured that my basement is probably WAY messier than yours, my fridge WAY more disgusting, and the noticeable dust in my living room WAY more obvious.

   If you feel like you are a perpetual "to-do" list creator, but not finisher...I'm right there with you.

   And for the REST OF YOU! Throw us a bone here! If you're reading this thinking...Oh, poor thing...if she just alphabetized her spices, and labeled her drawers and sorted her baskets everything would just fall into place! You are the women I envy...PLEASE leave your best organizing/time-managment/ how to handle the stuff of life with small kids around suggestions in the comments section below.



 
 






    


    

Giveaway Winner and the Beauty of Honesty

Morning Friends,

     Hope you all are well in whatever neck of the woods you hail from! Buffalo is sunny and warm and birds are chirping everywhere today...a good day to tackle life.

    It's a good thing too, because I needed an extra boost today. Ever feel like the stuff of life is just coming at you left and right?!  I was talking to an older mom at a women's dinner at our church last night. She was recalling life when her kids were younger (they're in their 30's now) and said,

    "Boy, some days, the pace, I felt like I was almost hyperventilating"

     Yes. Yes. Yes!  Thanks for being honest!

     That's what I love about honest stories from honest moms about their real lives.

     That's why I always try to be pretty honest here...

     So yes, between family get togethers and Ava getting sick (the flu which turned into an ear infection, pneumonia and a trip to urgent care where the poor kid got stuck with an IV (and mommy almost passed out!), on top of a busy season in which I spent many hours on a devotional project for our church (which turned out beautifully and was handed out to 2,000 women on Mother's Day...something I could have never done without the support of such a great church!), all added to a husband's busy job, Bible studies, spring yard clean up and the other stuff of life...

     Phew...I'm ready for a trip to the tropics and a big frozen strawberry beverage with an umbrella and a straw handed to me by wait staff (Not happening any time soon...a woman can dream, can't she?!).

     But, as I mentioned in my last post as I was talking about Tracey Bianchi's book Mom Connection, I think so many of us our in this same boat together...the marathon of motherhood! I don't know about you, but I've only run 1/2 a marathon and I was tired, but exhilarated at the end.

     I think the same thing goes for our parenting...it's hard work, it's hard to breathe sometimes, we want to check out of the race and into tropical paradise, but we must keep pressing on and it will be worth it in the end. 

     And, as the book says, it's important we slow down enough to make deep connections in the process...something I'm consciously working on after having read that.

     Which leads me to my next thought...a winner for the giveaway!

     You should know this winner was picked VERY scientifically...

     I wrote everyone's name on scraps of paper, multiple times for those of you who followed me on google, or FB or twitter, I put all of the pieces of paper in one of our Dollar Store popcorn buckets and viola...

     Ava picked Amelia Rhodes!!! 


     Congrats Amelia! Sending the book your way! 


     Thanks to the rest of you for taking the time to leave comments...and, I had so much fun with this giveaway that I picked up a few other fun prizes to give away in the weeks to come....keep a look out!

     Hugs to you all on your marathons of motherhood!!

      Keep up the honesty...it's the only thing that keeps us all (or me, anyways!) sane!!!