My day

It's been a :
Wake up tired
Take your son to school in your pjs
Find your baby eating his poop
Sweep 4 times and there's still crumbs
Wash your children and they are dirty 10 mins later
Eat chocolate for meals
Give your toddler peanutbutter on a spoon for dinner
Never change clothes just pj bottoms
Never look in the mirror cause you are scared
Constant babies crying
No nap
Constant discipline
Ask your husband to bring home takeout
Kind of day.

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DIY Advent Calendar

As a child we had a paper advent calendar where we would open the "door" each day and there was a fun activity to do! That was my favorite thing about Christmas.

I wanted to either make or buy a cute advent calendar that Barclay could do this Christmas since he is pretty aware and this might be his first memory of Christmas.

Never got around to it. It is December 1st today so I decided to just write out a fun activity on a piece of paper and put it in a little advent church I got at Target a few years back for $2. By next year maybe I can incorporate these activities into a cute calendar that will last. But for this year it's torn up paper!

I thought I'd share in case anyone else was in the same pickle:-)

I tried to make it a mix of learning about the real reason for Christmas, giving to other people, having fun, making things and enjoying family.

December 1-Put up the nativity and read the Christmas Story

2-Have a 10 minute dance party to Christmas music

3-Make Snowflake Cookies (I have a snow flake cookie cutter)

4-Take Christmas Pictures!

5-Take a meal to someone with a new baby (tie it into the Christmas story and Mary)

6-Make a Christmas tree ornament

7-Make cookies and give to neighbors

8-Go to goodwill and find a Christmas book

9-Watch Charlie Brown's Christmas, snuggle and eat popcorn!

10-Wear your Pj's, get a milk shake, get in the car and see all the Christmas lights around town! (This originated as a way to make my mom not so sad on her anniversary with my dad).

11-Go see ginger bread houses at the Grove Park (a huge Inn here with a national gingerbread competition).

12-Make cookies for people who help us (ie mailman, trash pick up people, etc)

13-Make orange and clove hanging balls. (stick cloves into oranges in patterns and hang for smell)

14-Watch Frosty the snowman and drink hot coco

15-Take cans of food to homeless shelter.

16-Watch Rudolph and eat ice cream

17-Give money to a child in another country who needs it.

18-Send great granddaddy a letter (this is because my Grandmother's birthday was today)

19-Bring good cheer to a nursing home! (probably the one my dad's at)

20-Give 5 toys away to children that need them (aka goodwill)

21-Go to goodwill to buy presents for family (let him totally pick them out and pay)

22-Wrap presents

23-Go to Jojo's house and make Aunt Lucy's Christmas Cookies!

24-Go to Nana's house to open presents. Read the Night before Christmas.

25-Read the Christmas Story. Sing Happy Birthday to Jesus!

Breather

Today is my first day in like a month where I am sitting here and realizing that I don't have anything scheduled today. It has been non.stop. We went from a whirl wind season of fall photography (I did 6 photoshoots in a week!), to a ton of doctors appointments and finding out about Sullivan having some pressurizing problems in his ears, to having last minute surgery, to flying to CA with two babies and all the non-stop-ness that comes with that (multiplied with time change...yikes) to back to photoshoots and sickness. A whirl wind trip to Savannah to cheer on my friend Melanie in her first Marathon! To a wedding, and then my dad (who I am totally responsible for now) having total hip replacement surgery....and all the long hours preparing for and after entails. To more photoshoots and editing. And on top of all that a LOT of drama with my sister and her husband. All multiplied with the most temperamental toddler and a fussy 9 month old who wakes up several times a night. It's all a lot. A lot. And there hasn't been a moment to sit back and cry.

Sometimes when people complain about being busy or stressed out I just want to laugh.

I do want it to slow down and I want to be able to give more to my family and friends than my distracted stressed out half brained attention.

I went to baby shower for a friend from college this past Saturday and I came home and Noah asked me how everyone was and I couldn't tell him one thing. I was so out of it!

Things are looking up. I have committed to start cutting back on photoshoots in December. We hired someone to clean our house once a week ( a MAJOR MAJOR humbling experience for me). That has significantly decreased marital tension and it has helped me SO much to keep up. The holidays are around the corner and I am SO thrilled to be able to spend it with my family.

I feel like there are seasons of my life where it is non stop, one thing after the other, people think I'm lying it's so crazy. Glad to be leaving that season and on to one with boundaries and taking it slower.

All my blogs in one

I've written 1/2 of a zillion blog posts and they all sort of look like this:

Im tired
I love my children
I adore my children
My children cry all the time and drive me crazy
I am crazy
Will I ever sleep?
Why does everything I do feel like trudging through mud
I'm tired
I wanna kill almost everyone I come in contact with because they sleep...including mom's of brand new babies
Why do my children hate sleeping?
I eat a lot
I want to eat more
I am freaking tired!

The end

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Dear Sullivan

Dear Sullivan,

I think I've fallen in love with you a thousand times over this past month. I do NOT think you can be any more delightful! It finally clicked with you yesterday and you are crawling everywhere. You crawl like a drunken sailor though! Very wobbly!

I have spent hours every single day (and night) just gazing at you and I do believe I kiss you more than a thousand times a day. You are so soft and so chubby and I can't help it!

You adore your big brother. ADORE him! You will just sit and watch him like he's the best thing since sliced bread! You laugh at him all the time. I'll just be driving and you two are giggling away in the back seat and I have no idea what about!

You smile with your whole body, just like I do. You have two cute little teeth now and they make you cuter!!!

Honestly, I can't imagine my life without you. You are such a precious joy in my life.

Sigh.

I cannot stop thinking about you and I'm tempted to lean over your crib and just kiss your face all over...but that would be silly!

I cannot wait to watch as you grow into the man God made you to be. I pray you are as gentle and loving as I can already see you are now.

Please never stop letting me kiss you!

Your "love-is-bursting-out-of-my-heart-mama"

Tidbits from CA

In theory, I want to do a long, blog post for every day of our trip to CA. But in reality, I know that will never happen! So I've decided to update random memories and snippets of our adventures on this blog post. It'll be out of order and probably grammatically incorrect, but it'll save me from blowing up Facebook with a hundred statuses AND I'll have a record of it to keep forever. So check back for updates, I'm sure it'll be amusing;)

*everyone on the plane hated us before we even took off, and we did NOT disappoint. The entire 6 hours, someone was either crying, screaming, whining, or kicking the seat in front of us. The five mins of silence we had,both boys pooped. No joke. It was helacious. What made it worse was the stares. People were acting like we were being rude! Not one blessed min of that trip was spent NOT trying to calm the babies down. I mean, you cannot leave...what did they expect us to do? It was magnified by how utterly exhausted we were. I slept 2 hours (not in a row) Monday night because Sullivan had unexpected ear tube surgery early Tuesday morning. I slept less than that Tuesday night due to packing and finishing up editing photoshoots.

*I grabbed the guy sitting behind me on the plane's sock foot when I was on the hunt for a lost toy car. That did not help out our " cheer up the grumpy people" cause.

*no matter how hard I try to be organized, pack simply and smartly, and dress my family adorably...we are nothing but a chaotic hurricane of mess. We will never be "those people" who look effortlessly put together.

* despite the chaos, I am so thankful that Noah and I have continued traveling and exploring with our children. Well maybe not in the moment when we have to leave a delicious local meal with doggie bags to eat in the hotel because of multiple breakdowns. But in the long run, I don't think we will ever look back on this time and regret not putting our adventures on hold for the first 10 years of childrearing.

*at the beginning of our trip yesterday my bra broke and the underwire was sticking me. It chose to pop completely out of my shirt in a crowded train. What did I do when I found myself stand in a crowded train holding an underwire? I casually handed it to Sullivan to teeth on.

*I despise eating fast food. I find I can completely avoid it, even in situations most people would just give in. On road trips, I usually call ahead to a town ahead of us and order something and pick it up as we pass through the town. Usually it ends up being about the same or less money too. When we arrived in San Fran, we were all starving but I was not about to let our first meal in CA be fast food. So we drove to down town, I hopped out at a hole in the wall Falaful place while Noah did block laps with our conked out boys. We enjoyed a delicious kebab sandwich with spicy cabbage as we drove around the city in blissful silence. And it was less money, lots tastier and we didn't clog our arteries;)

*in an effort to keep Barclay from kicking the seat in front of us in the plane, for the thousandth time, I braced myself and pulled him back...and ended up jamming my toe onto the metal chair base. I didn't scream bloody murder like I usually do when in pain because I was so scared they would throw us out the emergency exit! I ended up nearly ripping my nail off and gashing my toe. it bled everywhere. positive thing to the situation was that we got band aides and they entertained Barclay for 10 mins.

* Noah and I are exact opposites in every way...except how we travel. We always fall in love-again when we travel. We love just being places. We normally don't make a lot of touristy stops. We love to sit at cafes and watch the locals. We love to have a fluid schedule. We love taking every opportunity to eat something yummy :) I think it's one reason we do it so much:)

* I know it's weird but I have an obsession with pretending I'm a Native American Indian. I love to think back to times when all their was the land. We are driving the Pacific coast hwy from San Fran to Templeton, where we are going to a wedding on Friday. The pacific coast is wild and rugged and very uninhabited. I can close my eyes and suddenly I am an Indian girl standing on the jagged cliff overlooking the ocean. Because as much as everything in the world has changed, the ocean has looked the same since the beginning.


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Some Thoughts on Motherhood

I feel like God blesses me with a few moments of seeing my life in a "big picture" sort of way everyone once in a while. Times when everything clicks and I see things in relation to eternity instead of in relation to things that just don't matter in the long run. I feel like sometimes I am just fighting trying to be better and do better and I just feel like a failure and then God opens up my mind for a few seconds and I can grasp onto the fact that he loves me unconditionally and that the reason I feel so unsatisfied sometimes is because I wasn't created to be satisfied here on earth and that the reason heaven will be so sweet is because that constant longing in my heart that I cannot satisfy with things I buy, ways I succeed, or the relationships with my husband or children.

I'm visiting a sweet college friend who has twin girls and with 4 children to tote around even simply getting to church was a feat! Something is going on with Sullivan (the doctors think he could possibly have allergies like Barclay) and he has been up nearly all night just wailing. I was so tired yesterday that I couldn't really see straight until about 11 am and after a cup of coffee. Sullivan was crying so I could not stay in the service to listen to the sermon. This isn't unusual for my Sunday mornings lately. The church I visited had a library in the foyer with all kinds of books that you could purchase. I didn't have any cash on me so I browsed them, mentally noting titles of books that I would like to read one day. I stumbled upon the book Stepping Heavenward (http://http://www.amazon.com/Stepping-Heavenward-Journey-Godliness-Inspirational/dp/1577483421/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1316443312&sr=8-13). I remembered my mother giving it to me to read when I was about 12. I think I read the first two chapters and just gave up. But it was so RELAVENT to me at this time in my life! It was written in the 1800's by a girl with gumption (as I'd like to refer to a real zest for life!). As I skimmed through my heart just identified with her so much in her struggles and her lack of an eternal view. And she lived a good 130 years before me! I just giggled to myself as I read her account of a fight with her husband...it was so real and so familiar. I ordered a copy off ebay (from 1901) for 12 dollars and I am so looking forward to reading it!

I also was able to read a little pamphlet that was entitled The High Calling of Motherhood. It convicted me so much of where my prioreties are. I know this might be a little contraversal to others and I'm not saying I agree with it 100%, but it was so nice to read something so straight forward instead of something trying to be politically correct. You can read the whole thing HERE (http://http://www.reformedreader.org/rbb/chantry/motherhood.htm). Again, it was looking at everything we do here on earth with an eternal view instead of a view of what we can gratify ourselves with.

Now, I am so blessed to have a job that I love, and SO blessed that I am able to stay home with my children most of the day. I always wanted to be a stay at home mom, I never imagined I would WANT to have a job. But here I am with a job that I love, not one that I HAVE to do to make ends meet. One of the sentences that just resonnated in my heart was that women like to work because they get a pay check immediately and it gratifies them. Whereas motherhood is not like that. We do all this HARD work day in and day out and we dont' see results until years and years later (if at all). I am so guilty of this. I do not think there is anything wrong with working. I do not think there is anything wrong with doing something I love. I do think that I have a little problem with accepting every single photo opportunity that comes my way. I bend over backwards to make them work instead of protecting my time and my family and not scheduling them back to back. Not only does it affect the time that I am photographing people, it really affects my days as I am usually sitting at a computer, editing for several hours a day as my chidlren run around tearing up the house and I get SO impatient with them for not letting me do my work. It takes away from everything. More than a pay check, I love getting positive feedback from people. It just fills my heart up when I hear how beautiful my photos are and how talented I am. Every single facebook comment just makes me feel that much better about myself. It's one of the only areas in life I feel successful at. No one praises me after each diaper I change. No one cheers for me when I discipline for the hundreth time. Of course I would prefer the former!

Another sentence that really resonated with me was this: " Some day the glamour girls who leave their children in a nursery will reap their reward. They will sit in their plush houses with their fat bank accounts and will look with envy at godly seed."

Please here me, I do not think that a working mother equals children growing up to not love God. I'm not saying that at all. But it really gripped my heart that at the end of my days, seeing children that I have mothered, and tried my best to daily point to christ will matter so much more than any money or reccognition that I had.

In conclusion, I was greatly encouraged to do what I've known for a long time now and that is greatly cut back my business. This means saying no (which I am not good at), this means not giving discounts or doing free work for friends (as much as I LOVE doing that, it takes away much more time than the few hours it takes to photograph them, from my family). It means making my family my priorety.

Believe me. I KNOW I'm blessed. I KNOW that many women either want to stay home and cannot because of finances or simply just love working and I do NOT fault them one bit. In fact, so many of my close friends do both. I'm just saying that I, personally, was convicted of an idol in my life and that was getting praised for my work. I admit that I have put my work in front of everything. In front of my husband, my relationship with God, my children, my housework...

I really want to work on switching that around. This does not mean I'm not going to do photography. I love it and I really think that it's a talent I've been given and it gives me so much JOY!

I was also struck (like a TON of bricks) with the great task I've been entrusted with! It's not just keeping children alive for 18 years, I am the MOST influential person in their lives. With God's help, I am literally shaping their views of God and their attitude and actions.

I'm so thankful the Lord can speak to me and encourage me in all kinds of circumstances. And I just wanted to share some thoughts.