Genuine in the Journey

Each morning, almost without fail, my seven year old is my alarm clock.  It has been this way for years.  I assume it will continue this way until he hits middle school if the pattern of past children is any indication.  This means that while I am still coming out of whatever dream I’ve been living and well before I’ve had the one cup of coffee that fuels my morning brain, he begins to chatter.  Topics may include questions about the Titanic, what kind of plane we’re traveling on this Spring Break, when we get to travel on a train or ship (not in the near future), and sometimes he simply wants to be fed.  Lord, first Coffee! Yesterday, I was listening to him prattle on while scrolling a facebook article about the sitcom Friends. I figured I could still mostly pay attention to what he was saying while reading about “Little Known Facts.”  Maybe it’s not a proud mommy moment, but I’m keeping it real.  He asked a question about our UNO game the night befo...

The other day, my two younger kids needed to get out of the house and get some wiggles out. It was rainy and cold, and the perfect day for a fall soup recipe,  but not a good day for running around at the park. Thankfully here in the rainy northwest,  McDonald's has blessed us with indoor playgrounds. So lunchtime found us driving to the closest wiggle-zone.  As we drove, the kids joked and giggled about this meme or that tick-tok, and while I enjoyed them bantering instead of fighting, I found myself intervening to explain what is appropriate and what is not. They did finally admit that half of what we see on the internet isn't even real. Okay, maybe a generalization, but I wasn't going to argue with their logic since I dislike watching YouTube anyway.  Coming to a stoplight, we sat behind a car whose bumper sticker read, “Stay Nasty.” I wondered if this was a teachable moment or if I should just keep my mouth shut. Deciding to go for it, I pointed out the sticker t...

The Lord promises us blessings as well as trials.  So many times we must go through hardship before we get to the blessing.  Other times it is simply hard to see the blessing in the middle of the trial because it may not be the one we expected.  God has brought me through many moments of small and large difficulty.  Married life did not turn out at all the way that I had imagined when I was twenty three.  What does a twenty three year old really know anyway?  They think quite a lot of their time and growth on this earth and yet I know now that I had so much further to go.  I often wonder how to prepare my kids for this stage in life, but I realize that all I can really do is give my best learned advice and be there when they need a sounding board.  They have to make their own way, just as I made mine. As I was stating, mine didn’t turn out quite how I had imagined it.  Call it youth, call it inexperience, call it naivete, I like to call it wa...