This week we are enjoying Spring Break, and I will be spending time with my kids, my husband, and a glass of wine or five. It might be quiet here on the blog, although there is the possibility that I will need to talk about how much I love my kids, and/or the revelation I have every school break in which I realize once again, that homeschooling will never be an option for us. I think it's more important that one, my children learn math, and two, they have a mother who is not driven to brink of insanity.

This week will be a good one. My son will turn ten, and I will lament that fact that we have two children in double digits. We will sit in the sun and I will wear big hats because the sun has become my nemesis. We will explore and I will look through the lens and appreciate learning how to see all over again. I will think about running and writing and change and new life and celebration.

I will remember Christ's work on the cross for us, His blood and His love. And even though things on this great, green earth keep changing, my limitations grow ever clearer, and my children become more themselves every day, even in this I know God's love for me is unchanging. Nothing I've said, done, thought, hated, loved, sought after, cried over, doubted or trusted in will ever change what happened on the cross.

Nothing.

So when numbers tick upward and change is a revolution I can't win, I celebrate a God who remains the same yesterday, today and forever. He makes all things beautiful in His time, including me.

This weekend I celebrated my thirty-seventh birthday. Birthdays that fall on the weekend are the best kind of wonderful. Children make homemade gifts and do their best to behave, and husbands clean kitchens and bake knock-off Starbucks peppermint brownies. It so beats having a birthday on a Tuesday.

We crammed heaps of my favorite things into three days, one of which was a hike in the nearby forest. We started out under a cotton ball sky and walked down to a creek bed filled with ice and moss draped stones.

Today is the last link up with Emily for Tuesdays Unwrapped. I'm afraid traveling between countries and states hasn't allowed for a quiet walk, so I have something else on offer today. I've so enjoyed unwrapping the gifts of this month with all of you. Join us at Chatting at the Sky one last time?


We were 'home' a grand total of four hours before I found myself on the phone with 911. I'd had a premonition/feeling/God whisper that there might be a health issue on our trip, so I wasn't surprised to find myself standing in the kitchen giving details about shortness of breath and increased heart rate. Later, after we heard that treatment had begun and discharge the following day was likely, I mentioned to my husband that I knew something was going to happen, I just hadn't counted on it being so early in our trip. He laughed and said, 'Well, there's always a 50/50 chance around here that someone's going to the hospital.'

He's right. Some of our family members have a penchant for self diagnosis and treatment that usually ends up with me needing a glass of wine, and their taking a trip to the hospital at our insistence. We haven't decided whether to call it maddening or endearing. I'm leaning towards maddening. And that's the thing about families. They make us crazy. They make us love them. They make us want to wring our hands and fall apart and hold them together and pick up the pieces and laugh like a hyena and treat them to a coffee and thank God that He saw fit to put us in one.




I didn't need a premonition to know that my kids would be jet-lagged and waking up at four a.m. every morning. But they are and they do. For days, I've begged for the mercy of more sleep while my daughter curls into the curve of me in the bed. She wants to talk. And while I want to cry because, good gracious I'm exhausted, I bend my head into her neck and and her brown hair tickles my nose. I hold her hand in the dark, and I remember her in my womb, curling into the curve of me. I remember the call to 911, the crazy that is family, and that God saw fit to place me in this one. I lie in the dark and I unwrap each name and I call them a gift. Then I shush my girl, because if Momma doesn't get some sleep there isn't enough red wine in the world to make that look pretty.


If you have expectations for this Christmas, but find that things aren't going according to plan, you might enjoy reading this post. Have a wonderful Christmas and enjoy unwrapping your gifts this season.

Kimberly

Given our travel schedule and limited time with family, I'm likely to go a bit quiet here for the next few weeks. I'll pop in occasionally, but not very consistently. If you'd like to receive email updates, there's a little gadget at the bottom of the blog where you can sign up.

I am an anticipator. I like to anticipate. I do not like surprises (unless they sparkle and come in a little blue box). I like to plan and look ahead and imagine what the end result will be. One of the negative aspects of being an anticipator, is that the end result doesn't always live up to the imagining.

Six weeks ago, I ran 26.2 miles. It was an intense, exciting, life-altering experience.

Then I took a nice long break in which I refused to even look at my running shoes. And it felt good, real good. That is until I realized that I was losing the ground that had taken 16 weeks of hard training to gain. Two weeks ago, I began the process of taking back what I'd lost. The runs are slow and short, and sometimes they're great and often they're not. But, I'm forcing myself to push past the resistance and get out there and do it. I run because I have to, and also because I love chocolate chip cookies. Doing the work, means getting to enjoy the benefits. It doesn't mean the work is easy, or that I like it every day, or that I don't occasionally dream of throwing heavy objects at the treadmill.



My husband and I are celebrating fifteen years of marriage today. To be sure there have been highlights, those wonderful experiences that stand as hallmarks for the years we've spent together. But mostly, there's been the day to day. The working hard not to lose ground. The building on what has taken days, months, years to produce.

Have we had setbacks? Sure. Have there been days where we have wanted to give up, to sit around and eat cookies, and forget about doing the hard work? Absolutely. I'll even admit to throwing things a time or two. But, marriage isn't about the huge life events. It's about the daily exercise of keeping one's promise. It's lacing up, and being committed to the exercise because you know the payoff is worth it.



So worth it.

Kimberly

There are a number of things that I should be doing.  I should be ironing or folding laundry.  I should also be filling out paperwork, returning emails, or finishing my bible study.  But I'd rather be here.  I'd rather put the 'should-be's' on the shelf and sit across from my pitcher of sunflowers and think about my kid turning eleven today.

I would rather think about how she made me into the person I was always meant to be, for better and sometimes for worse.  I'd like to think about how she can almost look me in the eye when barefoot, how she has more patience than any person I know, and the way her hair swings around her shoulders like a cape.  I'd like to think that she's inherited all of my good qualities and none of my bad ones, and how she has my eyes and loves a good book as much as I do.

I should be doing a number of other things, but I'm not.  I'm sitting here thinking about how eleven years ago my world tipped and turned and transformed into the best thing this side of heaven.

Some things are universal.

Another universal truth?  Time moves too fast and babies become kindergartners and firstborns become middle schoolers and mom's cry at the gain and the loss.  And so this week I am celebrating beginnings, endings, and the universal language of mother love.





Kimberly

This week Michael and I are celebrating fourteen years of marriage, and eighteen years as a couple.  I've been asked the secret to our success.  The secret?  There isn't one.  It's persistence.  It's consistency.  It's deciding that we are "for" each other, no matter what. It's an awful lot of hard work.  It's forgiving and starting over, again and again.  It's knowing there is no way out, the only way is forward.

It is making a promise and keeping it.

We mentored an engaged couple a few years back who, when confronted with this reality, said with some anguish "If marriage is so hard, then why get married?".  And we laughed, because the real secret of marriage is this; it is worth it.  It's knowing and being known.  It's a faith builder, a heart healer, a hope bringer.  It's a living, breathing reflection of Christ's love for us.  It's doubled over, clutching your stomach laughter.  It's companionship and affection and secret smiles across the room.  It's phone calls home at the end of a long day, just to chat.  And it is deeper and deeper with every year.  Even the bad ones.

It is what I thank God for every day.

Kimberly

My life is boxed up neatly into brown cardboard boxes, and sitting in a warehouse.  Our home has a FOR RENT sign in front, and the swingset sits still, lonely in the back yard.  Leaving is so much harder than I expected.

With life changing, kids growing, and circumstances unknown, the comfort of a Savior who died 'once and for all' means everything to me.  I cannot add or take away from His gift.  He is risen, Death is defeated and I, I am offered Life.

"Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself."  Hebrews 7:27


I am so grateful for Christ's sacrifice.  Happy Easter.

Kimberly

I used to live a life that was punctuated by evenings at the ballet or shows in London's West End.  I enjoyed afternoon tea at Brown's and spent many a day absorbing the beauty housed in the National Gallery.  That was my life.  And I loved it.  LOVED it.

Last night was a new low in my re-integration into life in suburban NJ.  (It's been six years since we moved here, but I am slow to embrace change)  We spent two hours standing in line with the kids waiting for bouncy castles and kiddie rides on the Boardwalk.  We then spent an hour watching, listening, gazing in absolute wonderment at the strangeness of the "Turtlesinger", a woman who has combined her two great loves of opera and reptiles into an hour long show.  I do not make this stuff up.  I actually spent my New Year's Eve watching a nail biter of a race between four turtles and listening to her sing an ode to "Spike, my Spike".  He was the best birthday gift she ever received.

We then sat through a musical extravaganza, whose crowning glory was a song called "I NEED a man".  Ladies, I can assure you that you will not get a man by shouting that on stage.  A feminist review it was not.

And the piece de resistance?  "Julius Squeezer", a ten foot albino python.  He was not part of the musical review, but was the hit of Jungle John's show.  Jungle John being the fellow who has a world record in holding ten madagascar cockroaches in his mouth at one time.  I know it's true because he showed us.  With a live cockroach.

I can tell you by the end of the evening I was seriously regretting the fact that I didn't insist on that glass of wine or three at dinner.  However, after consuming them with a healthy dose of champagne upon our return, I was able to look at it a little more circumspectly.  I might never get those four hours back, but it was great fun to see the kids enjoying the weird and wacky entertainment that NJ has to offer. Who needs the ballet when we can watch ladies in leggings ask Santa to put a man under the tree?  Who needs the genius of Van Gogh, when we can see a real live crazy person put a cockroach in their mouth?  And for goodness sake, why visit the ruins of Rome when "Julius Squeezer" will come to you?

If New Year's Eve was any indication, we are in a for a wild and weird 2010.  How did you ring in the New Year?

Kimberly

PS I do have photographic proof.  I'll be posting them when we return home so you can get the full experience.