New Home

Okay, it is official, we are moving. We bought a house!

Our new home is in the same little city, just a little further east, but still close to work, church, and all our friends. It is a four bedroom house so we will finally be able to set up a proper guest room, and we are hoping God will allow us to enjoy lots of hospitality! And the kitchen looks like it will be great to work in!

We actually signed the closing papers on Saturday and are closing on Wednesday if the final walk through goes fine on Tuesday!

After renting for over 10 months I have to say that we are done renting. There were just some things that were hard, and somethings that are just weird after having your own house.

We will have the entire month of March as overlap between the two houses so that we can get the repairs done that are needed (they gave us a credit), and paint the bedrooms.

If you think of it, or feel like it we would love prayers for God to work out some issues at our rental that need to be resolved, and the logistics of it all. Plus provision for our needs, the repairs, and a dining room table. (We had to sell ours at our last home in Southern CA and would love another one as our kitchen table is so small that seating 6 can be tight, so we cannot even fit another family around it!)

More Than A To Do List

This time of year finds many women at the mercy or under the tyranny of their to do list, and I confess, I am often no different. As the girls become increasingly aware of things around them I am reminded that life is more than a to do list, life is essentially about living every day to the glory of God.

I certainly don't have this down perfect, but I am slowly learning.

Many friends have praised me for having my shopping done and mostly wrapped...not hard when most of the things that need to leave our house ship internationally! They had to be out last Saturday!

As for the wrapped part - we used a lot of furoshiki this year, and the toys all came from a store that wrapped them for me.

I am skipping the newsletter for the Christmas card this year, I just cannot get it done and be a good mom right now. Not a hard priority call once I realized that that was the trade off.

We are happily baking away - yes it goes slower with little helpers and the mess is bigger, but then, so are the smiles.

When little girls hold up a book, even the one I have read many times today, I am trying hard to say yes.

Yes to reading.

Yes to snuggling and watching a Christmas special...

...or the family hockey night we have planned to watch a game this weekend.

Yes to reading the lunch time advent reading one more time (yes, they ask for the Bible passage to be read again).

Yes to lighting the advent candles every meal and taking turns blowing them out.

Yes to help wrapping presents.

Yes to help of little ones with the Christmas cards.

It is not helping my to do list very much, but it most certainly is helping my joy, and my family's joy too!

Preparing

It seems like I am always preparing for something:

• the next meal
• the pantry for winter
• presents for Christmas
• baking for a baby shower
• baking for Christmas
• Oh, yes, Thanksgiving
• Advent - our family celebrates it!
• Did I mention Christmas and all the crafting we planned this year - fun but lots of work.

In the midst of this preparing, it is easy to miss some important preparing:

• One's heart with Thankfulness for the Lord's Provision
• One's heart to celebrate the Lord's Birthday

There is only one way I really do well at this, and that is to have the bulk of the outside the house stuff done before Advent so that Advent really is a time of preparing our hearts and looking forward to the joy of our Saviour's Birth!

Much is done, much more needs to be done.

Tomorrow morning we are heading to a book store to find some new Christmas reading. Each year we add a book for each girl and so does my husband's mom who is so dear to us - she also supplies the Advent Calendars each year!

So what books would you recommend we add to our library this year?

I will share my list next week....

Tradition

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada - the combination of Veterans' Day and Memorial Day. The whole country all but shuts down, and we always watched the ceremony of Remembrance from Ottawa. My husband's family did the same thing, except they also baked Christmas Cake today.

So today the girls and I made what has been renamed Candy Cake in our house. It is a blond fruit cake, or the fruit cake before it is soaked in liquor, and is very delicious. We make 3 loaves of it, and they will be carefully wrapped and stored in the fridge until at least the first week of December - it is the only way to make sure there is any left for Christmas.

It is a fun tradition, and after the cake is in the oven, the phone calls go out. This year we were about an hour behind the rest of the family - which is impressive considering we are 2 hours behind according to the clock!

A Time to Celebrate

The last 2 years have been interesting, brutal, and probably the most spiritually significant of my life so far. The health issues of the girls have had us all over the map, and the fact that they are so healthy now is nothing short of miraculous.

On Sunday we got a chance to celebrate with our new church family at one of the summer evening picnics. And it was wonderful!

The children played and had a great time. It was fun to see how many friends Miss Pear has!

We all sat around and ate our suppers.

Then we were called up to share our story of the past 2 years. My husband did a wonderful job of opening our time by making it clear this is all about what God has done and sharing the timeline of all the goings on, and then I shared the big lessons we had learned through this, and got to really say how wonderful God is!

Our pastor then led us in singing Praise to the Lord and prayer. While we were praying a present for the girls appeared, and they were thrilled to find it was the doll house they had loved so much. It was a very special, very meaningful, very appreciated gift.

We then shared cake, ice cream, blueberries, cookies and whatever other yumminess was put out and visited some more.

It was a very special evening, and even now I get a bit teary thinking about it.

It was wonderful to have a chance to stop the fast pace of life and thank God for His love, mercy, and blessings in our lives.

Happy Canada Day!

A great day to eat pancakes with maple syrup and have dessert of ice cream, strawberries, and whip cream!

graphic credit

Front Window Views

When we moved here, we moved fast, and we opted to rent for a year so we could move as a family. It occurs to me that I have said very little about our new home. Time to fix that. This week I will share a couple things that are ready to share, and hopefully have more to share in a couple weeks.

We have a very nice house in a small development that is still being built. In fact, the lots directly across from us have not even been sold!

When we stand in the front yard and look out and slightly to the right we see this:



Love seeing rainbows again!

Straight out we see this:


Although this picture was taken from the upstairs window. On a clear day we can see the mountains in the break between the stand of trees on the right and the next pine tree. It is beautiful.

If we look out and to the left we see this:


If you notice, that street that beings in the bottom corner and runs up diagonally is blocked off. We call it the runway and it is perfect for children to play with bikes and scooters! Such a treat to have that after living on the main street into our development for 3 years!

Monday...night

More and more I find time slipping through my fingers. Somehow a morning gets away from me and next thing I know the day slipped away. I find I notice it more as I try to be more deliberate in my use of my day, as I am more deliberate and purposed in my teaching and training of the girls. And as this is the first day in a month it was just me and the girls, which was nice.

That being said, the day may have slipped way, with much of my to do list incomplete, but my family is loved, they were fed, have clean clothes, and were well cared for today.

Clear marks of a successful day.

A Fun Supper

Tonight is my MIL's second last night here, so we are having a fun meal tonight. She has informed me she is ordering pizza....obviously I did not protest one bit! We love pizza around here and it is a treat for her because she never orders just for herself. By informing me and not asking me it eliminates any question or argument of who is paying!

So my contribution is dessert.

Crepes stuffed with strawberries and chocolate pudding and topped with whip cream.

Yummmm

What do you stuff your crepes with?

A deep sigh

Sometimes I catch myself doing it before it comes out.

And sometimes it just comes.

That deep sigh.

Sometimes it is one of contentment.

Sometimes of fatigue.

Sometimes of frustration.

And sometimes of having no idea what to do.

Yesterday I was waiting for a phone call, one I had to be home to answer, it was that important to us. So my MIL took the girls out to play with the promise to ring the bell if they needed me or could not close the garage door. Shortly after they went out the doorbell rang. I did not run to the door because I did not hear the garage close, and I did not hear any crying or yelling. When I opened the door Miss Pear said her grandmother had fallen, and there she was coming up the drive holding her nose with a kleenex.

I did what anyone would do - I ran out in the rain in my socks to get Baby and usher everyone in.

My MIL is fine, she is skinned and bruised, and deeply, highly embarrassed. You see, she fell on the flat street, she just tripped over her feet. And she she says she "landed on her head because it is too big" which Miss Pear thinks is a hysterical description. Today she is stiff and sore, she is tired from laying in bed last night thinking it through and trying to figure out how she managed to do that, but she is fine. Much to proud and embarrassed to admit she might need more than a nap, but fine.

But I find that I hurt.

But here is what hurt me the most.

I did not know what to do. Not really. I knew to get ice and clean clothes. I knew to pray.

But she is on medication that could have made this scary, and I did not know what to do, what to watch for, when to call for help despite her protests not to.

From the time the girls were born I have been meaning to refresh my CPR and to take a good first aid class. And I never get further than saying I should do it.

I talked to my husband last night in the dark and confessed how annoyed I was with myself. I could hear his smile in the dark as he said he would sign me up for a class first thing. That and the "what to do in the case of a local and regional emergency class" our local fire department offers a few times a year. I asked if he would take the classes too, and he agreed he would take the sessions following mine so that we did not have to worry about babysitters.

In the dark I smiled and sighed deeply.

Salt and Light

Sometimes I wonder what God's purpose was in putting us where we are, and sometimes I think we catch glimpses of it. Often we feel so counter culture in Southern California that we feel like aliens (oh, wait, according the USCIS we are! Which is pretty funny because I was pretty sure I was born on earth....)

But this past two weeks we have seen clearly how different our parenting styles are from those around us. Actually, to be perfectly honest how different our family life is.

All around me I hear moms lamenting the trial of summer break and counting down the return to school, discussing daycare provider options, preschool options, and the assorted costs but how it is so worth it. That they don't have to teach their child letters and numbers, the school will do that. That they are looking forward to the fall so that they can have their time back again.

I realize that my heart, actually the very core of my being is different.

Let me see if I can explain.

This week is vacation Bible school at our Church, and I am thrilled for Miss Pear to be there. Our church does an excellent job of really teaching the Bible to even the youngest, and while there are crafts, they are not busy work, they are to teach (you should just see the wall of Jericho craft! I would take a picture but it is looking pretty beat up from all the re-enactments that have occurred since Sunday morning!)

So Miss Pear is at Church each morning this week.

And Baby was beside herself without her sister, she got so excited when I asked if we should go get sister. They love each other.

And as for me? Let's just say that on Monday I was 15 minutes early to pick up Miss Pear. I love having my girls with me! I delight in the blessing the Lord has given me in my family! And I really did miss my sweet daughter for the 3 hours she was away from us yesterday morning.

But today I will take her back again because she is having so much fun, and learning so much, and because for 1 week Mommy can subscribe to the "suck it up, Cupcake" school of thought.

Being counterculture is not bad, from what I can tell it is making me a whole lot happier!

Springtime Bliss

There is one thing you can say about Canadians, besides the fact we tend to be funny (it is all that winter, we have to amuse ourselves while we hibernate!), and that is that we love our hockey. And the epitome of the hockey season is about to begin!

My husband and I cheer for different teams. We can agree on deep theological things, we cannot agree on hockey teams. But both our teams made it to the playoffs. For which we are thankful. My husband forbids me to cheer for his team, when I do they have a statistically higher shot of losing...honestly...I was a statistics geek and I can prove it...the losing thing, not the geek thing. Anyhow, our teams will only play against each other if both make it to the finals, and history tells us that one of them is bound to mess up long before that.

And if you are all wondering about the hockey fans acting weird suddenly, there is a great explanation on nhl.com here! If you know a hockey fan, you will enjoy it.

Why to I post this here? After all, this is mostly a blog about being a wife, mom and homemaker.

Well, in Canada it is a parent's patriotic duty to provide good hockey instruction, our kids learn to skate shortly after they can walk steadily, as in usually in the first winter after they turn 2, with lots of help, knee pads and a helmet. And if a date takes you to a hockey game, that is a very nice date.

Also, women in Canada usually love hockey as much as the men and host a lot of watch parties for the playoffs, and that means pulling out our best recipes, and matching them to the teams and team colors as much as possible! (No, really, I am not kidding).

Plus, if your family cheers for different teams it can get very competitive, in a fun way, to see whose team makes it the furthest. (And you will be eating proverbial dirt if your team is out first!)

So around here we are gearing up! And if one of our teams make it to the finals you better believe I will be planning special meals for each night they play as we all glue ourselves to watch! (And making cake with color coordinated icing....ooh, I think I even have sprinkles to match Mr. Pear's team colors!)

(image from NHL.com)

Allergy Assembly Line

Baby - change yucky diaper, make note that allergies give her unhappy tummy. Find new outfit for her with thick sweatpants for extra absorbency, offer prayer of thanks she was not just in her onesie!

Both - Administer Benedryl per doctor's instructions. Clean up mess made administering medicine to baby...check wall and ceiling just in case.

Both - wipe eyes, face, neck, hands (in that order) with clean, warm, damp face cloth (this is why you need about 20 washcloths in the house).

Both - Super Duper Aveeno lotion to all little faces.

Both - nap for all Pear girls, including Mom so she can keep up (and who God prompted to make supper in the crock pot during Baby's first nap, and get the bread to rising, so that she can rest too but still feed her family a delicious mean of white chicken chili and oatmeal bread, for which we offer another prayer of thanks.)

Really, do you want to know how I know? Yesterday we took Baby to the doctor with a rash and malaise that turned out to be environmental allergies as we are at the height of pollen season down here. And Miss Pear has had allergies for ages, and we always suspected environmental ones along with the food ones....

Nurse Mommy...again

Both girls are very sick with colds, and Miss Pear is down right grumpy about it (but the way she is sneezing and coughing it is easy to understand why.)

Mr. Pear is starting to feel yucky like he might be coming down with it, and my stomach is a very unhappy camper, so I think I will be disappearing for a bit to nurse my family to health.

Good thing I made a full crock pot of Tortilla Soup yesterday! (There was a great sale on chicken breasts - I got just over 3 lbs of them for $2.99 and that was the perfect amount of chicken for my soup!)

News and stuff

Baby's time out of her harness is fabulous. She is filled with wonder at what she can do, and so are we. Yesterday, at about 8 and a half hours out of the harness she started rolling to her side. Babies in harnesses cannot do that as their legs are out to the side. She is a little floppy again without the harness to stabilize her, and but she is a little perpetual motion machine, it is so cute. We are getting the hang of the harness removal and putting it back on is a 2 person job.

Miss Pear got to eat apple pie for breakfast this morning as a reward because she FINALLY pooped in the potty. Hopefully this will be a big turning point to not needing diapers at night!

And things around here are getting caught up, even rest a little bit too with help here to let me rest when Baby does as grandma reads stacks of books and plays lots too.

Rainey Monday Morning

This morning began with huge grins from both my girls. Baby was just happy to see me come and get her and immediately launched into baby flirting (which I adore!). Miss Pear came running in while I was nursing baby and declared in a voice of wonder and excitement, "I hear the rain!"

It does not rain much here, and Miss Pear longs for both rain and snow. It is unlikely I can do much about having snow in her backyard for her, but today she gets rain, and you can tell she is excited - there are nose prints on all the windows and she has created a special dance in honor of the occasion.

Baby had her first follow up appointment this morning with her doctor. He was able to answer all our questions and made an adjustment to the harness. Basically we now feel equipped to answer most of our own questions. In the face of each question you must ask if it brings the knees forward or if it brings the ankles together, and if the answer is yes, then you may not do it. So we will continue to work on new nursing positions and diaper change methods. We will continue to do just do our best, pray lots and love her lots. The hardest thing to learn today was how to help her hip back into the socket if we notice it is out....Baby could not care less, Mommy's heart cracked a little at the same time her hip did.

I keep reminding myself of some important truths:

1. God is in this with us, He is not one to abandon His people!
2. God loves us, and loves Baby.
3. By doing this we are giving our girl greater health as she gets older and avoiding surgery.
4. It really could be worse so don't whine.

Okay, so the last one is kind of a "suck it up, cupcake!" thing, but still.

More Baby Pear stuff and other stuff too

So at 8AM Friday morning I was on the phone to make an appointment with a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. I only have two things to say about that: first, how sad that there actually is such a thing; and second, how wonderful that they were able to get us in Monday at 9:45.

The rest of the day seem to be monopolized between brain freeze (are you kidding? do we really need to see one of those?) and trying to get all the stuff together that we need, such as a hard copy of the test results, a referral and a hard copy of the ultrasound. While the last one was the hardest to track down because I got caught in the hospital's telephone answering loop, our daughter's pediatrician was excellent in walking us through what we needed to do. In fact, her final words to me Thursday evening were to call her if we could not get in by Monday, if we had any trouble getting the paperwork, if we had any questions, and to just call and let her know when the appointment was so that she had peace of mind....and that she would be praying for us. We LOVE our pediatrician.

So we are now all set for Monday's appointment - at least paperworkwise. Our brains are catching up.

But how sad is it that Miss Pear can say both cardiologist and orthopedic specialist.

Today we are spending the day putting up the tree with a brief interlude to run to Joanne's and CVS for baskets on sale and diapers on sale. And then I am thinking buttermilk waffles for supper because maybe that will tempt Miss Pear's appetite (she has had a cold all week and is just off her game still).

Baby Pear's Ultrasound

If you think of it today, could you please pray for Baby Pear? She has her hip ultrasound to check for hip dysplaysia today at 3 PM California time. And it is pretty obvious there is something there all of a sudden. We are praying that ideally it would be something that could be stretched and exercised out, but most importantly for complete healing and correct treatment right away.

I realize that in the scheme of things this is not the biggest of deals, but at 11.5 weeks she has been through so much that the thought of this is heart breaking.

And if you could please pray that the Lord would give us wisdom and strength, that would help so much.

Thank you for the encouraging notes and for all the prayer, they mean very much to us, and we can say with all honesty that it is the Lord alone who is helping us right now because it has just been a bit too much.

Baby Pear is keeping us busy...

Baby Pear is 11 weeks today. Baby’s 2 month check up was yesterday, which we are 2 weeks late for due to her being so sick, too sick to vaccinate at the actual 2 month mark.

The great news is that she has made a full recovery from the meningitis, can do all the developmental things and is growing wonderfully with her height being in the 95 percentile and her weight in the 90th, which is stunning considering how sick she was just a couple short weeks ago.

The bad news is that there is a clunk in the hip test, so we are scheduled for a hip ultrasound to check for hip displaysia Monday at 3, back at the hospital. Apparently it can show up later and not just at birth, which is why they keep testing for it.

It just feels like way too much. She is 11 weeks old and has had to have a heart echogram in the hospital when she was born, was very sick with a cold, was hospitalized with meningitis, and now this. With Miss Pear’s heart thing thrown in for good measure. It is just way too much.

I don’t know how parents can turn their backs on modern medicine for their kids. Everything we are facing can be fixed with modern medicine to give our girls a healthy life. I read about parents who have lost their children by refusing modern medicine and I just don’t understand, I know it is an issue of faith, but I just don't understand. We pray for our girls and their healing, but also use the resources He has given us in tandem with prayer. They are not in competition with each other.

And I most certainly don’t know how people face life without God. Without Him I think I would have curled up into a little ball long ago. Even though this is all very hard on a mommy's heart, I am confident in God.

And on this Thanksgiving Eve I am so thankful for our little family, that we belong to the Lord and that He will never lose us, misplace us, or forget about us, we are His. He is very faithful and will see us through.

Thankful

This Thanksgiving is especially sweet to us. We now understand how rich a blessing it truly is to have two healthy children in our family, to have a healthy, loving marriage, and to have a family who really does love each other.

I was looking at Baby Pear this weekend trying to figure out how she is already 10 and a half weeks old. Then I though about all she had been through already and wondered how she was so little. And snuggled her a little closer.

I looked at Miss Pear and thought about what she has on the horizon, still not truly understanding how it is possible when she looks so healthy AND WILL NOT SLOW DOWN! And dropped an extra little kiss on her head as she zoomed by (her favorite game "zzzzzoooooooooommmmmmm" as she runs past).

I looked at my husband as he slept, after I returned from nursing baby last night, and realized how blessed I was.

The Lord has blessed us richly, and my heart over flows with thanks.