It started waaaaay back when we were in our second apartment. We had no kids at the time. We lived in a one bedroom tiny apartment $325 a month rent (that tells you how small it was) with a pull-out sofa that was used when Mom and Dad came to visit.  They would come for a week or two weeks at a time so that Dad could take intensive classes to get his Master's, and then he started working on his Doctorate. One apartment, three kids, and now this house later, he graduated.

The cool part is that during the weeks of his classes, he would come home and over dinner would talk about what he learned in class that day.

During his graduation (this past weekend)  I kept thinking how nice it would have been to have Jeff there witnessing it.  So that he could see how valuable education is.

I did not know until I saw the program that Dad was graduating Summa Cum Laude (4.0 grade point average)

Steve's parents.  I think Coco gets her pretty little face from Steve's Mom.

I also enjoyed hearing my uncle speak at the graduation.  Jotted down a few notes..

"Don't spend your whole life looking at circumstances... looking around at what is predictable"

"At what point do you say to God 'No further will I go'?  What are you willing to sacrifice for Christ?  To live for Christ? To lead for Christ?"

At our small group that meets at our house once a week, we had a couple come and speak.  They just came back from cultural training before they head to Peru as missionaries.  They talked about selling their home that was not even a year old yet, selling all of their furniture.  They have to go through every single thing they own and ask "Do I really need this, can I let this go?"  I asked them what was one of the most important things they learned in the cultural training and one of the things they said was this question "What are you willing to let go of in order to minister" and that is not only physical belongings but also cultural barriers. the second was this.

"Just love the people, that is more important than being task-oriented"

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Selfish

Imaginary worlds

"There are no boring subjects, only disinterested minds."  

                                                                                               --Chesterton

I remember the joy of being delightfully bored when I was young and by that I mean, the time and freedom away from electronics and scheduled events where we stretched our minds and followed our imaginations to fill up the afternoon.

It was an enormous gift of simplicity.

My siblings and I  (there were six of us) can talk for hours about the fun we invented, the world's we created. 

We knew how to daydream.

We knew how to take blankets and throw them over tables and chairs to make tents.

Sometimes it feels impossible to educate my children in the art of gratitude and an afternoon well spent.

"The test of all happiness is gratitude," Chesterton wrote.  We feel no wonder at ordinary things; it is no wonder that ordinary things disappoint us. Chesterton could be made happy by the sudden yellowness of a dandelion, but we do not find dandelions delightful if we are constantly comparing them to orchids. "It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all." The twin brother of this presumptive attitude is despair, and the two make us sick and tired. "Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless."

---David W. Fagerberg

Spring Rain

I stood under it's branches and the wind blew it's blossoms down.  A magical, fairy tale sort of rain.

The soft petals landed in my hair and on my shoulders and covered the ground all around my feet.  I thought maybe I should apologize for stepping on them, or at least stop and pray before walking there like how we teach our children to pray before they eat.

And here she sits

 As if it is the most normal thing in the world to walk to the bus stop like this. 

She knows her own mind very well.  When the kind neighbor lady and her husband (who sit on their porch and wait for us to pass) ask her why she is wearing a life jacket.  She looks at them waving into the air in front of her and says in her squeaky voice "Because I wanted to go swimming"  and then she heads off down the sidewalk swimming.