Updates

I can't believe that I have time to post.

School started for us about a month ago.

Trey is going to public school now and is living with his mom and stepdad during the school week. He is still with us on week-ends. It has been a tough adjustment, but it really seemed to be the best choice that we could make.

Shelby is in third grade this year and is breezing through school at home. We had a rough first week or two because we couldn't figure out how to have school and watch a busy toddler. We finally learned that he would give us all the peace and quiet we wanted if he could touch me. So, the more complicated subjects are now taught at the kitchen bar where I can stand in the living room and John Stephens can hold my leg.

John Stephens is wild and wonderful now. He is a big boy and is busy, busy, busy. He is loud and rowdy.

I know that I need to post pics and such. Hopefully, I'll have a little more time to blog. Don't give up on me.

Baby's First Birthday

May 1, 2009, was a busy day. Superman turned One! We had a blast.

Baby's First Easter

The Cousins

Probably Rosy and III's favorite part of moving to our hometown is that they now live across the road from their 1st cousins. Tonya was baptized Easter Sunday morning by her new pastor, my Hubby, and Sviet sang a beautiful Call to Worship solo that morning. After church, we took pictures of the kids in the prayer garden outside the church.

Egg Hunt

Finally, I have my camera, my camera charger, clean floors (although it's still just concrete subflooring) in my school room, and a few minutes with Superman asleep. I can blog.

We went to his first Easter Egg Hunt today. He didn't really care to hang out with the other kids. He wanted to keep up with the 3 eggs that we had brought and hold on to them. He was sort of okay with other kids touching them, but he clearly wanted them back.

We stayed for about an hour and then noticed that he was getting a little too much sun so we headed home. I can't believe that I forgot to sunscreen him!

High Heel Waders and Mousin' Boots

Living in the country has required me to re-purpose some of my footwear.

I posted a while back that Hubby had seen a mouse in the laundry room. I didn't post the follow-up to that story. So, here we go.

The Monday night after the initial mouse sighting, Hubby was due back in St. Stephens after he finished his class that he teaches for the Baptist College of Florida. Class is over at 10 PM so we expected him around midnight. I had a terrible time getting kids to bed that night, so when I finally got the baby down and Rosy took her shower and got her thick head of hair dried, it was close to 11:30. She bribed me that she would do some of Tuesday's school work if I let her stay up to see her daddy. I gave in and let her. Then I went to clean the kitchen. I walked to the laundry room to toss a hand towel in the dirty clothes and I saw Twinkle in her pouncer crouch in the corner. I knew right away that it was the mouse!!!!! I quickly dragged a big box in front of the door so that the mouse couldn't get into the rest of the house. I hollered for Rosy to run upstairs and grab the boots I'd worn to church the day before - my brown, leather high heeled knee boots! Just as she came racing down the stairs with my "mousin' boots" as they are now called, Hubby came through the front door. He made it down the stairs just as I finished zipping up the boots and was about to head in to rescue Twinkle. He ignored the fact that I was dressed in my night shirt and "mousin' boots" and he went in to battle the mouse. He chased and chased, but the little vermin hid. So, the next morning I called the exterminator. I had tried to be nice, but enough was enough!!!! Forever, Rosy will refer to those boots as my "mousin' boots". (And, in case you didn't get this part, I needed the boots so the mouse couldn't touch my bare feet.)

In other exciting news, our house flooded last night. I came downstairs this morning at 7:30 and stepped in about 1/2 inch of water. Almost the entire bottom floor was covered. It has been a really long day of mopping, swabbing, drying, and trying to make intelligent choices in the face of some real stress. At one point, several men in the church decided to re-route the water flow through our flowerbeds. I looked out my window and I had 3 trucks, 1 front end loader, 1 four wheeler, 1 disc-er, and about 7 guys with shovels in the front yard. Momma and I stayed inside and mopped. Most of the floor is either ceramic tile (which is fine) or wood laminate (which is not fine), but one room is carpeted. We are still soaking water out of the carpet. I refuse to walk on it, so I dug out some of my platform high heels and I now have some high heel waders. As a matter of fact, my computer is in the carpeted room, so I had to put my waders on to get in here to blog.

I can't wait to show y'all pics. As a matter of fact, I dug out the camera today, but I still haven't found the charger, so it was useless. We're working on getting everything up and running.

My husband and I ask for your prayers. We feel that God led us to this new church field, but we feel very much that we are under attack by Satan and his demons. Please pray for our protection in the big and small things.

So Much to Tell...

...so little interest in reading long posts.

An update for those of you who don't know...Hubby and I have moved to our hometown for him to pastor our home church. On Christmas Eve this year after the Candlelight Service, one of the deacons at our home church asked Hubby to submit a resume for pastor of their church. We laughed about it and went on with the evening. Later that night, we discussed it and found that we were both feeling led to begin praying about the situation. We continued to pray about each step of the journey and continued to feel like God wanted us to move farther into the process. Ultimately, the church voted to call Hubby as Pastor.

Unfortunately we had signed a lease on a house in P'cola. We were scheduled to move at the end of February. We ended up losing our deposit and the partial month's rent!!!! (Huge bummer, but at least they didn't sue us for the rent remaining in the lease!)

The kids and I are settling in, but Hubby is still on the road. He finishes up at our old church this week. Wednesday is his last day and we will be taking a U-Haul down on Friday to get the rest of his library and to clean out our storage building.

Right now the digital camera is packed up, but I will soon start posting pics. Little Man is growing, growing, growing. He can take one or two steps and he is finally getting that first tooth! All of the kids are loving living in the country. We are right across the County Road from my parents' house. We see my folks almost every day. We have dinner every Monday night with my brother's family.

I have always asked Hubby how he as a Pastor knows when God is calling him to a new church, and he has always told me that he just always knows. I guess now I understand. We just knew. I'm extremely thankful to God that when he told us to "Go" that he was telling us to "Go Home".

I'll write more about the challenges later...so far we've had mice, sugar ants, centipedes, beetles, brown widow spiders, black widow spiders, wasps, yellowjackets, bees, one frog, and a hoard of ladybugs.

Tiny Mouse and Big Congestion

It's not a very poetic title, but it sums up my last two weeks pretty well. Hubby and I are just getting everything in place. After a week without a compuer or a washing machine, I'm back in business. However, this morning he discovered a mouse in our new laundry room!!!! Yikes!!! No laundry for me until Mickey has moved on. Hubby says, "maybe it went out the dryer vent." I'm not buying it. Until I see it on it's way out the door, it's still here to me. BTW, I'm a catch and release girl, so I had to call around for the right kind of trap.

Superman has been very congested. I ended up taking him to the doctor Friday. He has had diarhea most of the week from teething. It has been a challenge to keep his hiney from getting raw. Then mid-week he developed a chest cold. Tonight, he threw up all over me and himself right after his bath.

Rosy is well, but III is coming down with a chest cold!!!!!

If I remember correctly, the natural order of things is to tend toward chaos...we are really following that law at our house right now!!!!

You've Got the Cutest Little Baby Face!

Superman was fascinated with everything at Rosy's party yesterday! Hubby got a little distracted with the camera and we ended up with more baby pictures than 8 year-old pictures.

Party Hearty last night!

Superman at his Valentine's Banquet last night. One of the other mommies is holding him. They are doing the Hokey-Pokey.

Rosy at her "Baby Shower" Birthday Party. She loved it!

Math Joke

We're packing, and I'm stressing.

In the midst of it all, III has been doing some pretty advanced stuff in math and I have been writing the tests for it. So, my brain is math-fried. I saw this joke online today and I think it is hilarious.

Rosy's b'day is tomorrow and we are having a small, babyshower theme party for her tomorrow after church. I know that III and Hubby will be thrilled, but I do know that she will love it. I'll post pics soon.

Cage Match

Our new playyard, aka "The Cage", is perfect for our family. It has a ton of uses for us. Today, the big kids wanted to go outside to ride bikes, rollerblade, ride scooters, etc. Because our street is kind of busy and I haven't been able to consistantly notice them getting out of the way of traffic, I have to go out when they go out. This has been hard because Superman is only interested in being in his stroller for a little while.

Today we moved the cage outside. We stayed out there for several hours. I could lay on the blanket and read. Superman was in his cage and the big kids were up and down the street. It was one of our better afternoons since Superman has been born.

I'm guessing that it's a sign of the Apocolypse, but we've had two really good school days in a row. We've been completely done around noon both days and have been able to enjoy going out.

And, yes, to Alma and Gram Sam - I did put a hat on that baby right after these pictures. It was very windy outside today and I wanted to take care of his little ears.

School time for Baby Boy

For Christmas my parents gave Superman a set of these differently textured balls. At the time, he had zero interest in them. Now, they fascinate him. He rolls them, chews them, and bangs them. We got 30 minutes of school done this morning while he sat in his walker banging these two balls on each other and everything else he could reach.

Notice his turtle face in the top photo. For some reason he pulls his top lip down to a point and stares at us sometimes. We all think it makes him look like a turtle.

Does that thing come with a lid?

We got all three kids in the new playyard Saturday night, and the first thought I had was, "Does that thing come with a lid?" I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to cage them up in the living room, but there are days when I sure think about it!!!! Either way, I think they are adorable all playing together. Twenty years from now they are going to wonder how big that playyard was if they could all fit in it. They won't believe that they were just that small.

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

Today is my first Blogiversary!!! One year ago, I started my blog. Thanks to Cinda for suggesting it to me, and thanks to everyone who reads it.

I'm not much of a phone talker, so it has been a great way to share Superman's progress without being tied up on the phone for hours. I keep odd hours (stay up late and get up late), and blogging lets me type on my schedule. I'm usually adding to the blog around midnight and it was even later than that during the terrible indigestion of my pregnancy.

Yeah, Papa Deet!

My dad (known as Papa Deet by all the grandkids) and my mom (aka Gram Sam) got us a play-yard! We were at their house a few week-ends ago and little man was all over the place. My mom called this week and told me that she and Daddy had been talking and they had decided that Superman really needed a play-yard. She volunteered to go to Wal-mart and pick one up for him if I wanted her to.

We were up there this week and he really enjoyed it at their house. I set it up first thing this morning, and he is loving it. I've had so much more flexibility now that I can contain him. For the first time in over a month, our couch has cushions. Once he started crawling we had to use the cushions to block the hearth, the television armoire, and the legs of the end tables.

I can't wait until school Monday morning. I think we are going to be able to get a lot more done with him in "Sing-Sing" as my dad calls it.

My Big Boy

Superman had a busy January. He learned to crawl forwards and he learned to pull up. Of course, we immediately tried to baby proof. However, I missed some things. You can't see it in the picture, but I have the outlets covered. It never occured to me that he could pull over the ironing board. I made it just in time to stop him.

He went for a nine month check-up this week. He is 22 1/2 pounds, 30 inches tall, and his head is 47.8cm around. He's about the size of the average 13 month old according to his doctor.

Charley Skedaddle

III's school curriculum is all online. It is a good curriculum for the most part, but sometimes the assignments are extreme. Last week they suggested that he visited the Linneaus' Museum in London to better understand the assignment on animal classification. Obviously, we skipped that one.

He is supposed to read through his work and make a judgement call each day on which parts of the assignment he should complete. He makes a list of things he thinks he should skip because they are too diffiuclt or too involved. (Examples would be trips to London, science experiments that involve live electricity, assignments that involve reading a whole book for one day's work, and things like that.) We are trying to work on his ability to understand what is reasonable and what is extreme.

Earlier this fall, he started "hiding" assignments from us. If he didn't want to do it, he would "forget" to put it on the list. Of course, we check behind him each day, so it NEVER worked. We ALWAYS caught it. Then, if possible, we had to assign him the extra work because it became an integrity issue.

One of his lessons on Nov. 11 assigned him to read a historical fiction book about the Civil War and write tons of stuff about it. It was a HORRIBLE, lenghty, useless assignment and I never would have made him do it, but he chose to "forget" to put it on his list the day after we had sworn that if he ever did that again, he would have to do the assignment "no matter what."

He turned in one messy, misspelled, poorly punctuated version of the book report in December, and got told to do the whole thing over. I am glad to say that after almost 4 months of drudgery, the book report is finished.

Unless you also home school a mule, you can't know how exciting this is to us!!!! What a dark cloud has lifted at our house!

Shouldn't Have Tried It

I was determined to make sure our whole family was at church together this morning. I shouldn't have tried it. Superman is ill and feverish. Any sane mother would have kept him home. Finally, halfway through Sunday School, I gave up and headed home. I've never been so miserable or seen him so miserable. Thankfully, the Tylenol finally kicked in and he is sacked out on the bed now.

What a Day!

My sweet mother came down this week to help me clean the new rental house. She got here on Wednesdaymorning, but we had complications and we didn't make it over there Wednesday. We decided that we would get up early Thursday morning and tackle it.

Thursday morning started very early...too early! Hubby accidentally woke me up at 4:21 AM and I couldn't go back to sleep. I got up and started doing laundry which disturbed my mom. So, by 5:30, she and I were both up but Hubby and the baby were still asleep. We puttered around for a while and then when Hubby got up, I went and laid back down with Superman. I got up and Sam and I were going to head on over to the other house. Then 5 or 10 other things came up (feed us, feed the baby, change the baby, pack baby toys, pack cleaning supplies, etc.)

When we finally got ready to leave around noon, we loaded up the Jeep and backed out of the driveway. CRUNK, CLUNK, CRUNK, CLUNK I looked at my mom and asked her if it sounded right to her. We got out and looked - at a flat rear tire. I called Hubby who canceled a lunch appt. and came home and fixed it.

We loaded up again and as I was shutting the door, the rear passenger window fell down into the door. Now, my Jeep is not brand new, but it is a 2004. It shouldn't be doing all these things.

We decided to go ahead to the house and work anyway, so my poor mom had to ride with her hands bracing the window up. We had to have the baby in the rear facing car seat, so she had to ride back there and keep the wind off him.

We got to the house and it turned out that none of my cleaning products were what we needed. The kitchen has greasy build-up on the cabinets, and we needed a "de-greaser". I was armed with germ killers. I had all the Clorox and such that we could possibly use. We cloroxed all the light switches and the door knobs and decided to wait on the rest. We came home and started packing up china. Fourteen boxes later, we had the china cabinet completed unloaded!

Superman, Rosy, and I are all sick. We feel rotten, but we are going to church in the morning if at all possible. It's been a while since we were all in the same service and could worship together.

Sweet Moments

Most school days we take a small break around 10:30 or 11:00 to put Superman down for a nap. Rosy loves this time because she is usually the one who rocks him to sleep. She gets to go to the nursery and climb up in the big white rocker with him. We wrap them up in his special blanket that Mrs. Jana made for him. We turn our lullaby music on and they rock. She loves when he does "baby doll" things like taking a bottle or nap.

I know these days are fleeting - I wish that we could just double each day!

Best of Days

My Mommying Mentor who writes the Pigtails and Pacifiers blog had a great idea in one of her posts last week. She recently had a baby girl and now has three little girls aged three and under. Her pediatrician recommended that they make sure there's a "fun" time each day. Maybe something as small as dancing for 5 minutes a day would be enough.

The doctor's advice reminded me of one of my favorite things we've done in HomeSchool this year. We have kept a chart all year chronicling our favorite thing from each day. It hangs in the hallway between the kids bedrooms and I update it each week to showcase their accomplishments. It covers everything - our cooking lessons, science experiments, stories we've read, poetry lessons, art projects, good grades, and good behavior.

It also serves as a great countdown for us. We have a 170 day school year. The kids' bio mom and I split the year in half and each teach 85 days. We each choose our own holidays and stuff so that the school calendar fits our family calendars. Our schedule is pretty flexible, so it's hard to keep track of just when the school year will end. I hate to say it, but it is really exciting to me each time we finish a row on the poster because I know we are that much closer to being done for the year.

Crawl Videos

I finally managed to catch him crawling and not mugging for the camera. I have a dozen videos of Superman crawling half a step and noticing the camera. As soon as he notices it, he flops onto his heiney and starts grinning and waiting on the flash to go off. Rosy and I were on the love seat having Reading Class and Twinkle was on the back of the love seat. He was desperate to get to us.

This is a nearly averted disaster. I was so busy filming this cool side view of the crawl that I didn't notice what he was aiming for. Now, the cat toys have been relocated to higher ground. He actually screamed at me when I took them away.

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

Sleep has eluded me lately. Hubby and I are both night owls, but lately it has gotten out of control. During the work week, we usually go to bed around midnight On Friday nights, we are likely to stay up until 1 or 2 AM. This Friday night when we laid down at 2 AM, I wasn't sleepy. Then it was 3 AM and I wasn't sleepy. Then I remembered that I had to write a Math test for III to take on Monday. Then it was 4 AM and I still wasn't asleep. Finally I got up and wrote the test. I finally went to sleep at 6:30 AM Saturday morning. Thankfully, Superman is a late sleeper, so I got to sleep until 9:30 AM. I took a short nap Sat. afternoon, but I still couldn't sleep Saturday night. It was 2 AM before I dozed off. I feel like a baby whose schedule is off.

My mom says that she quit sleeping well in her early 40s. I'm not far from there. I'm hoping that this insomnia is just temporary. Of course, I am able to get a lot more done when I only sleep 3 hours a day. I am not a nicer person, but I do get lots done.

Vinegar and Salt

Hubby is off work today and is spending a little extra time with Superman. They were enjoying a snack of vinegar and salt potato chips!

Sorry about the continued sideways video. I'm really trying not to do it so much.

Mazurek...Missouri

Blended families are funny creations. Unless you belong in one, you can't imagine what it's like to co-ordinate your entire life with someone else's family. Dentist appts, PTA meetings, television guidelines, bedtimes, allergies, car seats, and everything else you can imagine are dealt with on a daily basis. And, then there are the biggies for us...insulin, home schooling, holidays, etc.

Here's a great story about living in a blended family.

Hubby and I are currently living in a small garden home that we rented when our house sold last year. It had been on the market for about 2 years, but when it sold we had very little time to pack up and move. We needed a house close to the church and reasonably close to where III was attending school last year. This house is small and we've never really been able to get all the way unpacked this year. There's just not enough room. Lots of our things are in a storage building that we have to visit several times each month to get things out that we need and to put other stuff back up.

Our lease is up in February, and so I looked for a bigger house. We found a house really similar to our old house in a neighborhood called Mazurek. It is a little farther from the church, but is much closer to the hospitals. (Hubby starts a lot of work days at the hospitals visiting folks or sitting with families during surgeries.) All of our stuff will fit in it, so we can give up our storage building.

I was on the phone with III and Rosy's Bio Mom the other night and mentioned that our lease is up in February and we will be moving to Mazurek. I assumed she would know where I was talking about because she and I had talked about that neighborhood before. She was very tired that night, and she thought I said that we were moving to Missouri. Talk about panic!!! There's nothing like thinking that the person you share custody of your children with is about to move to Missouri without really discussing it with you.

Of course, I immediately corrected that misunderstanding and we got a laugh out of it.

Orange You Glad...

Orange you glad this didn't happen at your house?

I was in the den playing with the baby and I heard Rosy bellowing for III from the hallway outside her room. I saw him go to her and heard her ask him to "take this to the trash for me, real quick." Of course, that piqued my curiosity. Then he saunters through the den calmly carrying a green and gray orange!!!

Now, the rest of the story...

I bribe our kids in school. We keep a giant bowl of candy with a sign on it that says, "A Sweet Treat for A Great Job". They are allowed one piece of candy for an A on a test or a quiz and two pieces for 100s. Rosy has Type 1 Diabetes, so candy that she can earn and then KNOWS that she is going to get to eat at lunch is a huge treat to her. III likes it because I let him take it to his room and snack while he studies.

Sometimes they end up with more candy than they can eat. Halloween, Valentine's Day, and Christmas always bring more candy. So, they each have a Halloween bag in that hallway between their rooms and we store surplus candy in it. Well, apparently Rosy had also stored the fruit from her Christmas stocking. I guess I should have noticed that it didn't go into the fridge, but we had other fruit in there and frankly, I'm just very busy this year. She was checking out her candy stash yesterday when she noticed the incredibly rotten orange.

I gave a mini-lecture to both the kids on fruit storage! (You other parents know how this sort of lecture sounds. "Have you ever seen me store fruit in the hallway?" "Aren't the other oranges in the fridge?" "Did you think this was a free range orange?") As I was winding done, III looked at me and said, "Well, I guess I'd better get the fruit out of my bag, too."

All in all, it was a good day, but I always recommend that you check on it when your kids are working on something and one says, "Take this to the trash for me, really quickly!"

Road Hog!

This is what it looks like when Superman is flying towards you in his walker! We think it's very cute. I know it's sideways. I'll try to get a better version later.

This is what he looks like when he is refusing to let me video his new crawling skill.

Injuries from the Walker

In yesterday's post, I blogged sarcastically about how "the experts" say that baby walkers cause injuries. Well, it turns out they are right! I always thought they meant that the baby would get hurt, but it turns out that the baby can now really hurt the rest of us.

Superman has raced over our toes and whapped our ankles so many times that we are considering investing in steel-toed boots for the whole family! He is a menace to our overall foot and leg health. He is relentless with that thing and will back us into corners and charge at us like a raging bull.

He's also got road rage. If that walker gets stuck or his toy falls off the little tray, he throws a fit. He has displayed more bad temper in the past 48 hours that in his entire life prior to that.

Mobility

Superman has attained mobility. He learned to crawl yesterday afternoon. He has been rocking, sliding, scooting, falling, stretching, crawling backwards and generally wallowing for weeks now. Yesterday afternoon he finally made forward progress!!! My mom says that she gave him a lesson on crawling and a pep talk before we left her house yesterday, so she is claiming that she is the reason he got it.

While we were at her house, we got a walker. I know that all the experts say not to let your child have a walker. I promise not to let him fall down the stairs in it. (We don't have any stairs.) I promise not to let him grab a burner on the stove. (They are about 2 feet taller than him.) Anyway, he can now scoot all over the kitchen, foyer, and school room area. This is the view from my desk chair as I try to type.

Now, he can get where he wants to be. There will be no peace for any of us. Poor Twinkle!

Jealousy

Rosy got a new small sized Baby Alive from Santa this year. It is a little boy. He is now the "twin" of the girl one she got last year. They are Samantha and Jake. She is really enjoying playing with them. Superman really likes Jake. He imitates him and likes to hold him. Today, Rosy let Superman have Jake in his high chair.

Not to be outdone, Twinkle found Samantha taking a nap by the couch and laid down with her. I guess Twinkle figured that if borrowing a doll was good enough for Superman, it was good enough for her.

Visitor Count

I am obsessed with my Visitor Count at the bottom of my blog. I noticed over the holidays that our friend Bro. Steve had a visitor count on his blog. I am very competitive, so I was immediately jealous of his visitor stats. Then I started to worry that maybe I don't have very many readers. Then I started to worry that I would never know how many readers I had. (Y'all do know that I'm obsessive-compulsive and little things like that can drive me crazy!) So, on the day after Christmas I installed a visitor counter on my blog.

Now I get a free weekly report that tells me how many visitors I've had and what times of day they are visiting and how long they are visiting. Of coursee, it does not tell me who is visiting. So, you are safe if you are one of the relatives who is "supposed" to be reading the blog. I'll never know if you are or not.

Do feel free however to visit the blog as many times as you want to each day. I get really excited when my visitor count is high for the day! I feel like I've really accomplished something. (That probably means I need to get out of the house more!)

And the Bombs Keep Coming

I forgot that blogs post the most recent thing that you write as the top thing on the blog. This post will only make sense if you read the post below it.

... Superman peed the bed. Not his bed, mind you, but my bed. Add more laundry to today's chore list.

... III reported to me that he thought we had skipped one of his Science lessons before Christmas break because he was missing some notes that he needed to study for a quiz. After checking the records, it turns out that he was assigned the lesson and that he checked it off on his daily assignment card. The computer shows no record of him doing it. He now remembers that he lied to his mom about that assignment and didn't actually do it. Of course, this is a major problem on a variety of fronts.

Please pray for us as we strive to thrive!

Under Attack!

This is my new desktop image for my computer.

Several weeks ago, my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Mary, used Galatians 5:22 (Fruits of the Spirit) as an additional scripture to make a point in our lesson. Something about what she said really grabbed me.

I began thinking about how we rear our children. We often tell them the areas of their life that we think they need to improve. "Sit up straight." "Don't chew with your mouth open." "Pay attention." "Do your best." "Be diligent." "Did you study for this quiz?" "Why is there toothpaste in the sink?" We spend our time correcting their path. Well, who's doing this for us? Like Paul, we "have not attained." There's still a lot of work to do in most of us.

I can flick III if he's not paying attention during the sermon. But, who's going to flick me if I start drifting? If Rosy is rude to her brother, I can put her in timeout and make her apologize. If I talk badly about my brother (not that I do - he's a remarkably great guy), who's going to make me apologize. For most of us, the only voice speaking to us on these matters is the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, most of us aren't listening very well.

After Mrs. Mary talked about the Fruits of the Spirit, I started evaluating my life. Are the fruits (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control) more abundant or less abundant than they were a year ago? two years ago? three years ago? I determined that I've been so busy improving the behavior of my children the last few years that I haven't allowed the Holy Spirit to improve my behavior.

This might would have been a passing notion with no real commitment, but the next week we unpacked our Christmas ornaments. A dear friend of ours passed away unexpectedly in January 2008. Each year she gave us Hallmark ornaments to celebrate Christmas. As I unpacked our ornaments, I found the ornament that Mrs. Mickey had given me last year. It was a gold pear that said "Fruits of the Spirit - Love, Joy, Peace". I was so amazed that God sent me the same scripture twice, and so I've chosen it for my 2009 verse. I can think of no better tribute to Mrs. Mickey than to improve my walk with the Lord and to be a better wife, mother, and servant to the Lord.

I say all this to let you know that I am under attack! School started this morning, and I knew this would be a terrible test of my new commitment to nurturing the Fruits in my life. Yep, Satan was ready for us. Hubby overslept! So, therefore, III started his computer lessons an hour late! III's printer no longer works! We've got a lot to do and we are already an hour behind!!!!! But, I did well with this first challenge. I prayed about it (and, now, I'm blogging it to release my frustration) and I didn't lose my cool with anybody.

Please pray for me as I work on my Fruits this year!

"Ammon-gator" face

This is Superman's big, "I'm overexcited!" grin. It is new. He has developed lots of expressions in the last week or so. This one is usually accompanied by flapping arms and "eh-eh-eh". Trust me, it's cute in person.

This is the "Ammon-gator" face.

When I was a little girl, I made a snorting face that we called "Ammon-gator" face. I'm thinking that probably meant "Alligator" face in baby talk. I don't know why a snorting face was an alligator face. I'll have to check with my mom on all this.

Last night, Superman was helping his Daddy do some research on the computer. Computer time involves Superman in his high chair pullled up right beside Daddy while Daddy works on his laptop. Hubby called me over to see a new thing that Superman was doing. I was very excited because Superman has started making my "Ammon-gator" face.

Maybe this is something that all babies do. If so, you can just ignore how excited I am about this. If not, it is really neat to me that something in him makes him do the same things I used to do. It amazes me how God has created us.