Oh the Bliss!

One of my nearest and dearest, my best friend since 4th grade, the girl I've walked nearly every journey with thus far in life, is (along with her adorable family, of course) just starting out on the journey of adoption. The sweet Coulombe family will be adopting their daughter from Ethiopia and I am over the moon excited for them! You can follow the journey too by visiting their blog . Here's to one less!!

I worked really hard on a post tonight. It took almost an hour. I pressed Publish Post and BAM! it's gone. I was sad. mark assured me it was ok to cry. I tried to find it, but only the first couple of sentences remained. I tried to rewrite it but I just wasn't feeling it anymore. So instead I'm here to tell you about another House (almost) Rule. No microwave. Mark hasn't used the micro for, well as long as either one of us can remember. Here and there he's said little things to encourage me not to use it either... mainly because of the way it heats food up, and the heating up of plastic stuff, and the actual microwaves it emits. Like the no TV rule, though, it's easy for him to say; he's not heating up 6 cups of milk, warming up cold oatmeal or reheating last nights uneaten dinner all throughout the day. Ben's need for hot milk in the morning boarders that of a caffeine addict and their morning fix. So getting rid of the "45 seconds to Happy Ben...

(Two blogs in one day! Look at me go!) For people who do not have TV we sure do watch a lot of it. Thanks to my handy dandy laptop and Ben's fantastic computer skills, he easily navigates through Netflix, Disney, PBS Kids and more, finding all the TV shows we were trying to avoid. I think reminding myself that we don't have a TV made it easier to believe that my kids weren't spending gobs of time in front of that screen, but also masked the amount of time they were spending in front of another screen. Why was I allowing this? Oh that's simple, because it made my life so easy. Upon waking my kids would come straight downstairs and watch shows on the computer - while I continued to sleep. If I needed to make a meal a "quick game" was played while I was in the kitchen. If I wanted to talk on the phone, sure, go ahead and watch some old school Goofy clips. When it came time to pick up the house instead of all of us picking up I found myself saying things like, ...

I went into Halloween thinking it was my chance, praying I'd get to meet and chat with my neighbors. I made baked goods, and set up a table. And waited. And waited. It seems the hood keeps their garage doors shut on Halloween too. That's not to say we didn't have a good time because we did. And a handful of people came by, and I even got to talk with a few of them. But I figured out some things that night, which was great because now I know, and if I learned nothing else from Saturday morning cartoons as a child it was this: Knowing is half the battle. 1. It's difficult to dialogue with parents on Halloween because they stay back, way back, like in the street back, and send their kids up to get the goods. 2. It's difficult to bring "Jesus saves" into conversations consisting of "Nice goblin costume" and "Wow, you make one great witch." But I DID have a fish pumpkin. 3. I'm not great at bringing Jesus into conversations at all. I get...

This morning Ben got up, took a shower, got himself completely dressed, and came downstairs. After a little while he yelled up to me that breakfast was ready. I came downstairs to find he had made scrambled eggs for all of us and a cup of coffee for me, complete with cream. As I was picking my jaw off the floor I looked around to find the "5 year old makes breakfast" disaster that was sure to be there, but the boy had totally cleaned up after himself, egg shells in the trash and everything. He's not even six. How can he be doing all of these things? After gushing over him for a good amount of time I remind him not to grow up too fast. He shrugged and said, "I might have to mom." "Why might you have to, Ben?" Shrugged again, "I'm just serving." AAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! I don't even know what to say. I'm not writing this to brag or anything close to that, I just want to remember this morning. And spotlight a boy whose heart is st...