Let the Birthday Season Begin!

Happy 4th Birthday to the Panda!  He had his third birthday party and first voluntary bite of cake!  Grandma and Grandpa got to have a rehearsal birthday cupcake with him this afternoon, so he sort of had some idea about blowing out candles this evening.  His siblings helped, though...

My thoughts turn to his first parents.  May God truly comfort their hearts on the Panda's birthday.  I would love for them to know that he is safe and amazing.

We had VBS last week, and it was great.  That means that Monday should have been our first day of homeschool.  I am not even close to ready to start, so we didn't.  I have all the books and stuff, I just am not emotionally ready to start.  Grandma and Grandpa are moving across the country this weekend, we have appointments all week, travel this weekend, and family vacation next week.  Not a great time to get momentum going for the year.  I'm aiming for Wed. August 28 for our first day, the day after I start my 5th year at our homeschool co-op.  I also found out that I get to teach middle school girls in Sunday School this year, which is exciting.    By the time we get started on school, both the Puppy and I will also have had our birthdays.

The Panda's birthday cupcakes were made from an accidental pumpkin that grew in my "compost heap".  Don't ask Matt about the "compost heap" though....  Also, it turns out the mystery plants in my garden were muskmelons.  One finally fell off the vine and we cut it- it was just like the thing that they sell in the stores as cantaloupe (they aren't, though... they are muskmelons).  Here's a runaway zucchini.

Last weekend I headed home for my ****th class reunion.  What a fun night!  My classmates are really a great bunch of people.

The Panda and I with Zhou dynasty tigers at the Sackler Gallery.

The Penguin in front of the Smithsonian Castle.

The giant flower that smells like rotting meat at the DC Botanical Gardens.  

I can not wait to see my dad's side of our family this weekend for my cousin's wedding.  She was my youngest bridesmaid, and we wish her and her new husband happiness and joy in their new life together.  Also, we will get to hear him perform with his band at The Purple Fiddle this weekend, apparently, which sounds like a really fun time.

My mom's family reunion was 2 weeks ago.  I love them so much and had a great time.  Matt got to have a Fear Factor weekend- about 17 yellowjacket stings...  My dear 97 year old auntie hasn't known me for about a year.  She usually won't wake up to talk to me anymore.  That weekend, I got a gift from the Lord when I visited her.  She was awake when I got there, and her opening line was, "I am ANCIENT!"  We had a precious walk down memory lane.  She talked about her days teaching in a one room schoolhouse, and when the gypsies came to Thomas, and going to Catholic school.  It was good to have her back for an hour.

Isaiah 40:8  The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.

Summer Flies By...

I can't believe how fast this summer is going!  Only one, short, busy month left!  I needed this break, and my stomach knots up at the thought that it will end soon.

The wonderful stuff we've done:

Backyard Bible Club.  Love it.  Enough said.

Garden.  Can't believe how big it has gotten.  There were pumpkins that I became convinced must be watermelons, which have proven themselves to actually be pumpkins.  There is still one mystery plant, maybe a honeydew?  ??  Good tomatoes, not quite as plentiful as last year.  Same for cucumbers.  Zucchini like crazy.  I've already had roasted pumpkin seeds and pumpkin pie.  I'm pretty sure I planted too early and there won't be any pumpkins in October....  The peaches were too buggy.  Should have pruned and sprayed, right?  My carrots and beets are still tiny.  They were supposed to be ready to harvest more than a month ago...  hmmmm....  Not having the best of luck with the berries, but the ones that we got were very tasty.

Fourth of July in Thomas, WV.  If you really want to see a small town have fun and put on some amazing fireworks, this is the place to be!  The Panda made his first big trip down all the steps to see Blackwater Falls.  We visited my dear, dear friend and her family, and were visited by old friends, and we are so blessed.  Look at the Panda, finally working up courage to touch the terrifying dog.  He's getting braver.

Hitting the museums.  We are trying to see several that we've just never been to.  The Newseum is free for kids with a paying adult right now, and we really enjoyed learning about the history of journalism (except the Puppy, who really just fools around and distracts everyone.)  The Puppy is behind MLK's jail cell door, considering the tiny space marked off behind it to represent the size of the cell.  Hoping to do the Freer gallery soon.

The Panda is eating more variety, and I'm able to spoon it in much faster now.  Our current goals are for him to put food into his mouth himself (like Cheerios), learn to chew it, and to eventually bite pieces off of something (like a sandwich or a Ritz cracker) and chew them.  He's not doing any of these things at all.

Last year was the "Summer of Yes".  This year feels like the "Summer of Sure".  There is a razor fine difference between "yes" and "sure", and the difference comes from my attitude.  Last summer I had to keep it together and give it my all, and even so, we were falling apart.  The deployment was taking its toll.  This summer, everyone seems so much better in general, but I am still recovering.  I'm struggling to shake some unnamed, beaten down, exhausted something.  I can't pin down what it is.  I am tired.  Not depressed or sad.  Worn out.  Worn down.

I really like taking time out of my regular Bible study in the summer to study the things we do for VBS (coming up soon, can't wait!   Longest, hottest, most rewarding week of the year!  Wooohooo!) and Bible clubs.  I meander down rabbit trails while studying it.  Then I eventually (like right now with only a week left) have to pull back and figure out what I should actually do in that tiny 20 minutes each day with my class.  Oh, Lord, please let them see Your greatness, love, and grace!  Let us all come away knowing how much we really need You.

Hebrews 10 is the place I keep coming back to this summer.  It is deep and true, with so many applications, it just can't be exhausted, even when I am.  I can't even figure out which piece of the chapter to include here.

Heb 10:14-18 For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

 The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:

“This is the covenant I will make with them
    after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
    and I will write them on their minds.”

Then he adds:

“Their sins and lawless acts
    I will remember no more.”

And where these have been forgiven, sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.

The deep prayer of my heart is that God would keep this in front of me, so that when I deal with the sin of an unrepentant child, I would remember how much grace He has lavished on me.  I can draw hope from knowing that Jesus has done everything that is necessary for me to have a relationship with God now and to be with Him forever.  Sin will not poison everything forever.

My Mother's Day Garden (and random catch-ups)

And so begins the "last month of school" (although we will probably do light school over the summer).  Actually, we may have to do school over the summer to make up for the "last month of school," in which there are more field trips than work days.  I think we learn more on field trips anyway.  

My Mother's Day blessing this year was a second raised garden bed.  My Matt, his dad, and the kids all pitched in to build it the weekend before Mother's Day weekend.  I planted seedling tomatoes and peppers in our old bed a few days before they built the new one.  The old bed also has a few zucchini, cucumber, pea, beet, and carrot plants that I started from seed.   Look at what 10 days has done for the old bed:

May 4                         May 11

Building the new raised bed.

The Panda and mom are showered and clean after gardening.  Except my fingernails.  They will never be clean again.

I am not a garden expert.  I have 3 years of very small scale, limited size and scope experience.  My cherry trees have never produced one cherry.  I'm great with tomatoes and cucumbers.  We have a very fat groundhog.  I really dig in spiritually when I garden, though.  It is great prayer time.  When it's a peaceful time, I can meditate on some of the things God says about gardening.

John 15:2

Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

I am so chicken to prune a plant.  My peach trees have branches that probably need to go.  I just don't want to cut off something that looks healthy and good.   I have learned to prune tomatoes.  Hey, it's a start, right.  They are obvious.  Some branches are not going to bear fruit, and some are.  It's easy to tell them apart.  I don't even mind cutting the "suckers" off anymore, because it's good for the plant.  I get a huge yield.
When I cut off those "suckers", I ask the Lord what he wants to cut off from my life.  Which branch is a "sucker".  Some are obvious.  It is painful to cut them off, but good for me.

I stare at the peach tree.  There are real live peaches forming on every branch.  Too many.  I need to thin them.  Some branches need to be cut.  When it comes time to do it, I keep chickening out.  I'm not really sure what I'm doing.

The question is harder this time.  Lord, do I need to prune a healthy branch with fruit all over it so that it may bear even more fruit later?  How do I do the job right, not hacking away with no skill or planning?  Sigh.  Is there a teacher for me somewhere?

As for my new garden bed, I told the Penguin and her friend what my plan was.  I asked them to help me plant watermelon, musk melon and a few other things.  We had lunch after church and I fed the Panda and changed.  When I got to the garden, they had planted it all.  They were such hard workers.  Probably, they did a great job, right?  Today, a week later, the first mystery plant popped up.  The new bed should be good entertainment this year....

The Penguin is my garden helper.  We have a few experiments running with different soil mixes.  We way over-planted beet and carrot seeds, so we pulled some out to see if they'd survive a transplant.  The penguin desperately wants to grow popcorn and cotton (!?).  I bought seeds.  Now, we just have to wait to see if there's some room in the "bed of mystery".  

The penguin has been struggling for a few months.  We have peaceful moments, snuggling, reading, gardening.  She rages, has sleep issues, anger.  Nothing new, just particularly intense, lately.  Oh, how I love her.  She's great.  Except when she's not.

On those days, I'm not meditating and pruning, praying and puttering.  That's when I weed, hack, upend, dig.    Calm down, so I can remember and claim God's great promises, even when I can't see how or when my own personal scorched places and ancient ruins will be healed and rebuilt.

Isaiah 58:11

And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.

My co-op students getting ready for the year end photo after skating and pizza.

Ok, best field trip ever.  You are going to be so jealous.  We got to tour the Bowen Farmstead, owned by brilliant author of Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon Morell.  http://pabowenfarmstead.com/
They are educating people about the faults, dangers, and fallacies of commercial farms, and making amazing raw milk cheeses.  It is so interesting how they use pigs and chickens to turn over the land so that in a very short time, a thinned forest or totally trampled, dead field can be a perfect cow pasture with plenty of grazing food.  It is great for all the animals involved.  They also only milk once a day, which decreases their yield by 20%, but their labor by 50%, which seems to work out pretty well!

If an animal touches this big brush, it spins and sways.  A self-petting machine.

In the Panda's perfect world, all bottles would look like this.

The Puppy had that great rite of passage, touching the hot wire and getting a good solid zap.  He was happy to pose for this picture with the electric fence, though.

Iron cross, here I come!

The children's choir blessed us with a song for Mother's Day this morning.  It was the Penguin's last song before she moves up and is too old for Joyful Noise.

The Panda's eating is about the same.  He is getting used to a very squished version of what we are eating instead of commercial baby food, which is really great.  In a moment of insanity, I told Matt that he could throw out all the bottles for Father's Day.  He hates bottles so much at this point.  I had never bottle fed a baby, and it was so good for bonding and snuggling, that I have warm, fuzzy feelings about the bottle.  Matt just sees his almost-4-year-old son with a bottle.  He's probably right to push to get rid of the bottles, and it is do-able.  He's had 18 months at home now.  He's down to 2 bottles a day, and it seems like the fewer bottles, the more frequently he asks for one.  "Bottle?"  

"Bottle?"

"Bottle?"

They were a blessing, but now they are holding him back.  Matt is more confident about pruning than I am.

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Best Day of Eating, Ever!

The Panda has been an eating machine today!  Much faster than ever before, asking to eat, eating new things....

He fully consumed his first Cheerio.  His feeding therapist and I got him to put several in, and crunch down on a few.  The last one got crunched enough that it dissolved and I grabbed his hands and clapped and cheered (so he couldn't use his fingers to pick the bits out of his mouth).  He finally swallowed it!

He also ate regular oatmeal that I hadn't ground into flour with a banana that I squished with a fork.

Every bite I fed him today was spoon into mouth!  No licking!

So happy!

This morning before therapies, the Panda was so cute!  I got him a new slide for inside the house yesterday.  He has been hesitant to slide at playgrounds even after all the work it takes him to climb to the top of a structure. I was hoping that this would help.  He started a crazy cycle.

Climb slide.
Slide down.
Beg for a spoon full of coffee (with creamer!)
Repeat.


It worked!  He did the slide at physical therapy and at the park later without hesitations.

Blog World Drama

Rumors are flying.  Drama unfolding.  Apparently Google Reader is folding on July 1.

Quick, everyone!  Damage control time!  See the little button on your left?  (Everyone who knows me in real life just looked to the right, but I double checked.  It's the left.)  Bloglovin is the answer to this dilemma.  We are going to be ok.

It was easy.  I signed up, it imported all my blogs from Google Reader.  I downloaded the app for my android.  Reading blogs has never been easier!

Click the button.  Don't lose touch with all the great bloggy friends we've made.

Or, just make sure we are facebook friends.  :)

Tonight is a big night.  Matt and the Puppy are out there roughing it with the Cub Scouts for the first time.  :)  Mount Laundry is calling.  I am procrastinating.  No doubt Mount Laundry will erupt after this campout anyway, right?

Panda Eating and Reflecting on a Retreat

The Panda is eating more from a spoon than from a bottle.  It is still slow going, but getting better.  A 4oz. carton of baby yogurt could take 15 min., for example, but only if I let him lick it off the spoon instead of putting the spoon into his mouth like you normally would eat yogurt.  For a week or so, we've been making him let the spoon into his mouth instead of licking it for the last couple bites of each meal (only if it is perfectly smooth puree- we can't do this with texture yet.)  I am trying to transition to almost all bites into the mouth if he's eating something smooth.  This morning, the yogurt took 40 min instead of 15, but he did all but the first few bites in "the normal way".  He is so scared until he gets going.  I hate the look of fear of food in his eyes. It helps to start with a few licks, so he knows that it is a food he likes, then an empty spoon so he gets on board with letting the spoon in his mouth, then a very little bit of food on the spoon, then normal bites.

Stage 3 baby food is getting a little faster- sometimes even only 30 min!  We are practicing "chewing" when it is in his mouth.  The Panda has been biting on crackers and such for months, but hasn't really bitten pieces off.  Last night, he did bite a piece off a taco shell.  I tried to get him to chew, but he almost swallowed the pokey shard of shell and gagged.  Then he reached way down his throat and pulled it out.  Eeek.  I'm really not sure how to teach someone to chew.  He's so smart, I'm sure he'll eventually figure out my overly-dramatic "mum, mum, mum" chewing instructions....

The Panda has started eating from those baby food pouches.  The pouches have brought a new level of convenience to my life!  We got to go into DC to see the cherry blossoms and walk through the American History museum.   He used to be so scared of the pouches, because one of our early attempts to get him to eat was to squeeze one into his mouth every day.  Mostly, I think that forcing him to eat solids like that was a bad idea, in hindsight.  I will say, though, that learning to swallow undiluted solids helped him stop drooling, and taught him a lot about how to use his mouth and tongue muscles.  I think one of his expressive language explosions came as a result of that learning.  I can't  totally regret it because of that, because it took 10 months to get a spoon in his mouth after he learned to swallow, and if he'd drooled and not been able to speak for 10 more months, that would have been really bad for him.  I just discovered this morning that there are reusable pouches for sale that I could fill with homemade baby food.  I'm really hoping that they will help him start eating homemade baby food, because he still strongly rejects it.

One bad thing about learning to eat pouches is that they have ushered in that fun developmental stage of "sticking every poisonous thing into my mouth and sucking on it".  Like grandad's eye drops, for example.  I grabbed them away in the nick of time.

The biggest progress, though, is that the Panda is now eating a bowl of oatmeal with squished banana every day, even though it has texture, and even if I squish the banana with a fork instead of a food mill.

The Panda's other new skills include sneaking out the front door when mom is making dinner (good thing he's slow on the porch steps), and sneaking to the basement to open the slider and free the cats.  The Puppy got the blame for the cats' escape until the next day when the Panda did it again and I saw him.  As ornery as he is, he is so sweet and not stubborn about being corrected (a first for me as a mom), and when I think about how he couldn't even walk just one short year ago, I am so thankful that he can do all these wonderful things!

The Puppy is himself again, still high energy, but all the anger and extra acting out that came with Matt's deployment is just gone.  I really missed him almost as much as I missed his daddy, and am so thankful to have gotten them both back.

Last weekend I attended a multi-church women's retreat.  Nancy Guthrie, who was a great speaker, taught on Revelation 1, 4, 5 and 20-21, with an extra session about grief.  It is nearly impossible to sum up the learning and soul searching of a retreat, but the first part of Revelation gives us an introduction to Jesus, alive and glorified, holy and powerful.  As hard as it is to wrap my brain around Jesus, who was totally God and totally man, who set aside His glory and lived a human life, never sinning, but still experiencing every pain and grief, it is even harder to imagine who He is now.  He is still Jesus, the one I can pray to and take my needs to, but also God Almighty, who holds all things together with His word.  I need to intentionally and frequently set aside all doubt that any plan of His will somehow be thwarted by my sin or inability, or by the complete brokenness of this world.

Rev 1:17-18
¹⁷ When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, ¹⁸ and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. 

Nancy Guthrie asked us, "Is God on the throne at the center of your life?  You will worship Him forever in heaven, but are your practicing now?"  

I am so easily distracted, forgetful.  But having a full weekend to dedicate to prayer, worship, fellowship, and rest was wonderful (and actually exhausting- I'll be glad for that new body that won't get tired in heaven). May God help me keep drawing refreshment from Him, and may I keep God at the center of my life continuously.

This was really convicting...  Nancy Guthrie read Rev. 4:8

⁸ And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say,

“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
    who was and is and is to come!"

Then she told us to fill in the blank:  Day and night, she never ceases to say, "_____________________"

Does what most often fills that blank point others toward Jesus?    Or is it, "Wash your hands!  Get your work done!"  Eeek.

When I fall short, Jesus forgives and makes me new, not just painted over so the old is hidden under a pretty coat of paint.  I can be content now even if I'm not fully satisfied, because He will truly make all things new someday, and I can wait for it.  

I still struggle with how much harder it would be to say that if I were one of the 167 million orphans  or 27 million slaves in this world, though.  I struggle with how empty it sounds to say that God has a good plan when things are so very bad for so many.  I know that God is telling the truth.  He has called His people to bind up the brokenhearted and fatherless.   I can't do everything, but may I do the part that God gives me with excellence.

Here's where the hope comes from, and until that great day comes when all God's people worship with unity AND diversity, but without sin, I'm going to hold on to this hope:

^{Rev 21: 3} And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  ⁴ He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

⁵ And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

And finally, new pictures!

Granddad sets the fashion trends around here.

Jefferson Memorial

Four girls, more beautiful than the blossoms, and my sweetie boys.