Sat., Sep. 6 - Wed., Sep. 10

Saturday was a stay-home, relax, do housework kind of day. Nothing specific to report. :)

Since Pray Over Iowa last Friday night was quite a lot of work for quite a lot of folks, and potlucks are quite a lot *more* work for most of those *same* folks, the elders decided that our (first Sunday) potluck this month, scheduled to be a "p.m. potluck" (every-other-month is p.m. potluck instead of an a.m. potluck, so a bigger variety of people can participate), would be a Picnic-Potluck-in-the-Park with the church buying the meat, buns, and condiments. They asked Mitch to bring his monster grill and be the chef, which of course he was happy to do!! Much to our surprise, it turns out that the park they usually use for such events is the one six houses from us, at the end of our street!!! LOL

Here are pictures.

McKenna swinging.



Missy (McKenna's mom) & Lyndsay.



Natasha w/ Ross (Missy's son ... just to keep the connections straight). Natasha told me a couple weeks ago, "I can't picture myself being married to anyone else in the world except Ross because he's my age and just as crazy as I am." (Now, let's just cover all the fallacies in *that* statement!! LOL Oh, my, my, my....) [I had to -quick- look up "fallacy" at Dictionary.com. I think I used it right, according to the following definition: "any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render arguments logically unsound."] OH, BOY, and did these two, Ross & Natasha, *ever* end up in a disagreement/spat by the end of the night!! It related to rock-throwing and tattling ... just as a very vivid reminder that, oh yes, they're NINE, thankyouverymuch.



(foreground) Ethan and (background) Mr. Uncooperative, aka Enoch, who I had been trying to shoot for the previous five minutes. [Stacy (now pregnant with twins, btw) and I had some laughs about that!!] Ethan is son to Patrick and Danielle, who meets us at the library for crafts when we go.



That is Mitch, there on the left. Also easily visible are Todd J. (homeschool dad), Jerod (Enoch's dad), and in the stripes, Joe. Isn't that a HUGE grill???!!!




Jo (Mitch's wife), Carrie (Todd's wife), and two of Todd & Carrie's 12yo triplets, Ellie, and then Aaron, who could barely fit into the pic because I couldn't back up any farther! lol


JoAnn with (Robert & Lyndsay's) Taylor, and Pam.



Ladies setting up the table: Marge, Nancy, and the back of Donna.


Debra and Millie (wife of Joe from the grilling picture).



Ann & Marnie.



Amy (N & J's piano teacher) providing brownies and supervision for Emma (l. - Patrick and Danielle's daughter J's age), Kristen (Philip & Marnie's 2nd grader), and Charlotte (Mike & Ann's 9mo ... no brownies for Charlotte!)



Alan and Debra.



Clockwise from the front left is Hannah (the other triplet), Kristen again, N, McKenna, Hope (Kristen's sister N's age), and then Ross (that same age) providing comic relief, as usual. ;) lol



A great time was had by all that I know of! :) The chill in the air is ssssssssssssssssso welcome! :) :) :) :) We are leaving windows open and the house temp doesn't top 74 in mid-day. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!! (big sigh) (of RELIEF!!)

Favorite songs sung this Sunday: Great is Thy Faithfulness - to a different tune than usual!! (In the Songs of Faith & Praise book, #844), and song #130, Children of the Heavenly Father ... which I have heard, I believe, only on a tape by Dad, Floy, Betty, and Freeda from back in the DAY. Mmm!! Awesome!! Also, recently we sung #360, a first for me. It is a touching song, for sure.

Am I the only one in the world who didn't know that president William McKinley was martyred?

On Monday we went to the library. Here are three other amazing things about our tiny little library a mile from our house. This library is the first library I've had anything to do with that loans music CDs, puzzles (all difficulty levels), and cool-shaped cake pans ... the ones us 'ordinary folks' would never splurge for, since they would typically be for a one-time use! Now, SOMEONE was thinking!!

Yesterday was a crazy-but-fun day. Ann and Charlotte got to come over for lunch! Of course we had a very nice time getting to know one another better. Remember me talking about Jesse and Desiree, from Tucson?? Ann is Jesse's cousin!!!!!! When Jeremy told Jesse we were moving to Des Moines, Jesse said, "Weird! So is my cousin Ann!" So anyway, Mike & Ann officially placed membership with Grandview a couple weeks ago, much to everyone's great delight, not least of all Elaine, Charlotte's 'Des Moines Grandma'. Then, due to a dramatic development in the Mort family (which of course I must not blog about in detail), they were set to be in town around supper time, so we were happy to invite them for supper. Jeremy made his "Triple Threats", which he made on one other occasion: pork chops stuffed with sausage wrapped with bacon. He Mesquite-Smoked them, and the consensus of the five Morts + a friend of Wes's who got to come along was this: "Put this on a stick and sell it at next year's state fair!! You'd make a mint!" Awwww, so sweet. :) They were GOOOOOOOOOD ... and I'm not even a pork lover! True, I had only 1/3 of one because my favorite part of the meal was the Crock-Pot-"baked" potatoes w/ broccoli and cheese sauce. :) Truly, that is one of my favorite things to eat, hands down.

My big accomplishment of today was that I designed, in Word, some master "Lesson Plans" sheets on which to record our daily educational goals and accomplishments. Admittedly, it's little more than a checklist of what we need to do every day, but I left some space to keep some necessary details (what we're reading, for example), and a space to record whatever unplanned academic-related events occur (e.g. - Today N & J harvested Yucca seeds from the plants out front!!! huh???! lol). However, skimpy though it may be (no self-respecting teacher would call this To Do List "lesson plans" ... it's just the closest I've ever gotten to such a thing!), it gives me a place to a.) plan ahead the day/week/s before what I hope to cover, and b.) record what actually happened, for the benefit of our Supervising Teacher. :) I made it pretty generic, and will print up probably no more than four weeks at a time so that as life's changes occur I'm not stuck with an unusable straightjacket. Hopefully usable, if not fancy.

Oh! I received my new Bible yesterday!! This is huge news. My blue Bible was purchased in Oceanside, and it has served me extremely well. I was not at all interested in replacing it; however, *it* was interested in being replaced, since it has been falling apart for the last two years, and the binding busted off a number of weeks ago. :****( argh!! DO NOT.NOT.NOT BUY A 'BONDED LEATHER' BIBLE!! BUY ONLY 'GENUINE LEATHER'!!!!! He who has an ear let him hear. You will pay only slightly more for genuine leather, and have a Bible that will last decades longer. The Bible Mom and Dad gave me in 1985 was used daily by a middle-schooler, teenager (back pack), college student (book bag), and newlywed (Diaper bag), for nearly 20 years and is still in GREAT shape [True, I kept it in a zipper case, but still!]; we now use it daily, Mom and Dad will be happy to read, as a 'house Bible' (heehee - sounds funny), for example, during morning devotions/Bible study (in which we review/finish the children's papers from the Bible Study Guide for All Ages curriculum which is AWESOME-AWESOME-AWESOME. I like it more every day, especially now that I get to use it to teach a class in addition to using it at home with N & J!!!!!!!!!

Summer asked a question in a comment a couple days ago which was a huge compliment to me, first of all, which I recognize with gratitude, and which I thought I might address in a post. She said it seems that I have an easy way of going about things in a way that doesn't stress me out or anyone else ... and how do I do that? I'm not sure how, really. "How" questions are, IMO, the most difficult to answer, yet often the most imparative. First of all, let it be made perfectly clear from the get-go that I am as guilty as anyone else of getting a wild hair now and then, and turning things upside-down and inside-out for whatever reason (often external pressures that are neither logical nor significant). Every time I do this something else far more important suffers, be it patience levels, the 'rhythm' of our life, time spent with the family, our health, or any other number of truly-important things. This sequence of events has happened so often, and so dependably, that I've decided it's not worth it. Now, of course, in the moment of the wild hair, I have to practically PREACH that concept back into my brain, and just coach myself about whether or not this new idea is something that even truly has to be done right now, and then, if it truly IS important, the next coaching step is that I can't eat the whole elephant today, or even tomorrow, or usually even this week. So it's back to babysteps. How many minutes of today could I use to do which part of the project that could make tomorrow a little better? I have very few minutes of my day that aren't already 'taken', and it's becoming more and more clear to me that every time I'm saying 'yes' to something, I have to THINK about what, specifically, it is that I have just said 'no' to. eek! (sigh)

Letting go of un-related-people's expectations has lifted a huge load of complications and difficulty from my shoulders and heart. [I'm not necessarily talking about blood relations here, just the opinions of people who don't relate with our life, our priorities, and/or our choices]. Of course Satan makes this invalid concern rear its ugly head now and then, and I get all in a tizzy about what people would/do(!?) think about this or that. It will often bother me for a number of days until logic works its way back through the cloud of emotions, and, praise God(!) that seems to be happening more and more quickly as what matters to God matters to me more and more, and what doesn't matter to Him matters to me less and less.

It helps me sssssssso much to have a husband who is relaxed about things that matter not, and who is always willing to lend a hand, when I need it. I greatly enjoy following his lead, in these eleven years since I transitioned from following the similar lead of my dad. Jeremy, like my dad, has moderate expectations for eternally-trivial things and high expectations for eternally-imperative things. What's the saying about "Majoring in the minors"??? Yeah. -no way- Not any more. And, actually, ironically (or NOT!), it seems like focusing on the truly important things helps take care of the less important things. Hmmm, "I think I've read something like that somewhere!" :) How 'bout "Seek first His kingdom and His righteous and all these things will be added to you." Like, here is an example, menial though it may be(?). We want our children to be good workers; this is eternally important. So in these babysteps ... as we have, for the past six and nine years, been training them to be good workers ... they have actually gotten a lot of work done around our house(s!!!)! This means that I can spend more time doing other kinds of work (like packing/unpacking boxes!!! LOL) that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do if I were obsessing about the insignificants. That seems like a weak example, but maybe it helps illustrate my point. ??

Well, okay. I can't stop harping about routines. The more I stick with our family's routines (basically our family's 'rhythm', as mentiond above), the better off everyone is. When I determine that a routine needs to change, well (lol!) it's usually because the change has already happened, I just have to make it official by editing the routines file and printing and posting the new one. A couple months ago I was all freaked out about how I was going to fit piano practice into the routine ("schedule"). We didn't do well at ALL about getting it done for that first month, but now we do it as part of the morning routine; Justus practices while N brushes her teeth, and vice-versa ... like that! >>Huh!<< Cool! That was easy! :) lol But it took me a month to figure that out! But that's okay!! Because ... is piano practice something that's eternally important?? No, not specifically. However, since it IS something we *have* decided to do, and we DO want to do our work with all of our hearts (Col. 3:23-24), which IS eternally-important, it was definitely "something to work on" to figure out a way to get piano practice accomplished daily. And we did, though not on Day One ... and that's okay. At least, that's good enough!

"Good enough" is really a blessing. I would go crazy if I had to do everything exactly perfectly the first time. Even God doesn't expect that of us. He tells us to practice. (I Tim. 4:15, Phil. 4:8-9, Lk. 6:47, Heb. 5:14, etc.) True, practice means a habit or a custom, but the word "practice" also means "repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency." Ssssso, when we start something, that day is likely the worst we're ever going to be at it. (Example: Thank goodness God set it up so that our children basically don't remember our first months/years as their parents! lol! Stated better, thank goodness He set it up so that the needs of a newborn are matched with the skills of the new parent ... because I have needed every single day of practice these last 9 1/2 years in order to be able to mother Natasha through whatever tomorrow may hold, and the six years of practice being Justus's mom are meet for him and me to get through that same day.) We're making progress. THAT is what I expect of myself. Not perfection or even necessarily a good performance, depending on what it is and how long I've been 'practicing' it!! Just development, improvement, be it ever so slow....

End of long answer; beware the "How" questions, I'm telling you!!