Saturday, March 29, 2008

He Is Risen

He is Risen Indeed! Yes, here is Easter, the commemoration of our Lord's resurrection. Before I babble about the fun C had with her eggs and gifts and whatnot, I need to mention Pastor Quinn's really powerful sermon from church on Sunday. The title of the sermon: To be, or not to be, that is the resurrection! The English teacher in me loved the literary reference, of course, and the connection between the Hamlet section and the resurrection message was quite poignant. Hamlet's soliloquy at that point in the play indicated his melancholy; he was contemplating suicide. He no longer had any hope. _But_ it it is precisely because of the resurrection that _we_ have hope! Of course, there was more to it than that, but it was a beautiful message of hope and future and life abundant and eternal.

C, however, spent the service in the nursery, so she's still at the "Easter's a celebration" stage of understanding though she doesn't yet understand what it's a celebration of. We decorated eggs on Saturday, and she hunted for them on Sunday morning, as well as for the plastic ones filled with treats. She also got spoiled by her grandparents who were here visiting for the weekend, and got all sorts of neat toys from them. Her favorite by far is the Snow White dressup outfit. Now we can have friends over and have princess gatherings. Mommy's goodies have been ignored thus far. I put together a plastic box filled with a plethora of crafting supplies. (child-safe scissors, gluesticks, construction paper, pipe cleaners, fuzzy balls, rhinestones, glitter, google eyes, ribbon, stickers, paper doilies, paints, fingerpaint, and playdoh) I'm sure they'll be discovered soon. It should be fun to create with her.

In life beyond the holiday, I've discovered the true blessing of hardwood floors: they're a whole lot easier to clean up vomit from than carpet. C got sick yesterday and I spent much less time cleaning up after her than I did back at Irwin. She's better now, and we've got some high school girls from the band performing at our chapel tomorrow staying with us. She was so excited to "get the ladies!" and showed off all her energy for them in the hour before bedtime. She seriously wears me out some days. This would be one of them.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

McDonalds Associations

So, what do you think of when one suggests eating at McDonalds? Most Boomers think of the Big Mac or a similar burger. Xers think of the same, or chicken McNuggets. And a good portion of my friends' children, or so I've heard, think of french fries. Not my child, no. C sees the golden arches and begins clamoring for, of all things, apples! I made the mistake once of getting a Happy Meal and forgetting to change the fries to apples, and she was so disappointed. She cried for apples all the way home. Last night I remembered the apples, and guess what she asked for as soon as the bag came through the window...apples. She finished the package before we got home. Apples and McDonalds...go figure.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Open Door Morning

One of the blessings about our housing assignment is that our across-the-hall-neighbors have a 2 year old (6 days older than C) and the girls really enjoy playing together. Today they had a play date that started in their place and then C had a meltdown and needed Mommy. Because we were standing in the doorway talking, Pammie came into our house and started playing. After laughing about how the girls kept just making themselves at home, Rachel (P's mommy) and I decided to put a baby gate across the stairwell and just leave the doors open so the girls could come and go into the apartments and we Mommies could get our things done. At lunch time, Rachel and Pammy joined us to help out with our leftovers. It was so much fun, we decided we ought to have open-door-mornings more often!

Sunday, March 2, 2008

What a privilege

I just have to share this testimony about the working of the Holy Spirit. I didn't manage to check my email on Thursday and Friday, so it wasn't until yesterday that I learned my friend Melissa had her baby. I hadn't even known she was in labor. However, she's been on my prayer list for a week or so, and I've been praying about her birthing process. On Wednesday night I couldn't sleep, so I went through my prayer list. The rest of my list went first, and quickly, but my prayers over Melissa seemed to linger. I felt moved to pray in depth for her and specifically for her labor. Finally, I felt like I could stop praying and could finally sleep, without any effort at all; I just drifted off. It was just after 11:30 pm. On Thursday and Friday I didn't feel the need to pray for her delivery at all, and just dropped that off my list for the moment, intending to pray for it later. Evan was born at 9:37 pm PST, which would have been 11:27 pm, my time. The Holy Spirit had led me to pray for her through her labor and delivery. I feel incredibly blessed to have been allowed the privilege to pray through that time for her, even though she...and I didn't even know it. How sovereign is the Lord our God!

Do it myself...

seems to be the mantra lately from my little girl, whether she's actually saying it or not. We've had a number of exciting things develop in the last few days. We've started consciously potty training. I'd planned to wait until summer, but C had other ideas. Earlier this week I heard a shriek from the bathroom and went running to see what had happened. C was standing there with her pullup and pants around her ankles and poo was all over the potty and her legs. She was crying, "I pooped!" *bawl* "I pooped!" *bawl* She was none too happy about having created a mess. (Don't know what I'm going to do about her mess issues.) She'd decided to try the potty on her own. I think they've been working the potty thing at the CDC and she'd taken it into her head to try it at home. F and I cleaned her up and told her over and over how proud we were that she'd tried the potty, because I'm concerned that she's intimidated about it now. However, last night I made her sit on her potty while I ran the bath, and she finally "made water" in it. The other big accomplishment was at the playground yesterday morning. There's a curved ladder that she climbed with Daddy's help at Irwin and at first yesterday. By the time we left the park though, she was doing it all by herself. I'm glad the weather was finally nice enough to go the the playground. We've been driving past the playgrounds, and she's called out wanting to go play, but we couldn't. She was so excited when we said "playground"! Pictures follow of our excursion.


The Lay of the Land

This is our second (3rd? they were back to back) assignment in Kansas, and one of the last things we did before leaving 3.5 years ago was visit Kansas City. It had become a fairly special place for us. We got engaged there at the Plaza and visited some attractions with friends several times as well. After getting settled in, we've found ourselves with a bit of extra time on our hands, so we've been off exploring how things have changed. One of our favorite haunts used to be the Hallmark Gold Crown Center. We made use of Parent's Night Out at the Child Development Center and had a very nice date there, enjoying Kabuki and having some excellent vegetable tempura. We discovered that the vendors immediately outside of the Crown Center had expanded, but for the most part, the inside vendors of the center remained unchanged. The only real change we noted was that the scrapbook shop on the second floor that used to have a photo studio inside had been replaced by a fragrance shop, and the paint-your-own-pottery place across from the Crayola Cafe had been replaced by a cell phone vendor. Both were disappointments. We've also explored the shopping on NW Barry Road, and there are robust shopping complexes that hadn't even broken ground when we left in 2004! It should be fun exploring Zona Rosa. South on I-435 we recalled that there had been construction going on around the Kansas Speedway when we'd left, wondering what it would become. Now that area is bustling with a huge Cabela's, Nebraska Furniture Mart (*chuckle*) and Legends, a massive shopping complex, and all the restaraunts that go along with such a commercial district. Seeing such changes happen in such a short period of time is a bit mind-boggling, since we'd thought KC quite robust in the shopping arena as it was!


I love the downtown in Leavenworth. There are so many simply lovely shops. There's a paint-your-pottery place, at least 5 antique shops, a flower shop with a toy store above, and an amazing quilting store. It's been fun exploring all the nooks and crannies.


I'm also looking for the options available as far as activites to occupy C's time go. Although I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, I bought two excellent books: Shifra Stein's A Kid's Guide to Kansas City and The Kansas Guidebook for explorers by Marci Penner. The former I found at Waldenbooks and the latter at a local shop called the Corner Pharmacy. I've found tons of interesting things for us to do and see while we're here. We tackled on of the top items on our list before F left for training, going to the Wonderscope Children's Museum in Shawnee. It was a reasonable drive, and there were plenty of activities for her there. There are programs on Tuesdays and Fridays for little ones, so Cand I will most likely venture down there at least once a month. Here she is on our first excursion. She was fascinated by the gate in the art room that maintained the partition between the rest of the room and a sandbox area.

Saturday, March 1, 2008