Five things

1. I miss blogging. So here is something short. 

2. Age two is my favorite age.  I'm on round three and it is just as great as I remembered. They are the perfect size to sit in your lap and everything is still exciting. Exploring the world with them is just wonderful. 

3. I will be sad when Warbie turns four this month because he will stop excitedly proclaiming, "THREE, like I am threeeeeeeee!!!!!"

4. Ages four and five are moody. But I love them still. I just really love the little years and wouldn't trade them for anything.  

I just finished a great book on raising children - it is in my trilogy of best child books. I'll review it later this year. It has given me SO much to consider while interacting with my kids. And this that alone it might be the best of the three for knocking me off my self dependent throne and helping me rely on grace. 

5. There were 52 people at ESL last night and 17 kids. Guys, I'm out of space and staff and the people keep coming. It is a bit overwhelming.  Maybe that is one reason the book on grace hit home so much. It is not about me. I can't solve all these problems. I can't convince people to teach. Come Holy Spirit and do your work through us.  Pray for wisdom. 

Bonus: My children might be cats. Today my watch caught the sunlight and they saw the reflection on the ceiling and chased it all over the room for a least fifteen minutes. I made the mistake of shining directly into Martin's eye and then he figured it out. Then the sun went behind a tree and the fun was over anyhow. It was hilarious.

2018 - Book 46

Pages 90

I love a book with questions at the end of the chapter.  I will probably read through this again soon and try to write more thorough responses to the questions.  This is would be great for a discussion group or just to study as a couple and think about your parenting methods.

You are about to see a whole mess of books about raising children come through.  I am on a parenting kick.

2018 - book 45

Pages 375

I used this for devotionals in the morning.  Piper takes all the words of Jesus and categorizes them into 50 groups. Then he writes a short devotional based off of each topic.  Future Grace is slightly better, but this one is also worth the read! If you want to borrow my copy, let me know.

2018 - Book 44

This books was excellent and I think that every pastor and Session member should be required to read it so that they would be better equipped to minister to hurting people.  I relied heavily on this book for my lesson on Grieving with those that Grieve for Sunday School this year. 

I cannot recommend this book more highly.  It is a must read. It is hard to say that a book on grief is the best book I read this year, but it is probably the most helpful (in ministering to other people).  But then the Gospel Comes With A House Key was also really good.  Read them both. 

Hi!

Guys, I have been slacking at blogging.  It isn't that I don't have anything to say. It has just been so busy recently.

I spent the later half of the summer creating a website and Facebook page for our ESL ministry.  Then there were forms to update and flyers to create and handout and interview processes to approve. I am blessed with some great staff members that take a lot of work off me.  But the emails each week are quite enough to keep me busy.  This year we are having classes on two nights and in two different locations.

In September we were supposed to go to OBX with my family for a week, but hurricane Florence came through and closed a bunch of roads and cancelled the trip.  So we just hung out at the house instead and had a quick trip to a closer beach for a couple nights.

September was also the National Folk Festival.  It rained almost the entire time, but we loved it. I was a naysayer up until the night before when I looked up the schedule and saw they had acrobats and a puppeteer. We went in the rain on Saturday and the boys begged to go back on Sunday. So we did.

We started officially doing school this year. So there are books to read and lessons to plan and field trips to go on and science experiments to do.  Science and math are our favorite subjects around here.  They are so easy to build into life.  Right now we are growing a sourdough starter and we have a pet tree frog. A few weeks ago we had a caterpillar.  We had been studying airplanes through the century and were looking forward to visiting Kitty Hawk on our way to OBX, but plans changed and we just made paper airplanes instead. :) That is the great thing about home schooling; we are flexible.

Jared is back in school too. He takes two classes a semester for his MBA.  Three down, seven to go. I wish I was back in school. I am slightly jealous of all his Excel Spreadsheet homework. He has also had jury duty this month. He has always wanted it and the first day he went in he was picked for a 7-10 day trial. I think he has had his fill of jury duty for a while.

I am teaching a Sunday School class at my church this year with two other people. It is on friendship. the topic didn't appeal to me, but I am having fun pulling in a ton of extra resources and expanding the scope of the class. We are five weeks in and we have already read some Gutherie, Piper, Welch, Beeke, Bonhoeffer, Powilson, Rendall-Risner, Butterfield, and a few more. It has been good.

The boys have been active. They love to play outside and we try to get out at least once a day.  Usually they require a bath afterwards. Oh well. Germs are good, right?  Warbie stuck two sunflower seeds up his nose this week and took us to the ER.

That's about all.

This feels like a Christmas letter. ha.

P.S. I updated my books for the year. I back-dated a few and schedule the ones through the first week of December.  I am up to 51 for the year. It is pretty exciting to be so close to reaching my goal for the year. Woohoo.

Mending Pajamas

The majority of sewing I do these days is like this.

The feet had holes in both of the toes and that bothered Meems. I chopped off the feet and quickly sewed some bias tape around the legs. Good as new!

2018 - Book 43

Pages: 71

Excellent little book! I am leaning heavily on it for the Sunday School.class I am teaching. The chapters are short, the questions great starting points, and the information is useful.

And if you live close to me and want a copy, I have one more left.  Let me know and I will give it to you.  I get these great deals from Westminster Theological Seminary's Bookstore and I can't pass them up.  This one was much cheaper if I bought a set of 5 (why would I need 5 copies?).  I don't know, but they were books and they were a good price and a great author and I bought them.  I buy a lot of books from them. So many books. I think 5 more arrived this last week.

2018 - Book 42

Finally Alive
John Piper

On Kindle

I liked the first five chapters.  It felt more like a bunch of essays that were put together than a book. There was good information in it.  But it was not one of my favorite Piper books.