Nathan writes us lettes

Recently Nathan has gotten into writing us letters.  He's learning so quickly in first grade and is excited by this new freedom of expression.  He also is very artistic, and made us each a Christmas present.  This morning he was handing out his Christmas presents and said, "Now remember, if it looks like a little kid made these, I did." :) Also in his Christmas gifts to Jimmy & me was the following letter:

"It is os helpfall when you help me!  As I growe up you help me, and I help you! But we all Love echathir.  Even when you unoy me I stil Love you and oba.  It is fun too live heer.  Love: Nathan"

Did you understand all of that?  No?  I needed just a smidge of translation, too.  So here it is:

It is so helpful when you help me!  As I grow up you help me, and I help you.  But we all love each other.  Even when you annoy me I still love you and obey.  It is fun to live here.  Love: Nathan

I think my favorite line is the part about us annoying him.  I think the letter was to the whole family so we're going to go with he was talking about his brothers.....Usually his letters are full of thanks for us loving him even when he's disobedient.  He's a sweet (and hilarious) little boy.

Christmas decorations and a little tour of our house

Here's a little peek at our house. I've included pictures of some Christmas decorations as well as general pictures of the house. You can assume that if you don't see a picture of it (the kitchen for example!!), it was too messy to photograph ;)

Near the bottom you'll see two pictures of a room that looks somewhat empty (but has the black piano). That's the two halves if what I think is supposed to be the formal living room. We don't have much furniture for it so for now it's the boys' art room and my piano room :)

More pictures of the house to come when the rooms are cleaned up enough to photograph!!

He has a sweet heart

I have to share a story about Nathan from this week that has made me very proud to be his mother, and has also been very humbling to know how powerfully God is working in his young heart.  A few days ago I was driving all four boys somewhere by myself and I started talking about how great Jimmy is as a husband and dad.  I was exhorting them to learn well from him.  Nathan was concerned about several things--how was he going to learn to be a good husband and dad?  Those things seem hard to a 6-year-old!  And here was the winner (out of nowhere), "How will I learn how to spend my money?!" So he and I had a brief conversation about wise spending habits, the number one being that we always first give part of our money to God.

Fast forward to this weekend.  Jimmy had a few jobs at church he said he'd pay Nathan to do (at the whopping rate of $1 a day!).  By Saturday night Nathan had $3.  He told me he wanted to give one of his dollars to church, referencing our previous conversation that we always give our firstfruits to God.  (And 33%--quite the offering!)  Then he said that instead of giving me a paper dollar, he'd give me four quarters, "because if I give a paper dollar, the church can only give it to one person, but if I give four quarters, the church can give it to four people."  I ended up carrying 10 dimes into worship, at his request, to put in the offering.  I admit that since no one else knew the story I felt a little foolish putting 10 dimes into the offering basket.  But the sincerity of this child, and how pleased God is with his simple act of obedience, nearly brought me to tears.

This Is How We Welcome The Weekend

It was Friday night. They were high on McDonald's and frozen yogurt. And we all love weekends. Happy boys make for happy parents.

Because They're Cute

These boys are fun. Loud, silly, loving, energetic, and an amazing blessing from the Lord. Come visit any time you want to partake in the craziness :)

What should we do with our jungle?

Our back yard looks like a jungle. Ok maybe it IS a jungle. We can tell that once upon a time it was a nice yard. There seems to be the remains of a fern garden and some hostas with a brick outline.

But no one has lived here for several years. It's very overgrown and seems like a big job to us. We aren't sure what to do or, more importantly, how to do it. What can we do ourselves? What should we have someone else do?

So now you can give us some pointers. The yard is all shade and has a lot of ivy. It doesn't have grass but does have some non-ivy ground cover. Here are some pics to get you started!

Oh and that last pic is just for fun. If you look closely you can see a brick building. It is an abandoned, broken down old building that we think was at one time the community pool building! It is actually kind of creepy!

A day at the park

I am trying something new: a blog post from my phone! Maybe this way I'll blog more? Anyway, today we took the boys to the park for a picnic lunch. We're trying to get our errands and chores done during the week so we can just have fun the one day everyone is home. This was an easy outing but Nathan's already requested the aquarium sometime! I know this isn't the most exciting post ever but it will at least serve as updated pictures of my four little men. :)

The time a tree fell on our house

Well, the short version is a tree fell on our house, we're fine, we were out for three weeks, and now it's fixed.  Below is the longer version :)  (Disclaimer: I am not an author or even a particularly good writer, so this is just the basic story.)

As we were leaving St. Louis we bought our first house, a home in Atlanta close to the church where Jimmy works.  (He's the Director of Children's Ministry at Church of the Redeemer.)  Some things were fouled up with the closing resulting in a few more days in a hotel than we were anticipating (no small thing with four young boys!), but we got in and we were enjoying more space.  Four bedrooms instead of two!  Three bathrooms instead of one!  A finished basement devoted to being a playroom!

Three weeks after we moved in, however, some things changed.  Friday night, July 13, Jimmy and I were greatly anticipating the next night because we had set up babysitting starting at 5:30.  We were trying to decide where to have a nice dinner and we couldn't wait.  We went to bed as normal and woke up at 2am.

The ceiling was falling on us.  For a brief moment I thought someone was in our bedroom throwing things at us.  I woke up Jimmy (how had he slept through it?!) and immediately realized the ceiling was caving in on us.  We'd had a lot of rain the previous week and I thought maybe the roof had rotted or crumbled under all the water.  I got up, found my phone, and called 911.

When the firefighters got there, they told us a tree had fallen from the neighbor's yard onto the house.  They said if that side of the house hadn't been brick, the tree likely would have fallen all the way through the house.  The paramedics checked us out and said that we did have some cuts (which we already knew; there was a lot of blood everywhere) but we didn't need any stitches.  They made us move everyone into the basement for the night, just in case the tree moved some more.  They suggested we clean up all of our blood before we woke the children who had slept through the whole thing (again, what?!).

A picture of our bedroom the next day before the tree was removed.
See that bed? Yeah, we were sleeping in it when the tree fell.

This is the back of the house.  On the left you can see the base where it came from the neighbor's yard.
It was a BIG TREE.

I'm not going to lie; it was a surreal experience.  But God's protection was amazing.  I just felt that He really physically protected us that night.  Trees falling on houses in Atlanta is not really something new.  But this tree fell in the middle of our bed in the middle of the night and we only had cuts that didn't require stitches.  The tree fell on our bedroom and not 5 feet over; had it done that, Zach would have been covered in all of those bricks.  I have a feeling we would have been going to the hospital or worse in that case.

Another view of the tree.

The tree got removed the next day.  We were gone all day so they could do it, but in the few minutes we were there, the boys really enjoyed watching them work.

Having to be out of the house for three weeks while it was repaired was kind of a pain, but we were thankful we had a place to go.  We spent the first night at our friends, the Sanders'.  We spent the next five nights at a hotel with a room that was basically a one-bedroom apartment, while our good friends took the two big boys to the beach.  We spent the next nine nights at the home of a family in our church while they were on vacation, and we spent the last week in the mountains with Jimmy's parents.

Picture of the bedroom once the tree was gone.
I think it's easier to see just how big the hole is when the tree isn't blocking the light.

All cleaned up, waiting to be fixed.

At the end of the tree weeks, the house was fixed right on schedule, with a new roof!  That was definitely a silver lining.  The insurance also paid to have all three bedrooms painted so we got to choose colors to have the prison gray repainted.  (Now we just need to repaint the rest of the house!)  The elders of our church came and prayed over the house (we'd had several other unforeseen unfortunate things happen and we really felt we were being attacked).  Before the tree fell on the house, I felt defeated by homeownership and all of the little things that come with buying a house that's 50+ years old.  Now I love it.  It's got quirks and there are things that need to be fixed.  The people that sold it to us "flipped" it and every day I find some other thing they did and just wonder "why???"  But it's also the house where God intervened and protected us.  He held up those rafters from falling on us.  He guided the tree to our bedroom and not one of our children's.  He preserved the life and health of the parents of four very young boys.  He gave us a renewed sense of purpose here in Atlanta.  We don't know what He has planned for us, but we know it's good, and we know the enemy doesn't like it.  

Only problem is we still haven't had that date we were looking forward to.*

*This is not 100% accurate.  While we have not done exactly what we were planning, we did have a wonderful, wonderful woman babysit for us one day so we could go to Six Flags and ride roller coasters all day with the church staff.

NYC Recessionista

Wow.  It's been a long time since I've written anything on here.  Since the last time I wrote we have graduated from seminary and moved to Atlanta!  Crazy.  More on that later.  But for now, I wanted to share with you a great blog I've ran across: NYC Recessionista (click to go to the blog).  I really have enjoyed this blog.  She shares all kinds of fun tips on getting great things at great prices.  I've seen a lot of information on this blog for codes for online sales that you won't find anywhere else (the codes, that is).  She's also got great taste in the outfits she pins and puts on the blog.

Part of that great taste is Anthropologie.  I first met Anthropologie thanks to my friend Sharon when we got to seminary :) I really like that store and find myself wandering through every time I go to the mall.  Well, much to my delight, for the 4th anniversary of her blog, NYC Recessionista is doing a blogiversary giveaway to Anthropologie!  You should click the link above, check out her blog, and enter to win!  But if you win, give it to me for suggesting you do it ;)

One of the best decisions I've ever made.

I have made a couple of good decisions in my life.  Granted, they've been amidst thousands of bad ones.  But I've gotten a few things right every now and then.  And this one, this one is intensely personal.

I have struggled with my weight for my entire adult life.  When I was younger I always thought I was overweight, but I don't really think I was.  I was always the tallest, biggest-framed girl I knew but looking back at pictures, I wasn't a roly-poly kid.  I think what happened was this: I went to college and the good health foundations built by my parents (they actually did an exceptional job of creating and explaining a healthy lifestyle to me) got drowned out by the all-you-can-eat dining halls.  Dessert before and after dinner every single lunch and dinner?!  Yes, please!  Large, full omelets for breakfast?  Yum! So I got to college and went from about 160 lbs to probably somewhere around 220 at graduation.

This is where I need to explain why I said this is "intensely personal."  I have never told anyone except my doctors and my husband (and that only recently) the actual number of my weight.  It's a hard thing to admit.  But, I've decided that what I look like is what I look like.  I could say that I weight 120 lbs or 320 lbs and I won't look a bit different.  I could say that I wear a size 4 or a size 24 and I will look the same.  So, since it won't change how I look, I choose the freedom to admit what I weigh, admit my size, and be OK with it.

Enter: One of the Best Decisions I've Ever Made.  Having Zach in September really spurred me onto wanting to get a grip on my unhealthy relationship with my body and with food.  For starters, he might be our last biological child and in the past I never saw the point of trying very hard to get rid of the weight because I knew I'd likely get pregnant again.  Also, and this is what really made me do it, I didn't have any pants I could wear and the weather was actually going to get cold at some point.  I'd never had a baby born that late in the year so I'd never been so freshly un-pregnant when winter hit (if that makes sense).  So I didn't fit into my jeans and I absolutely refused to buy more jeans when it would only take a little hard to work to fit into the ones I have.

Without thinking much of what I was going to do about it, a friend mentioned in passing that she'd joined Weight Watchers.  I had tried it back when Nathan was 6 months old and found it tiresome to think about every single crumb I put into my mouth.  But the program has changed and this time I actually paid to join instead of trying to do it on my own. (I might have to write a post about that because the program has changed so much for the better and actually paying to do it and go to meetings makes a word of difference.)  I could go on and on and on and ON about how much I love the program and why I love the program, and I might do that in a future post.  But not right now. (I will say: I love Weight Watchers and think it's an amazing life-changing program.)  I wondered if I had the time and energy to do it (have I mentioned I have four children--nay, four SONS--under six years old?).  I wondered if it would negatively affect my milk supply since I am nursing Zach (I decided I would take supplements if the milk started to drop).  But nothing was going to change unless I actually changed something.

On November 7, 2011, I took the following pictures of myself.  The ones where I'm wearing an orange short-sleeved shirt or a blue shirt were taken that day.  Zach was 7 weeks old and I was barely fitting into a size 18, but not all 18s, just the ones that were especially roomy.  On November 8, I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting and weighed in at 225.8 lbs.  Today is March 11 and this week, for the first time since before I was pregnant with Nathan, there is no longer a blasted 2 in the hundreds place!  I have lost over 25 pounds since November 8 (right now I'm in the 197-199 range).  I have been tracking my points (sometimes more diligently than others).  I have made the decision not to use "fake" food.  I don't use Splenda instead of sugar; I just eat less sugar.  I am also not eating dairy because Zach has a dairy allergy so while I have a lot of dairy alternatives at home, it makes it easier to stay on the WW plan while eating out because I can't eat anything that has, or might possibly have, cheese, butter, milk, yogurt, etc. (So when we go out for pizza, I get a salad, hold the feta!)

At the beginning of December I started exercising.  We'd been members of the YMCA for a while and I'd done some walking and some swimming here and there, but now I feel like I was just playing at exercising.  In December I started taking classes at the Y.  Oh wow.  What a difference!  Those teachers know what they're doing!  The classes are so much harder than I could work out on my own.  Jimmy bought me some personal training sessions for Christmas, too, so now I really feel equipped to keep it up.  I usually work out 4-5 times a week for 45 min to an hour each time.  For the first time in my life I actually enjoy exercising (but I'd still rather sit and read at Starbucks!).

I bought new pants a couple of weeks ago.  They're size 16 and one of them is a little baggy :) And I bought a dress today that is size L.  This has been an incredible process and while I still have a long way to go, I never thought I'd enjoy it until I'd reached the end.  Now I realize that I'm enjoying the journey.

November 7, 225 lbs, size 18+

November 7, 225 lbs, size 18+

March 11, 199 lbs, size 16

November 7, 225 lbs, size 18+

December 7, 215ish lbs, size 18 (comfortably)

March 11, 199 lbs, size 16