Boys Will Be Boys

True story, not for those sensitive to quasi-gross things...

Noah has been very snotty and snarky lately. I guess it's allergies, but it makes for a nasty nose. He's also quite taken with his ability to make spit-noises, and he walks around the house sounding like a very small speedboat. So, what with the snot and the spit, his face is pretty gross most of the time. This morning was no exception. I was sitting at the computer and he (and Abbey) were playing on the floor. Noah stood up, looked at me, and smiled, snot and all. I, of course, smiled back and asked him, "Could you be any grosser?". He smiled again ... and burped.

Aaron has chicken salad sandwiches for lunch

This will come into play in a minute...

If somebody's a really bad cook, people will say, "She can't boil water without burning it". And while I'm no Betty Crocker, I certainly don't consider myself a bad cook. Having said that, last night I burned water while boiling it. If you want to get technical, it wasn't truly the water that burned, but I'm getting ahead of my story.

Aaron has chicken salad sandwiches for lunch. (Told you.) The chicken salad consists of chicken (!), mayo, chopped pickles and hard-boiled eggs. Last night I put about 6 eggs on to boil so we could make Aaron's lunch later, then we sat down and watched the second half of "X-Men2". About an hour later, we heard this popping sort of sound coming from the kitchen. I thought it was Molly playing with something, until Aaron said, "I think the eggs are boiling". It was at this point that I realized it'd been well over an hour since I left the eggs, so I booked it post-haste to the kitchen to find ALL of the water boiled out of the pan, and the poor, very-hard-boiled eggs burning on the bottom. But what made it really embarrassing was that two nights before I had boiled three eggs (without incident, thank you very much) so I could make the salad. I left them in the sink to cool and forgot about them till the next morning. Not being sure of the health risks posed by eating left-out-overnight hard-boiled eggs, I chunked them. So, what with last night's fiasco, my egg neglect has now resulted in 9 victims. A moment of silence for those lost...

Luckily I had just bought two dozen eggs on Monday. So, in case you're wondering, Aaron took one chicken salad sandwich to work today, complete with non-burned, non-neglected hard-boiled egg.

Christianity Today articles

I thought this was a great article on Heaven. Intriguing and inspiring and intellectual. What more could you ask for?

Also, here's an interview for Cameron Crowe fans (Jerry MaGuire, Almost Famous). Yay for Christianity Today!!

You can't go home

I communed with my high-school self this weekend when I was in Tyler (home). It was Saturday night and I was driving by myself down Broadway listening to the radio turned up loud (except I was driving a Ford minivan with a waterdeep sticker instead of a Ford Tempo with shoe polish on the windows). I remembered who I was then; learning to drive, working at the mall, making midnight Taco Bell runs with my friends, laughing till our sides ached. For a moment I was almost that person again, carefree with no responsibilities. Then, as the song ended, that feeling was gone, and I felt very keenly the distance between then and now -- emotional, intellectual, experiential, spiritual. It's been almost nine years since I graduated from high school. It's so hard to believe it's been that long. Those older than me are rolling their eyes, but nine years is more than a third of my life!

There's a movie (maybe Dazed and Confused?) where a high-schooler says something like, "If I ever say these were the best years of my life, shoot me!" I can't help but wonder how those couldn't be the best years of your life. No responsibilities, no bills, no (serious) worries, no regrets, wide-eyed and bold. I won't have times like that again, where I can go and do and laugh (and laugh) till all hours of the morning, then sleep till 2 in the afternoon and do it all over again. I had a great time! And it was so short. Maybe it's because I became a wife and mother so young, and didn't really have the college experience, but I miss that time. I don't want to be seventeen again, and I wouldn't trade my husband and kids, or my current life, for anything. There's just a twinge of sadness that comes over me when I remember, and it makes the adage feel very true.

You know when you go to the store, and there's some lady there with kids who are just out of control? She's got a crying baby, and her kids are loud and keep touching (or hitting) the merchandise? Yeah, on Saturday, that lady was me. We were at the Garden Center at Lowe's (thankfully it was outside with plants, and not inside, say, Pier 1). Noah was tired and fussy, and the girls would NOT hold on to the cart. They had to touch every single plant we came across. And then, the kicker: I had to leave the cart in an aisle while I walked 5 feet away to look at something, and I told them to stay there and hold on to the cart. So I go to look at this plant, hear this banging noise, turn around, and my children are HITTING a fountain, banging on it like it's a drum. Luckily it's a plastic in-ground fountain and not breakable, but still! What would possess a child to HIT a fountain?!? So I walked back to them, threatened their lives, walked back to my plant again for a minute (trying to figure out what it was -- it wasn't labeled) and when I looked up again, Chloe's sitting on a pallet dangerously near some Pansies and Halle's flailing her arms and legs in some sort of crazed dance. (Keep in mind, Noah's fussing and crying at the same time.) I decided it was time to go home and forget the plants.

Today I was supposed to take Chloe to the dentist (about an hour away) to finish getting caps on her teeth. We were going to leave around 8:15, and at about 8:05, after Chloe had eaten breakfast, I remembered she wasn't supposed to have anything to eat or drink this morning. So we had to reschedule. I hate things like that. They make me feel like I have no brain. I wonder if God has purposes in things like that. Like, is there a reason I forgot? Or is it just one of those things? I like to make it all mystical, like, if we had gone, there would have been this bad thing that happened, and God saved us from it by making me forget about the food thing. But that seems a little melodramatic. I think it's more likely that I just have fuzzy-brain and God's purposes are accomplished in spite of my mistakes. Is that pessimistic?

On a seemingly totally unrelated note, I really liked the following article. Read it. It's long, so give yourself some time. Two of the things that struck me most were how different our priorities are from God's. "...we will continue to be disappointed in him until our value system lines up with his, until we value the eternal life of our souls more than the limited life of our mortal bodies, until we understand that God's primary agenda is kingdom building. It may cost us our very lives, and he is okay with that." Talk about paradigm shifts. The other thing that stuck with me was this: "Satan brings suffering to diminish our faith, he brings temptation to deceive us, and he brings doubt about God's love and goodness to estrange us from God. But since Jesus prayed for us, asking his Father to protect us from the Evil One, we are not at Satan's mercy. God has answered the prayer of Jesus with a resounding Yes! While Satan may win a battle or two in the life of the believer, he will never win the war against the soul. Jesus has prayed for his own, and we are protected." I will face suffering, tempation, and doubt. These things will come. But because of God's protection, they will NOT have the final victory. That is my hope; not that I will have perfectly behaved children, or will remember all the things I'm supposed to. I catch myself expecting God to "protect" me from these trivial things, and I think that just highlights how self-focused I am. This article was a good reminder that God's purposes are bigger and longer-lasting; that I focus on the seen, but He focuses on the unseen. It's good to step outside of myself and get a teeny-tiny glimpse of things through His eyes.