Moving On

Our house is officially empty. The past week has been a whirlwind of packers and movers, big trucks and boxes, eating out and hotel living. We have a week and a half left before we embark on our next chapter and fly to Honolulu.

There is so much busyness that I find myself pushing emotions aside and just doing the next thing...until I realize the little people I am raising are not able to do that. We have had plenty of tears. It's hard seeing your home reduced to a pile of boxes and brown paper-wrapped bundles, but it is such a good reminder that it's all just stuff-- once the house is empty, all we have left is each other and God....really, what else do we need? Reminds me of an old Caedmon's Call song "this world has nothing for me, and this world has everything....all that I could want and nothing that I need."

Along with a few shots of move week, I will share with you Morgan's insane case of bed head....how could you have not had a good night's rest when you hair is in this much disarray in the morning??!

17 Days

That's how long we have until the movers show up to pack our things. It's starting to feel like this move is actually going to happen. We have been planning and preparing for it...now it's becoming a reality.

I had my first meltdown over moving this week; I mean, I know we are blessed to be moving together, as a family, to Hawaii nonetheless. But that doesn't mean it's not hard. The morning after my meltdown, I woke up before anyone else and made my coffee. I went outside and was just sitting, enjoying the coolness and freshness of the new day. This is not your home. That is what I was gently reminded of by God. Not this house. Not this yard. Not this city.

And my friends...my soul sisters...as precious as they are to me, I don't have to be sad about leaving them 'cause we get to spend Eternity together! I will miss them with all my heart, but I just know I'll see them again. After all, I'm gonna have the best guest room on O'ahu so they'd better come visit! :)

Geocaching

We went Geocaching over the weekend for the first time. You can't beat free fun! The girls LOVED it once they realized there were trinkets to be found. We took a pocketful of random keychains and bracelets from the house to trade. I almost couldn't give up the Ohio keychain with the definition of cow tipping on it...pretty sweet find if you ask me :).

I wonder if there is Geocaching in Hawaii....

School's Out for Summer!

First Day of School August 15 2011

We are wrapping up our first year of homeschooling this week. It has been such a challenging but wonderful year for all of us! CJ has been TDY to two different schools since last August; he completed his schools two weeks ago and is now home again...but for the bulk of this year, it was just me and the girls. The girls and me. The three of us. One mommy versus two kiddos....and trying to figure out this whole homeschooling thing together.

I'm not sure how much or how little I'm going to write about this past year, but I do want to get it down in some amount before I forget the important parts.

Some things I never would have known had I not homeschooled this year:

Teaching your child academically will allow you to discover personality traits that you might not have recognized otherwise. I mean, I knew Maddy was impatient at things like learning to ride her bike before I began teaching her. But once I was schooling her, I realized her impatience permeated every facet of her life. I hadn't realized impatience with riding a bike would trickle over into impatience in math, spelling, reading, language, music, history, handwriting...am I missing anything? You get the picture. She's impatient. But teaching her enabled me to spend more time focusing on ways to develop her patience, which I probably wouldn't have done had she been in school.

My own patience needed improvement (still does!). If you want the cold turkey way path to greater patience, send your husband away for eight months, keep your kids home with you all day, drag them on every errand you have to run, and try to figure out how to homeschool. All at once. Believe me, you'll develop massive amounts of patience you didn't know you had. It takes a lot more to make me flip out these days...or maybe I've just gone completely crazy and can't tell ;). James 1:3 couldn't be more right: "...knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience." It really does!

Spending all day with the girls, and not having a husband to spell you in the evenings will completely change your view of time with your children. When they were in school, just the few hours they were both home between 3 pm and bedtime would sometimes stress me out. Now that I have been around them 24/7, I don't understand why I was so stressed. Actually, I enjoy being home with them! It's weird to NOT have them around at this point. Don't get me wrong-- I will still choose grocery shopping solo over with two girls in tow ANYDAY, but I'm ok with having to do it with them now too, which I wasn't before.

I still don't love teaching, but I can do it. I can DO it. I know I balked at the beginning of the school year, wondering if I was going to set the girls back three grades to K-4 by attempting to teach them. But the saying kept coming to mind "God doesn't call the qualified. He qualifies the called." I knew that I needed to be faithful in what I felt like God wanted me to do, and He would take it from there. And He did!  He did so well in fact that both girls aced their end-of-year testing. Whew.

We definitely had our not-so-great days over the school year when nobody was happy or wanted to be there...but you would miss the forest for the trees if you let yourself get bogged down in the bad days. The pretty trees in the forest overpower the ugly ones, and when you put them all together-- it's a beautiful forest.

What it's all about

This blog has always been about family life...making our house a home, cooking, birthdays, travel, etc. I feel a pulling lately to make it something more. While I have documented our life, I haven't written nearly as much about the Life Giver and my relationship with Him. I can't stay silent about a God who has blessed me so much more than I ever deserved. He is my reason for every day, and I want every aspect of my day to glorify Him, right down to my blog. I'll still blog about "everything else" but I want to begin sharing with you the best part of my life too.

This week I have been pondering His kindness. Romans 2:4 says that God's kindness leads us to repentance. His kindness; not guilt over our sin. Looking back at some of the milestones in my life, it is so true, yet I didn't realize it until I had studied that verse. I have had a few major turning points in my life, points that I can put my finger on and know that I have never since been the same. The thing powering them was God's kindness. How could I continue in my sinful ways when God had heaped blessing upon blessing on me and my family? I was so undeserving, especially because I knew I was living wrongly, and yet He still showed me kindness. Repenting was something I HAD to do...and became joyful in doing because it deepened my relationship with God. It became something I wanted to do, not a duty.

I am so amazed at the journey on which God is taking me and my family. Truly, His mercies are new every morning and his compassion unending. What an awesome God we serve!

Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes

I usually make CJ a Boston Cream Pie for his birthday. This year I added a twist and turned his traditional treat into cupcakes. I must say, they just might have been tastier than the original cake!

I used my normal "doctored" cake mix recipe (below), mixed up some vanilla pudding and made a thin chocolate buttercream for the icing. I would have made more of a traditional glaze for the icing, but it would have run off the sides of the cupcakes. Thats ok for the cake version, but a little messy for cupcakes. To get the pudding inside of the cupcakes, put it in a plastic squeeze bottle, poke the nozzle into the top of the cupcake and squeeze until the cupcake looks like it is beginning to expand. This is my favorite part of filled cupcakes :).

My basic vanilla cake and cupcake recipe is from the Cake Doctor cookbook. I think she calls it a pound cake, but I don't think it's really dense enough to qualify for that. It probably has enough fat and calories to qualify though :)

Vanilla Cake/Cupcake Base Recipe

1 yellow cake mix

4 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup oil

2 small boxes vanilla pudding mix

Mix ingredients and bake as desired (cake, cupcakes, loaf, bundt) at 350 for 20-25 minutes. 

Life is Sweet

A friend of mine had this sign in her home, and I fell in LOVE with it. From the saying to the cupcakes...I had to have it! I'm not big on buying mass-produced decor (I'm sure you know this about me by now if you've been my friend for any amount of time!), but this one was an exception.

It was at World Market, and I had a coupon...happy dance! It was a splurge but I used my allowance (laugh if you want; most of my friends do). Can't wait to find a new spot for it in our next home.