Scenes from our lives

Yesterday Rebecca's science lesson was about genetics. I asked her, "What made you have brown hair and brown eyes?" She thought, and said, "G...g..." and I prompted her, "Geee..." So she said, "Genes!" I said, "Yes, and where did you get your genes?"
"The store!"

When we got to my Mom's house the other night, Mikayla was sitting on my lap talking about what all she wanted. When asked how she was going to get all this she patted me and said, "She's my walking wallet!"

Mike took the three girls to a Daddy/Daughter banquet  at our church, and they played a game similar to the Newlywed Game. They asked the girls what pet-name their dads had for them. Mikayla wrote: Jessica-Rebecca-

Happy List!

Boy, it's been awhile since I added to my happy list! Seeing friends post about their 1000 gifts reminded me that I have many little blessings that bring me joy as well. For example...

#53 Watching my kids learn music. Specifically, hearing Mikayla verbally working out the rhythm in one of her songs this morning ("One and two and three, four...") made me smile.

#54 This little guy--especially when he's sitting in our peach tree!

                                                                                                                                                               

I took it through my window because I didn't want to spook him. And I wish it was zoomed more. But isn't he just gorgeous!

"Miracles and Answered Prayer"

There is a young woman who works at our church's day care who had a five-month-old baby and found out she was pregnant. She went to our county health unit, and they said she was not pregnant, and that she needed a D & C. She decided to get an ultrasound at our local pregnancy crisis center first, and when she did, they discovered she was pregnant, with twins! Their lives were saved that day.
A little while later, she discovered that one twin was getting all the nutrients and the other was not growing, and was told that she would eventually need a surgery that would either save them both or kill them both. But then...lo and behold...the small twin started growing and has now almost caught up and she is, I think, close to 30 weeks now, and the doctors are amazed! One of them said, "This is either a miracle or an answered prayer!" Hence the title. :)

One of our college students lost his mother this week. She had severe diabetes, with lots of complications, and had gone in for a procedure on her eye when the local anesthesia somehow sent her into a coma. We thought she was pulling out of it, and were thanking God for healing her, and then suddenly she had no brain activity. I started praying for a miracle, that God would breathe the breath of life in her, that the Holy Spirit would re-electrify her brain, and she would be healed. When I told Mike that, he said, "Yeah, but healed to what? If He's going to heal her, we should ask for total and complete healing, of all her diabetes and all its complications." So when we found out she had passed away, he said she is completely healed now. And I know that's true. But he's just a kid. A kid without a mother. And that just breaks my heart.

2 weeks ago my big brother's eye started clouding over, and when he told his eye dr about it, he told him to meet him at the ER. He did, and was there all afternoon (without telling my mom, who lives in the same town, and oooooo, was he in trou-ble!). They did all sorts of tests and said he had fluid on his brain, and that he needed to see a neuro-opthamologist. He did, and that dr said he thought it was plaque from his arteries affecting his retina. He also saw his regular dr, who said he saw a mass on the MRI of his brain and he needed to see a neuro-surgeon. Then more tests came back from the neuro-op dude, to the regular dr, and these said he has a cyst pressing on his cerebellum. So the good news is, my brother has a brain! The bad news is, he has a cyst on it. The good news is, it's not a tumor!

On Tuesday afternoons Jessica and Mikayla have been taking sewing lessons at our county extension office with some other home-schooled girls. This week when I took them I saw a parking spot on the street right in front of the door, so I turned the corner reeeal close, so I could just pull right in. A little too close. A little too close to the storm drain on the corner with a sharp metal piece sticking out which cut a gash in my tire so deep we could hear the air hsssssssing out from inside the van. Mike, of course, was out of town. Thankfully, another mom who was dropping off her daughter "just happened" to have her dad with her, who "just happened" to be a university professor who used to be a mechanic. He helped me put on my spare tire, and I got a hold of Mike and he told me where to go to buy a new tire. They "just happened" to have one left for our van, and they got it on right then! I even had time to renew my driver's licence (which expired in January and I didn't realize it until last weekend!) before sewing lessons were over, and I picked the girls up and took Jessica to a dr appointment where we discovered the strange growth on her foot was just a wart which was easily frozen off! And I didn't even cry one time. :)

I have much to be thankful for.

10 on the 10th on the 11th

Man, I can't belive how days sneak up on me! It just can't be March 11 already...yet it is. And my mother didn't even remind me. :) So here are 10 random pictures I just want to share. :)

1. Rebecca wanted boing-boing curls, so I worked and worked to get her like this...and they were completely gone in about 30 minutes!

2. I'm waiting for my turn on "my" lap top.

3. That's a lap full of love! (Jessica's gonna kill me!)

4. Mr. Bluebird--I'm hoping he chose my new birdhouse to bring his bride home to.

5. The girls with Mike's mom when we went to see her last weekend.

6. Our church had Daddy Daughter Date Night tonight, and I took a bunch of pictures before they left me all alone. Mike isn't looking at the camera because his wii football game was still running...



7. But now he's looking! Look how Rebecca's holding her hands-



8. There are no words for Mikayla.

9. I wish you could see how sparkly she was!

10. Jessica kept running from me and my camera (I have no idea why) so this is all I caught of her as she ran out the door.

Let's Play...Match the Comments!

To pass the time on our 6-hour drive to Houston on Friday, I opened a bunch of windows with all the blogs I needed to catch up on, so that even without Internet, I could read them on the way! It worked like a charm, except I couldn't watch videos...or leave comments. It was like listening to your friend talk on the phone and not be able to answer her! I couldn't stand it. So I wrote my comments on my word processor, and then I had an idea. I'm going to paste all my comments here, and you guess if one (or more?) goes to your blog!

A. Cool!! I didn’t know about any of that--we need to plan a family trip now!

B. Preach it, girl!! Amen!

C. You're so funny. I had a Willy Wonka-type dream last night. Which did involve a river of chocolate!

D. I would have done the same thing!! Butter is close to $3 here right now, and milk and gasoline are both over 3.35. But God provides!

E. Loved the tour of the neighborhood! And we have farmers selling stuff out of the back of their trucks in the Fred’s parking lot all the time!

F. I’ve been thinking about blogging about a typical day like this--you have now inspired me!

G. Monkey brains? Mango?

H. What is ata? And oh.my.goodness. The 3s were way worse than the 2s with each of my 3 girls.

I. LOVE Chris Tomlin!

J. Hmm, and I was just seriously wondering what the largest bra size in the girls’ department at Walmart was, since they are 2 for $10! Hey, it might work! And good post about the busy-ness of parenting. (But do you ever wish you could go Grizzly Adams for a while and live on an isolated mountain?)

K. I’m not making yogurt but I wanted to tell you--Rebecca learned about the ancient Battle of Marathon in history yesterday, and about marathons people run today, and I got to tell her that her cousin was one of those crazy people, THIS weekend! I’m so proud of you--and I’ll be praying for you.

L. Every post I read on your blog provokes the same comment from me--so adorable!!!

And for our big finish, here are the many responses that went through my mind after reading Angie's post here.

*Having been 44 for over a month already, I know what you mean. But why, I ask, with all those signs of aging, does my face still break out like a teenager's???

*They had phones in Shongaloo in 1973?

*I have a feeling I'll be given bifocal contacts at my next eye-dr appointment. Holy cow.

*Can you balance a spoon on your nose?

*Yeah, but can you sing the McDonald's Quarter Pounder ingredients?

And:
*Yeah, but do you know how many of them are now "on the other team?"

Family

We went to Houston this weekend to visit Mike's family. We pulled in to his sister's house around supper time last night, and after we ate we spent hours looking at old family pictures, trying to figure out who everyone was. We found some really great black and white treasures--I'm hoping to sneak them home in my suitcase. If it works, I'll show you later. :)
My reason for having them pull out the old pics was that I had made Mike's mom a book. She has Alzheimer's/dementia, and I read an article that said they can read the written word and comprehend  it longer than you think they can, and it helps them remember things. So I bought a scrapbook and made very simple pages with big black letters on white paper, following this pattern: This is Michael when he was little. This is Michael now. This is Michael's family.
We took it to her today. I went fully expecting to have to hold it for her and read it to her, but thought at the very least it would give us something to talk about while we were there. (It's very hard to think of what to say after the first 5 minutes when someone can't answer you.) But I was in for a surprise! We went in and hugged her, and when we showed her the book we had to help her look at the right page occasionally, but SHE READ IT! Mike and I saw her lips moving, and heard her whisper the words, and looked at each other in astonishment. It was so amazing. My eyes filled with tears watching her. Maybe deep down she does know who we are.

Five on Tuesday*

*Thank you Carpool Queen for letting me borrow your format for a day. (I wonder if I should have asked...hmm...)

1. At Awana Quiz Bowl the other night, we were watching Book One compete (and be totally dominated by chair 3) when the quizzer asked, "What did God create on the 7th day?" and chair 10 jolted upright and "smashed his buzzer" as he had been instructed to do. He was called to the microphone to answer, where he confidently declared, "He didn't create nothin', 'cause it was the rest day!"

2. It not only looks like spring around here, it smells and feels and sounds like it, too! Now what could I eat that would taste like spring...hmm...

3. Mike and Rebecca were jumping on the trampoline last night. When Mike "bounced" her once, she came down weird and started wailing. She said her knee "bent the way it's not supposed to bend." Now we have to figure out if she's seriously hurt or just enjoying limping.
Not to imply that anyone in my family would ever milk an injury for sympathy. Ahem.

4. Did you know I'm going to Slovenia?!?! Do you know where Slovenia is? Google it!

5. When Jessica signed up for Winter Jam Friday night, I thought it sounded like a lot of fun. But once she left that afternoon, I started to feel uneasy, wondering if she would actually enjoy a 4+ hour concert (having never been to any concert before) especially since she had only heard of one of the bands. She did enjoy it, she said, but it was really loud and really crowded and she couldn't understand some of the words. And they didn't eat supper on the way, like we thought they would; they told them to buy food at the arena. My child bought a funnel cake. Which fell upside-down on the floor before it was half-eaten. They finally ate supper at midnight.  They were supposed to get home around 12:45 a.m., which sounded really late, but I figured it was a special event, right? Mike had to leave at 7 the next morning, so I volunteered to pick her up from the church. (Yeah, he owes me.) I went ahead and went to bed around 10:30, to get what rest I could, but texted Jessica every now and then (SO glad we Santa got her a phone for Christmas.) and was tensely listening for the phone but trying not to keep Mike awake, so around 1:00 I went to the living room and texted her to find out if they were almost here. She said, "I just saw a sign for Shongaloo." Shongaloo!!! That's, like, an hour from here!! And yes, that's how long it took. She called me from the church at 2. We were some t-i-r-e-d girls the next day. I'm not sure I'm caught up yet, as evidenced by this random blog post.