one The pouring rain gets us out of going on any kind of outing today. You know. You ought to do something “fun” with your children but the idea fills you with a nameless dread and you would much rather spend the day cleaning the children’s rooms because you went up there once last week and realized one child was hoarding paper and another child was hoarding what looks to be actual garbage and the babies had got hold of... Read more
Three weeks ago Good Shepherd threw a party celebrating these last ten years of our ministry here in Binghamton. We had advanced warning of about 3 days which allowed us, or rather me, to fret with anxiety and consider being sick on that day. In the intervening time I dreamt twice that everybody stood up, one by one, to tell us, in detail, what a disappointment we’ve been and how sorry they are that we’ve been here this long. But... Read more
Elphine turns 10 today and has been up since 4:30. She is the one child that sleeps till at least 8am, sometimes 9. It breaks my heart to find her banging around singing and smashing up the general peace and its not even 7 yet. Matt looked reproachfully at me just now as I screamed for the seventh time, “stop kicking me in the head! If you can’t be still go back to bed!”and whispered, “when I was a child... Read more
(Sorry about the horrible picture quality. Fingerprints all over my phone.) A lot of us have Foot Mouth and Hand disease or whatever its called. Not me, I don’t have it yet, but a bunch of kids have it or have had it and a couple of other ones have been throwing up and one has had some headaches and probably a few have bad attitudes and one certainly has some bad problem in his soul. I don’t know. I... Read more
It is really really hard not to become soppy and cliche about growing things in a garden. One would think, or at least I always did, that putting your fingers in the dirt and mucking around with cheap packets of seeds and flinging slugs over the fence to the poor neighbor (whom, of course, I love as Christ has commanded me) would be a task sent to ground me in terminal Reality. And yet, morning after morning the nearly same... Read more
As usual at this time of the morning, there is some kind of crazed circus being played out by a variety of children who wake with every dawn ready to jump, shout, twirl, kick, whine and in other ways make me count the minutes till my walk at 7am. Four out of six are sleeping the sleep of the stayed-up-till-9:30 but those two babies…my goodness. They could go to sleep at 3am and still wake ready to kick me in... Read more
If you have a chance to pray for my friend Lauren who blogs at Sparkling Adventures I’d be so grateful.I’ve had her linked on the side for many years now. She lost her baby, Elijah, this weekend and it seems that her husband, David, is under suspicion. Please pray for Lauren and her girls and her family as they struggle to discover what happened and grieve the loss of their precious baby. Read more
one If I was going to start a new blog (which I’m not going to do) I would call it My Obese Cat. But then I would have nothing to say because everything is contained in the title. two Today is my Mother’s Birthday! Happy Birthday Mother! Earlier in the week she made a gorgeous dinner for us and my aunt and uncle from Norway. The salads were beautifully abundant enough to feed us for a whole week. But we... Read more
David Mitchell is doing soap boxes again! And since practically everybody at Good Shepherd stood in front of the vast array of coffee hour celebratory Anglican cake yesterday and 1. knew they shouldn’t eat it and 2. had been told not to fast by the preacher, I thought this really would cheer them all this fine Monday morning. Except, don’t believe him! heheeeee Read more
On Tuesday, a very cool awesome backhoe came to our yard to pull up and replant a hedge of arborvitaes. They were pulled right up out of the ground and carried along and replanted along the back fence of the church property. It rained and rained and rained as a something like 14 trees were pulled up and replanted. We all came out and watched for a while in the rain, trying to keep well out of the way. Marigold... Read more
Preventing Grace
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