Jodilightful!

It has been of great interest to me over the last couple years to watch a particular facet of my big girls’ personalities start to emerge: their  name preferences.  (You know, umm, I like names a little.)  Pippa is currently going through a phase of wanting everything and everyone to be named Sarah.  She had wanted that to be Juniper’s name whether she came out a girl or a boy, and insists she will one day have several daughters of her own and name each and every one Sarah.

This is a change from her former baby name style, which Romilly now seems to have adopted as her own.  This involves taking a random string of sounds and smooshing them together.   Once a name is created and bestowed around here, it is seldom forgotten by our girls, so it is up to Mommy and Daddy to learn and remember names like… well, you’ll see.

So, just to give you a flavor, here is a gallery of some of the best loved ‘Guys’ or ‘Guy-sies’ around our house, all named by Pippa and Romilly.

Let’s just say I’m glad the naming of our grandchildren is still a good few years off.  In the meantime, it is pretty fun to watch Daddy sweat when Romilly desperately needs ‘Hallowisa’ or ‘Stripey Gruffalo’ at bedtime.

September 2007: A Brand New Awana Cubbie.

April 2009 - Graduating Cubbies Tonight. Sniff!

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I had a really awful dream last week.  So awful I’m not sure I want to tell anyone about it.  I don’t often remember dreams, but this one and the thoughts that followed when I awoke have stayed with me for days, so maybe it’s worth sharing.

So here’s the dream (it’s not for the faint-hearted!):

I’m in some sort of hotel room with my best friend Mary (I know, Mare, I’m so sorry for dragging you into this!).  It looks okay at first.  We’re unpacking our clothes, so there are piles of clothes all over the floor.  Then we start to notice that there are also other piles on the floor,  piles of… umm… droppings.  Then we see these rats darting around the room.  Huge, scary rats.  We look around and realize that the whole room is infested with rats, and that now all of our clothes are covered in their filth.  Eww, I know.

But instead of immediately leaving the room and getting as far away as possible, we both start trying to clean it up.  I hold up sweater after sweater to try to find one to wear that doesn’t have too much grossness on it (as if there is an okay amount of rat poop!)  We wonder if maybe we could ask to borrow some cleaning supplies from the hotel staff.  It never occurs to us that this is not at all okay and we just need to get out!

And then I woke up.

My first thought was, ‘Thank goodness that wasn’t real and I don’t really have to clean it all up!’   But then ‘awake me’ realized what ‘dreaming me’ did not have the clarity of thought  to see: if you ever found yourself in a room like that, you could *never* clean it up sufficiently for human occupancy.  You would just need a new room (and probably a new hotel).  Period.

Do you know where I’m going with this yet?

It occurred to me as I continued to be haunted by this awful scene throughout the day, that that hotel room is a perfect picture of the human condition outside of Christ.  We are covered in our sinful flesh, through and through.  Our best efforts to please God are like filthy rags, and the worst part is, we just don’t see it.  We might look on ourselves and see a little bit of the dirtiness on sin, but we think we can just brush it off and take care of it by our own efforts.

Isaiah 64:6 says this:

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

God sees sin the way ‘awake me’ saw the situation in my dream – it is offensive and intolerable to Him, and He knew there was no way for us to clean up our own act.  Christ didn’t come to the world to show us how to live good lives, though He certainly did that.  He came to pay the penalty for our sin, so that God might look on our filth and see instead the spotless righteousness of Christ.

When we accept Christ’s offer of salvation, what we receive from Him is not merely a spiritual makeover, not even an extreme one.  We receive a completely new self.   And we need it!

The morning after I had this dream was our final study in Colossians at the Ladies’ Bible Study.  One of the passages we looked at was this one from Colossians 3 (emphasis mine):

8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

What a  sad state the human heart is in that we must be *told* not to go back to the filth we used to live in once we are freed from it.  Yet as I reflect on the reality of a really yucky dream in my own life, I cannot help but realize that I  do still have that tendency to look at my own sinful heart and think, “Hey, it’s not so bad – I can clean it up myself.”  Only the work of Christ in my life can transform me into the image of my creator.   And praise be to God that He can!

I’ve said it before and I’ll just keep saying it until everyone’s sick of hearing it:  I never truly know what my babies look like until they’ve been photographed by my dear friend Megan.  This weekend, Juniper had the privilege of her first weekend get-together with Megan, and Megan certainly lived up to her reputation.

The Red Hair! (We're calling this "The Lucy Factor")

A Big Yawn and a Dimple

Funny Face!

Great Big Sparkly Smile!

As always, Megan got great shots of the whole family, too.  (It was a hot and sticky sort of day for April, but we did our best to smile pretty anyway.)

(Oh, and by the way, she made our Jon & Kate-style shirts as well, aren’t they fun?)

There are dozens more pictures – too many to fit in a post, but each of them captures something we’ve never quite seen before.  Thanks so much, friend!

This is me (center) raising a Shirley Temple with my  little cousins Holly and Michael at Easter circa 1987.  (If you feel like you’ve seen this picture before, you probably have.  It’s apparently the only picture I have of these two cousins, and I posted here about a year ago about being weirded out by my cousin Michael being all grown up and married and living around the corner from me.)

Delightfully, after years of only seeing each other at Christmas and Easter and not even always then, Holly has recently come back into my life.  Back in November, Holly had her first baby, a sweet little girl called Morgan, and suddenly, we have a lot more in common than just grandparents.

Today, Holly and I and all our collective girls spent a gorgeous 70-something-degree day at the park, chatting and drinking coffee.

It is a wonderful blessing to find that you actually like the people in your family.  Of course you love them, but to enjoy spending time with them is not always a given.  I have loved getting to know the grown-up version of my “little cousin” and I am so excited for our little girls to grow up together!

I’m always so envious of blogs I read that document every new word and weight check and developmental milestone of each of the featured kiddos.  Well, I guess that will never be this blog, but I thought at least for my littlest two, who change and develop so much day by day, a little update was in order.

First of all, baby Junie is smiling!  She actually started doing it weeks ago while Trevor’s parents were visiting (at about 5 weeks, maybe 6) but she’s been a little camera shy about it.

Love it!  Otherwise, I’m sure she’s doing all the things an almost-two-month-old baby is supposed to be able to do, but I can never remember what those are.

She continues to be ginormous, weighing in at 12lbs at her one-month check-up and likely to stay on her 98 percentile line at her two-month check-up next week.

As for Miss Trix, at 21 months, she seems to have blossomed into a proper little girl overnight.  Her language has taken off since around the time Juniper arrived.  Her words have long since been too many to list, but some new favorites include: buckle, turtle, o-tay, ‘tside (outside), and Jesus.  She has started putting two or three words together to make herself understood, such as “turtle? bath? play?”, which translates loosely to “Mommy, would you mind getting me the little pink turtle that we usually play with in the bathtub?  I’d like to play with it out here, please.”  (It’s a very efficient language.)

As one astute reader spotted, she is now sporting pigtails quite a lot of the time.  This is probably only a milestone in our family, but it is worth noting that she is the youngest of our girls to have reached it.  Romilly wore her first pigtails for her second birthday, and even those were much sparser than Bea’s impressive little bunches are now.

On the getting around front, Bea is walking pretty quickly these days, but still has a distinctly toddler waddle about her.  She is also working on her her next motor skills breakthough.  See for yourself.

Jumping Bea 4/22/09

A Tuesday at the Zoo!

Thanks to our friends, the S. family, for sharing their membership with us!

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So I finally decided there was no way on earth I was ever going to get caught up on all of the Easter blogging I hoped to do, but it would be a shame not to document our Easter festivities at all.  Here’s a collection of photos from our egg-dying at Grandmom’s house on Easter Eve and egg hunting at Aunt Mary’s on Easter Sunday.

After all my fretting about losing sight of thr true meaning of Christmas a few months back, you’d think I’d have made a special effort to help the girls reflect on what is far and away, the more important holiday: Easter.   Somehow, amid visitors and juggling four girls, it just didn’t happen.  On Easter Sunday I was feeling discouraged that I had, by my silence, let the girls forget for this year that Easter isn’t all about bunnies and chocolate and eggs.  It isn’t just some metaphorical celebration of the new life that comes up all around us each spring.

And so, in a last ditch effort, the two big girls and I spent Resurrection Sunday (before the big egg hunt at Aunt Mary’s) trying to make Resurrection Cookies, as described in our church cookbook.  You can also find the recipe here, on a lovely site that I found by googling (I hope its author won’t mind a little linky love from a complete stranger…).  We also replaced the pecans with walnuts, and found that normal vinegar works just fine.

If  you are the kind of person who is already gathering ideas now for next Easter (which I, unfortunately, am not), I can thoroughly recommend that you follow the link and check this out.  The idea is that each ingredient and step of the process of making the cookies symbolizes a part of the story of Christ’s trial, death and resurrection, culminating in hollow meringue cookies symbolizing a glorious empty tomb.

I wanted to take pictures of the resulting cookies for you, but sadly, we hit a little roadblock in our quest for Resurrection Cookies.  I have no electric mixer.  My little handheld food processor, which I use mostly for pureeing my own baby food, seemed to be doing the trick ever so slowly, but then it got really hot and stopped working.  So I was left with only a tiny little whisk to get the job done with, and let me tell you, those stiff peaks are mighty elusive when you’re working with a tiny little whisk.  So, 45 minutes and *zero* stiff peaks later, I gave up and made our cookies out of slightly thick, gooey egg whites.  They were still yummy the next morning, but it took some persuading for the girls to see the “emptiness” of the tomb (“No, sweetie, you have to look behind the walnuts.”)

A few important lessons were learned:

• An electric mixer really is an essential if you want to make meringues.  ( I had one is Scotland, but it wouldn’t have plugged in here, so I gave it away when we moved.)  What I want to know is, how on earth did someone discover, back in the olden days, that egg whites ever form stiff peaks and turn into meringues?  I think I’d have to be really, really bored to want to beat egg whites by hand for the required 3 hours or so that it apparently takes, just for something to do.
• Watching someone beat eggs for 45 minutes is not that fun if you’re three, or even four and a half.  I released the girls after about ten minutes, and they popped back into the kitchen every few minutes to see if there was anything to be licked yet.  Sadly, no.
• But most importantly, my girls really do seem to have hearts for learning about the Lord, and this was such an encouragement to me.  This activity provided such a great platform for reminding them how Christ suffered for them, for me, for the world, and how He gloriously conquered death once and for all – hallelujah!

We will definitely do it again next year.  But, umm, with an electric mixer.

Happy Anniversary to my lovely kilted prince!

And just for fun, say “hi” in the comments if you’re in this picture!

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They are a novelty around here, to be sure.  The moment the girls set eyes on their uncles Adrian and Nathan last week, I knew this one going to be one of the best weeks ever for them.  This is what we got up to.

Apparently a fan of newborns just like his big brother, Uncle Adrian gets acquainted with his new favorite girl.

At the Franklin Institute (You can feel... the fun!)

Uncle Nathan with the three big girls at our local nature center.

Matching Ampelmann shirts from Gran and Grandad's trip to Berlin last summer gave Pippa and Uncle Adrian a special bond.

Even our homeschooling was a little more lively for having boys around:

Levers 4/14/09

Tonight the girls and I dropped the boys off at the airport, and the two big girls cried for five minutes straight as we drove away.  Then, for the rest of the journey home, Romilly would periodically sniffle, “But I don’t moant (want) the boys to leave.  I moant the boys to stay!”  And even Beatrix noticed their absence and asked, “boy-ee?” every so often.  It’s going to be a tough adjustment around here getting back to being a family of *just* six.  We miss you, boys.