it's great...

being 8!!!

don't believe me?

just ask this guy!

(it's not so great...when your mom's late posting your bday pics though! ehem!)

(you can take the boy outa SF, but you can't take the SF outa the boy! hummm baby!)

celebrate!

in case you haven't made your way over to the sweet blog of my sister-in-law lately...here is a glimps of what everyone in our family is "UP" to...

please go to emmakaitstanphill.blogspot.com to read more.


we are so proud of you emma kait!!!!
hurray!

one flesh

"Marital love is a demanding and dying thing compared to the stuff of movies and mirages. The love of imagination — it’s a different beast entirely than love made in the image of a Saviour with nails in His hands." -av

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage —but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
~ Deitrich Bonhoeffer

communion

read this today...

“Seek every day to have closer communion with Him who is your Friend…
True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person – Jesus Christ. ‘To me’, said Paul, ‘to live is Christ.’ ” (Phil 1:21).
~ J.C. Ryle

endless counting

more things i'm thankful for...

i'm surrounded by endless examples of His mercy and grace

He is only good.

Where was I?

Seems I was lost

and didn't even know it.

forgot all about how i'm trying to live life more thankfully.

got wrapped up in my anger over not being able to control things.

not being able to force my four year old to hold still for xrays.

not being able to get what i want when i want it.

angry at my lack of control...

i stilled myself for a moment and remembered this truth...

"you can only feel one feeling at a time"

then i started naming the gifts...
-bright blue skies
-healthy (and strong willed!) kids
-roof over my head
-silly laughter in the back of the minivan

the Holy Spirit melted away my anger and replaced it with joy...

the realization that i am not in control...but HE is...
ahhh PEACE!

the now

read this quote the other day...

“...the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this life.

I did not live in the moment enough.

This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed.
I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.”
~Anna Quindlen

such a heavy blessing, such a sacred burden, is this parenting of many small blessings.