Spice of Life

We just finished reading The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe to Kieren and Zoe.  It was so fun  to hear Zoe say "I'm really getting into this!" as it was her first chapter book with no pictures.  They have seen the movie but they really enjoyed having it read to them.  My mom read the Chronicles of Narnia to me as a child and I read them again 10 years ago.  They are not just children's books, that is for sure.  What stood out to me this time was when Mr. Beaver tells the children that Aslan is "not a tame Lion but he is good".  When the kids were around him or heard him being talked about they would get this "feeling" inside, they couldn't help but feel curiosity and joy at hearing his name.  He could be terrifying and brutal at times but also extremely gentle and even playful. As I get older I find that I understand God less than I thought I did.  Maybe that's a good thing since He is so beyond our comprehension and we're no...

Tomorrow my #3 baby turns one and I just can't believe it.  How did the last year go by so fast?  If you had told me 2-3 years ago "you're going to have a third kid", I would have laughed.  At the time we were "done".  Norm had finally gotten back on track to get his MDiv (after being stalled because of my freak lung thing) and though a small part of me longed to have another baby we knew it wouldn't be the "responsible" thing to do.  Well in the fall of 2014 Norm and I sat down at Prost for a beer and I told him "I think I'm pregnant" and decided I would take a test that following morning.  I was a little freaked, I didn't know how he would react but he said "at this point I think I would be sad if it was negative".  Lo and behold, bonus baby! The past year has been hard.  Especially recently as we have been preparing to move.  As Freija has grown and been sleeping less, it made it more and more difficult for Norm...

A very dear friend responded to an email recently.  She is always so great at encouraging me, giving me new fresh perspective and this time she referenced a part in The Horse and His Boy (from Chronicles of Narnia).  Things have been hard lately...fucking hard.  Stress is high, emotions are all over...things are...unknown and that is scary as hell.  I don't have much else to say than to put this right here.... And being very tired and having nothing inside him, (Shasta) felt so sorry for himself that the tears rolled down his cheeks. What put a stop to all of this was a sudden fright. Shasta discovered that someone or somebody was walking beside him. It was pitch dark and he could see nothing. And the Thing (or Person) was going so quietly that he could hardly hear any footfalls. What he could hear was breathing. His invisible companion seemed to breathe on a very large scale, and Shasta got the impression that it was a very large creature. And he had come to no...