poem and pics

Sarah wrote this for Mike this morning:

Dear Dad,
I love poetry.  Here's some ideas for Christmas presents: crayons, markers, notebooks, a watch.  
This is a poem:
I love you very much
as the sun shines down on us,
as we wrestle and play
in the warm-hot summer day
till the sun goes away.
Sarah

And here are some random fall pictures:

Mike put up the last piece of siding last week! 

It was unusually warm last week, so the kids got in the creek.

Noah and some neighbor kids agreed that they would all go underwater on the count of three.  They counted to three and just looked at each other, waiting for someone to go first!

They did finally go underwater.  It was very cold water!

Sarah made me a fruit plate for my birthday.

 

Testing

Last picture as a white belt

doing forms

getting taken down

Sarah made friends.

holding horse stance for a long time

Noah putting the hurt on his partner

Kyoh Sa Nim putting yellow stripes on Noah's belt.

studying his new martial arts ID card

congratulations from Kyoh Sa Nim

This group survived their grueling 3-hour test.

Sarah leaning on Noah at the pizza party after testing.

Repeat offenders

In CBS, we're currently studying Judges, where the Israelites keep falling into the same cycle of sin, punishment, repentance, and salvation over and over.  Noah was exasperated and said, "What's wrong with these fools?!  Don't they ever learn?"  I admit I had the same thought myself until God brought to my attention the fact that I'm doing the same exact thing.  I keep on committing the same sins, much as I want to stop. 

In Sarah's book, her last question said, "Make a list of the sins you commit in your life over and over."  On the blank lines that followed, Sarah wrote, "They worshipped idols, they broke the ark of the covenant (??), they stole..."  I stopped her there and clarified that she was supposed to write a list of her own sins, not those of the Israelites.  So then she wrote, "We lie, we disobey, we..." I stopped her again and asked, "Who's we?"  She said, "You know.  People." I explained again that she's supposed to be making a list of her own personal sins.  She tapped her pencil, she looked around, she seemed to be deep in thought.  Finally she wrote, "I threw the cat in the pool."  She proceeded to close up her book, satisfied. Done.

I said, "That was definitely a sin, but you're supposed to make a LIST of the sins that you keep doing over and over.  You only threw the cat in the pool once..." Then a terrible thought came to me.  "You did only throw the cat in the pool once, didn't you?"  She rolled her eyes and said, "Yes, Mom. It only took one time to find out he really could swim." 

I was sitting there thinking I'd need a separate sheet of paper (or even a whole notebook) if I was to make a list of her repeated sins.  I was mentally ticking them off, while she was apparently still trying to think of a single one.  Finally she said, "Well, I do know what I'm good at.  I'm good at confessing my sins."  As I thought about it, I realized that her perspective is actually much healthier than mine.  God sees her as perfectly sinless, because Jesus has already paid for all her sins, and mine too.  But I'm the one focusing on her sin, my sin, everyone else's sin, while she realizes that the slate is truly wiped clean. Psalm 103:12 says,

"As far as east is from west— that's how far God has removed our sin from us."

What am I, a football coach?

Football analogies are really not my thing.  But I'm raising a boy, so I do what I have to do to relate to him.  Today I was nagging him about his lackluster performance in math, and his eyes were glazing over.  Then I said, "You're barely crawling to the 50-yard line, and I know you can make it into the end zone!"  He perked right up and said, "Yeah, Mom, but I got blizted at the ten."

Today's distraction and crafty girl

Yesterday's distraction was the "free bike wash", a.k.a. hydrant flushing on our street, combined with the great weather.  This morning's distraction was "firing" a wall of mud so it would become solid and hard.  I don't know where Noah gets these ideas, but it's best to just let him do what he needs to do to figure things out.

So there's a wall of mud under there that they made yesterday.  It baked in the sun but didn't get hard enough, so they put some wood and newspaper on top of it and around it and started a fire. 

They put some cold water in a can and put some hot rocks from the fire in it.  They kept adding hot rocks until the water actually started boiling!  That was pretty neat. 

Back to tending the mudwall fire.  

It actually did turn into a nice solid wall after the fire.  Then the rain started. 

Meanwhile, Sarah made this envelope for me.  She is very crafty, always wanting to do messy projects and make pretty things.  I am not and have never been a crafty girl.  I just don't see the point.  But I try not to thwart her creativity.  So when she handed me this bit of loveliness, I oohed and aahed appropriately on the outside while thinking on the inside, "I'm going to be vacuuming up glitter for the rest of my life."

Here's the other side.

I was rather impressed by the note inside. "There is good in bad. Just dig it out." 

more kitchen mishaps

I could seriously write a whole book about all the catastrophes that have happened to me in the various kitchens I've had my whole life.  I can remember incidents I've had in my mom and dad's kitchen and every place I've lived since.  The main issue in my current kitchen has been the breaking of darn near every dish I own.  I can't believe there's anything left to break, but sure enough, I dropped a glass measuring cup on the tile, and it shattered all over the place.  Of course I was in a hurry, and Sarah was in the kitchen helping me cook.  I had a pot of shrimp tails and other goodies boiling on the stove to make stock.

I have broken so many things in the last 2 years in this kitchen that Sarah knows the routine.  She froze and waited for me to sweep up all the glass shards.  I scooped her up and put her in the pantry to get the linguini noodles.  While I was down on the floor picking up glass, the pot on the stove boiled over and started spitting boiling hot stock all over me.  Right then Sarah yells from the pantry that we don't have linguini noodles.  I was doing ninja moves, trying to turn off the burner while avoiding the splattering hot liquid and sharp glass, and I told her to just get spaghetti noodles.  The hood vent is on, and it's loud and chaotic, so this communication takes several tries. A few minutes later, she yells that there's no spaghetti noodles either.  I told her to just grab whatever long, skinny noodles she could find and hurry up about it.  She said, "We have 5 boxes of rotini, 2 boxes of macaroni, and that's it!"  I've never used rotini for shrimp scampi, but I figured pasta is pasta, and it worked.  We scarfed it down, and Noah and I rushed out for martial arts, leaving Mike to do a fast cleanup before he had to take off for somewhere else.  I guess those five or ten minutes we were sitting at the table together counts as a family meal?

Dental distress

My kids have always loved going to the dentist, and we've always known it's because the hygienist is too good to be true.  The woman is absolutely amazing.  She's great with the kids (fun, but not patronizing) and full of knowledge.  On the way there, the kids were saying how they could hardly wait to see her and hear her tell them how perfect their teeth are. 

When we got there, a different hygienist called them back to the chair.  My disappointment must have been apparent, because she said, "Oh, didn't you know Ann retired?"  My kids did a better job of rolling with it than I did.  I actually had to fight back tears.  She was more than our hygienist; she had been our friend for the last 9 years.  I felt a little betrayed. 

The new hygienist was all business.  No fun, no "look at your perfect teeth!  What a good brusher you are!", no attitude of you-are-wonderful-and-I-will-gladly-take-all-the-time-you-need.  Instead it was just cleaning and "They are not brushing their back molars well enough." 

The hits kept on coming when a new dentist came to check them.  He said Sarah needs a filling.  I said, "She has a cavity?" (she's never had one before) and he said, "No, just a natural pit in the tooth."  I fell into a natural pit myself at his next statement:  "And they both need braces.  I'll refer you to an orthodontist."  Boo.  Hiss.  Bad day at the dentist all around.