Yesterday, I celebrated my 24th birthday.

I feel like, being just one year shy of a quarter of a century old, I should have some sort of cosmic wisdom to impart on people, particularly people who are younger than me. I feel like there are so many things that I’ve learned in my 24 years of life, but I can’t seem to nail it down into a single cohesive set of wisdom at all.

I do know a few things. I know that there are times that I don’t remember my own name, but I can remember the Hanson hits that came out when I was in elementary school.

I know that I never fully understood unconditional love until I had a child.

I know that while many relationships will fail, and some may even be harmful, but you can learn from each and every one.

I know that I’d rather do something I love and be happy than be miserable doing something I hate.

I know that it’s in the harder times that you learn who is truly there for you.

I know that an amazing support system can work wonders, and without one, it’s sometimes hard to get by.

I know that there are so many things I don’t know yet.

 

I know there are so many things that I have yet to learn. For now, I’m going to keep enjoying every moment.

Last week, I showed off our fun Advent calendar made of little boxes with clues that led to a scavenger hunt for the night’s activity. We have been having so much fun with our advent activities, and I have some fun pictures of a few of our favorite activities together this week!

Jeffrey had the honor of getting to read our Advent activity clues for most of this week. It’s always fun to see the excitement as everyone races to figure out or find what the activity is for the night!

The very first night of advent activities, we made paper snowflakes to hang from the ceiling of our sunroom. Because we’ve had some relatively snow-free winters the past couple of years, it only seemed right to make some snow of our own.

Nicolas, our student staying with us from Bolivia, had his very first chance to make paper snowflakes— ever! It was so fun to see the excitement on his face as he worked on his snowflake, shaping it and making it unique.

Zach decided playing in his kitchen cabinet was much more exciting than snowflakes, but Jeffrey had a lot of fun using shaped scissors to create a totally new effect!

Even Dad got in on the snowflake fun!

Later in the week, we tried a different activity, which was another repeat from last year’s favorites. We decided to make snowmen out of pancakes! In addition to the pancakes, there were various toppings like bacon, red hots, chocolate chips and white chocolate chips, syrup, chocolate syrup, caramel syrup, Andes baking bits, fresh bananas, and more.

I decided to use the bacon as a scarf for my snowman. I forgot to give him arms…

Dad decided to make the bacon arms for his snowman… dad also usually gets stuck with any slightly over-done pancakes…

Jeffrey used Jet-Puffed Mallow Bits as snow on his snowman. For the record, the bacon that the top is not a hat… it’s a unibrow.

Nicolas decided to do the (near) impossible and make a standing snowman!

It worked!

We’ve had a blast with our advent activities so far, and we can’t wait to continue on in the days leading up until Christmas.

I am so excited that it’s finally December. Maybe it’s because I was born in December, or maybe I just love the season, but I literally love everything about December. I love the lights, I love the smells, I love the Christmas foods, I love literally everything about it.

One of my favorite parts is a tradition that our family started last year. Because the holidays can be such a busy time, we added in some time to connect with each other on a daily basis with a fun activity to do each night. We called it our “family advent calendar,” and last year, it began as a simple paper chain with an activity written on each one.

When brainstorming calendars, I came up with tons of ideas, but I finally settled on this one:

I hand-made the little matchboxes, which I had designed using this adorable digital scrapbooking kit from Mari Koegelenberg called 12 Days of Christmas. I punched it up by typing my numbers using the font “Pacifico.”

After making the advent boxes, which took me about an hour to design and then another two hours to print, cut, fold, and glue together, I wrote out clues for each of our activities to put in our boxes.

Sometimes, the clues would be clear about the activity, saying “We’re going to see Santa. Get dressed and head to the car!” but most of the slips just had a clue that was vague and led the family somewhere else.

For example, one slip of paper tells the family to listen to the phone messages to hear their clue. At that point, I will have called the home phone and left the actual activity plan via voice mail. The activity for the night? Using the phone to call distant relatives and sing Christmas carols!

The only rules are that the entire family must participate in each activity, and that we do one activity each night leading up to Christmas.

Because there are so many parties, activities, and opportunities for the family to be going a million different directions during the month of December, we have to be more intentional about making time to connect. It seems like this is truly the most busy time of year, and if we aren’t intentional about it, it’s easy to lose sight of family time amidst the travels from this party to this event to this cookie exchange to this store to buy gifts. It gives us the opportunity to connect, sometimes for 10 minutes, sometimes for 3 hours, every single day leading up to Christmas.

 

As I mentioned above, I considered several other ideas for advent calendars. I really liked this clue-based system where each night was like a mini scavenger hunt, so I went with it this year. I also needed something that was small, and able to be moved out of Zach’s reach, so we chose it over some of the more space-intensive calendars. Here are some other ideas:

-Get a shoe organizer with 24 pockets. Put one item that represents the activity that night in each pocket, with a card detailing the activity. For example, put cookie cutters in if you’re decorating cutout cookies. Put Santa hats in if you’re taking pictures wearing Santa hats.

-A paper chain with the activity written on each one. Last year, we did this one, and it was convenient and fun, but we wanted to shake it up this year.

-Notes hung on a Christmas tree featuring the notes. This one was appealing, but with Zach being so young, we opted out of having a tree this year. It posed too much of a hazard for his busy little climbing skills, and we don’t like shutting him out of any room of the house.

-In a similar idea as the shoe organizer, you could find 24 boxes, put the item inside, wrap it, number it, and put it under the tree, with the activity to be unwrapped each night. We considered this, even without the tree, but it meant that some items we use frequently would be wrapped up and unreachable until we got to that day.

-Find a 24-pocket muffin tin, fill each little hole with a note stating that night’s activity, and then cover each pocket with a square magnet featuring that night’s number. This idea was really cool, but again, I don’t have an extra muffin tin, and I didn’t want to go to the expense of buying a new one this year. I may pick one up in an after-Christmas sale since bakeware tends to go on sale from some stores post-Christmas baking.

There are literally hundreds of ideas out there, both for calendars and for activities to include. Just typing in “advent” on Pinterest brings up a ton. In fact, there are plenty that take no time at all, so you could decide to start the activities today and have a calendar ready by this evening before you start… it’s not too late, even though it’s the first, to get a jump start on the advent season.

Need an idea for tonight? We will be making paper snowflakes!

 

Are you doing an advent calendar this year? Share a picture or tell me all about it in the comments below!

I know, I haven’t been very present lately here on the blog. A lot has been going on. Some of it, I’m still not ready to talk about, and that will definitely come with time.

My grandfather passed away after his struggle with cholangiocarcinoma. The emotion is still very raw and very present, and I know that I’ll soon be ready to share more about him with you guys, but for now, it’s a pain I’m keeping very close to my heart. I’m not ready to share it.

We traveled to his funeral during my cookie exchange series, and returned home that Friday. It seemed like we were only home for a matter of minutes before we turned around and left the following Wednesday to head out of town for Thanksgiving, which was an amazing opportunity to see family that we don’t get to share time with very often. Saturday night, we went to Branson and saw easily the best show I’ve seen there… ever. I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Following the show, we returned home.

Sunday meant playing catch-up, like going to the grocery store, planning the meals for the week, and beginning to unpack from our rapid-fire trips. It meant getting ready for the weeks leading up to Christmas and the advent season, and it meant preparing to get back in the swing of school.

I’m not prepared with posts right now.

I know, I’m a terrible blogger.

I had intended to get a lot accomplished, but Thanksgiving kind of snuck up on me after my grandfather’s funeral. It’s hard to get work done when things like that are still looming over me, and it’s also hard to bring you guys cool crafts, awesome school ideas, and delicious recipes from the backseat of a car, isn’t it?

Never fear. I’m back. I’m better than I was before. And I have a lot of really cool stuff to tell you guys.

Just give me a few days to unpack my brain and get back in the swing of things, k?

Lately, I have been in the kitchen a lot. Between some posts I’ve recently shared to a few that are upcoming, it’s been busy around here! That’s why it’s so nice when we get a break from the kitchen, both in terms of me working on new recipes and in terms of schoolwork, and head out of the house to have some fun. It was made even more perfect by an announcement on a nearby city’s parks and rec page that showed a brand new park.

This park had so many cool features, with this awesome rock wall being the first part that Jeffrey ran to.

Natural-looking rock formations for climbing and crawling through, stepping stone-style logs and toadstools, and a slide and climbing section really added to the fun, and they all allowed for some great photos of my favorite boys.

I so rarely get to share fun photos of my family that I really wanted to take this opportunity to share these photos with you!

Isn’t Zach just the cutest?

He’s even perfect in black and white! Look at those little curls!

To speed up the editing process with some of these, I used some actions from the Coffeeshop Blog and edited them to my liking. I love how her actions make editing go a lot more quickly, and can help me get through those step-by-step items without having to work quite so long at it. If you have Photoshop or PSE, definitely check out Coffeeshop’s blog and see all of the amazing actions she has! My favorite is Perfect Portrait 3… it’s so easy to customize it to my own tastes! And the best part? They’re all free. She just asks for a donation if you love her stuff. How awesome is she?

That orange thing there? It spins! That way you can stand on it and spin around and around until you feel sick.

I simply can’t pick a favorite picture out of this set… but I think the one above comes pretty close to favorite.

Of course, I love these adorable photos that feature both Jeffrey and Zach… seeing my two favorite boys together is the best!

Grandma helped Zach climb across the toadstools and rock.

I am so sad that none of the photos I took of Zach climbing the stairs to the slide turned out… he had so much fun climbing up the stairs, but as you can see by this photo, he wasn’t a fan of going back down the slide again… He’d scream all the way down the slide, then immediately crawl over to climb the stairs again.

Jeffrey had some fun standing on top of the rock formations as though he was the king of the mountain!

He even did a crazy-awesome superhero pose!

I also edited this really cool picture. I know it can use some work– it’s my first time trying an edit like this. I loved how much of their movement it captured while they played on the equipment.

 

If you’re ever in the Olathe area, you have to check out this brand new park not far from Ernie Miller Nature Park. It’s over at Harold and Iowa streets! It was plenty of fun for our kids from 16 months to 12 years!

I have a confession to make. The people closest to me, well, they already know how true this is.

I am a total Martha.

All it takes is a quick flip through the New Testament and it’s clear to me, and pretty much everyone around me, that this is the case.

And on the surface, see, being a Martha doesn’t seem that bad. Martha seems like she has it together. She is the one who prepares the food and takes care of everything and gets it all in order. She serves in the sense that she’s doing a lot of the legwork trying to make sure that things are picked up and that everything tastes good. To me, a living embodiment of what Martha might have been like is to compare her to another famous Martha… Martha Stewart. She’s someone who can do it all– she can cook, she can clean, and boy, does she know how to use a hot glue gun.

That appeals to me.

It may have been most clear the time that I was hand painting fondant bubbles for my son’s birthday cake at 3am the night before his party. It might have been clear the time that I did and re-did the stitches on the voodoo dolls that only made a brief appearance on my blog. Perhaps it was clear when I was standing outside next to card tables trying to photograph my fall foods in just the right light, because anything else would have just not been perfect.

Perfection. It’s a funny thing.

As much as I know that my Martha tendencies can be a good thing, because hey, I always seem pretty put together when I bring exactly the right treat to the exchange meeting or have exactly the right table decorations when my guests arrive for a party, it’s also a bad thing.

There are good reasons that Mary was the favored one, the one the Bible seemed to show in a better light.

Martha, like me, missed a lot. She was so busy working through the details, making sure that the icing was just right on the cupcakes (figuratively. That may have been me and not the actual Martha. I’m pretty sure cupcakes weren’t all the rage 2000-ish years ago. I could be wrong, though), that she totally missed out on the opportunity to sit at Jesus’s feet.

 

Wow.

 

I was recently reading an article talking about Mary and Martha. The thing that stood out to me most was this:

“You are worried or distracted by many things. Frazzled. Running around like a chicken with your head cut off. You know what I am talking about. There’s a lot to do and it ALL seems to be a high priority. Jesus told Martha that she was worried and distracted by many things but that Mary had focused on the one necessary thing—sitting at Jesus’ feet. So when you begin to feel frazzled, stop  and take a deep breath. Ask yourself if you’ve done the one thing that was really necessary today. Did you sit at Jesus’ feet?”

Ouch.

And the thing is, despite the fact that I recognize that being a Martha can sometimes interfere with my Christian journey, my time with Jesus, it’s unlikely to change. Even the real Martha hadn’t changed a bit all three times we saw her in the Gospels. She was still running around trying to get it all done instead of being still, and spending time with God.

Sometimes, like the article said, I’m spending too much time in the kitchen and not enough time lavishing worship at Jesus’ feet.

 

I know I’m probably not going to completely change that behavior, especially not anytime soon. But I do recognize that I need to take time to worship. I recognize that I need to just spend time listening to what God has to say instead of interjecting my own perfectionist thoughts into the conversation.

God deserves more from me than a perfect meal. And, even though I can serve others, and serve God, through my baking or my party-throwing skills… it’s just not enough on it’s own.

So, I’m trying. I’m trying to put it in God’s hands and take more time to be a Mary instead of a Martha. I won’t change overnight. Most likely, I won’t change over time. I will probably always lean more towards being a Martha. Luckily, Jesus, in saying “Martha, Martha,” loves me as I am, too, with the hope that I’ll learn to spend a little less time on the “important” stuff and make more time for the really important stuff.

__________________________

Are you a Mary or a Martha? Sound off in the comments below!

 

While everyone was discussing the presidential debate that aired tonight, I was waging my own personal debate in my head the entire day.

I went back and forth. I made pro and con lists. I asked opinions from people. And then I got mad when they didn’t agree with the opinion I, in my heart, really wanted.

Instead of just admitting that’s what I wanted, I sat there and went back and forth, back and forth, in my head, and out loud, of course, begging people to agree with me, instead of just making the decision.

In the end, I actually ended up choosing neither option and creating a medium option until I can get more information.

I guess I should stop being so vague.

Recently, Zach’s doctor suggested that, in addition to the table foods he’s been eating, I give him more baby food as a supplement. The only baby food Zach has any interest in is baby food he can suck out of a pouch. He doesn’t have the patience for being spoon-fed. I swear it’s an independence thing.

Anyway, ever since I found out about the Infantino Fresh Squeezed system, I’ve had my eye on it. While I love Plum Organics and HappyBabyFood, pouches can get expensive, and it’s nice to be able to make exactly the blends I want– it’s part of why I originally made all of Zach’s food in the first place, until he switched to self-feeding.

However, the system was an investment. But the pouches were costly long term. There was no good solution. In my heart, I wanted the system because I could make the food myself, because I like the satisfaction that comes from knowing that Zach is getting quality food, and because I really feel like he deserves that from me. On the other hand, I have a tendency to overbook myself anyway. Did I really need one more to-do on my list? Not only making the food but also putting it into the pouches (which, I’ll admit, seems to be an easy process, but even one added step can be a lot these days).

I debated. I went back and forth in my mind. And I asked opinion after opinion. And I found more and more that anytime someone would disagree with me, I’d feel this pang of “Hey! That’s not what I want you to say. I’m asking your opinion, but what I really want to hear is MY opinion.”

I do this. A lot. I sit there and just basically get frustrated if someone doesn’t agree with me. It’s not cool. And sometimes, sometimes I just have to compromise.

I’m learning to do this more and more, and perhaps I’m just selfish in that I want people to agree with me. I want people to think I have awesome ideas. But that’s my pride getting in the way. To think that my opinion on this is the only opinion worth listening to, and to decide that everyone else’s opinion, even those I asked for, was wrong, well… that wasn’t cool of me.

In this case, I did actually decide to choose neither option. One memory trigger happened and I had a whole new plan, that would cost less than pouches but be less of an initial investment than the pouch system. At fall festival this year, there was a smoothie truck. When I bought my smoothie, Zach quickly drank half. It’s the only thing I’ve seen him drink as fast as a pouch.

I have a really great reusable tumbler with a straw. There’s no reason that I can’t, for the time being at least, make my own purees and put the blends in the freezer, then thaw them and put them in the tumbler in four ounce serving sizes for Zach to enjoy. He still gets the soothing sucking motion similar to nursing, and he still gets the same nutrients that he’d get, plus I get to know that I’m making his food for him. And of course, I’m sure I’ll keep some PlumOrganics and HappyBabyFood on hand for those days that it just doesn’t happen because I’m overbooked.

Maybe it was better that no one shared my opinion. I think it worked out, in the end, to have them counter me, so I continued thinking about my decision and ended the day on a better option altogether. Maybe, just maybe, even when I want you to agree with me, it’s not always what I need.