The Home I Want

What's on my mind? 

A prayer that Stephen prayed the other night, where he mentioned simplifying our lives this year. It's been stuck in my head ever since. I love the sound of that. I want that for my life and I think in a year I can make some good strides towards it, especially now that Benji is older and doesn't need as much constant attention.

I want a home that inspires creativity and I know open space and cleanness/organization does that. I want a home that we don't have to hide away in, a home that we can leave, so that we can do the best things, like hikes and parks and adventures. I don't want a home that clings to me anymore.

I want a home that is built for learning. I want a home that leaves room for lessons--not only in academics, but in the love of God for his people.

I want a home that people feel comfortable in. I don't want a home I'm afraid to let people into. I don't want a perfect home, but I want a home where people feel like they can express themselves safely, a home that flows with forgiveness and the peace of Christ and draws attention to things above, not to earthly things.

Balance

I'm starting to understand why moms talk about finding a balance in their lives between raising their kids and pursuing their own hobbies, interests, etc.

When Micah was a baby, I poured every bit of myself into caring for him. EVERYTHING else slid.  And I was absolutely okay with it.

Then Micah got older, and I was able to start pursuing hobbies and doing "me" things with him in tow.  I remember telling my friends how great it was to start wearing makeup again, LOL.

Now I have another baby, but I've been doing the "me" things for a couple of years, with a kiddo in tow, so I am used to that kind of flow of life, and a second baby feels like an interruption of that flow--especially with a 3-year gap in between.

I guess it was such a dramatic change, and the learning curve was so steep, with a first baby, that I really had no choice but to let myself get completely consumed by motherhood so I could learn even just the basics.  Going from one baby to two babies was simply not as hard, even though I got the special challenge of reflux babies both times (lucky me!).  Maybe that was one of God's ways of forcing me to slow down and pay attention to baby #2.

I've been chasing the "me" things since Benji was born, trying to get back to that "normal" state too quickly, and I feel like maybe this is why veteran moms say the little years go too fast and to treasure them.  I wish I felt the same urgency to bond with Benji that I did with Micah. Maybe if I pray for it, God can arrest me in my powering down the path to "normal" and help me pay better attention to what's in my hands right now.

House Hunting Again

Two years after my last post, we have a two-year-old, and we're looking for houses again!  I post about Micah on Facebook, so in this blog entry I'll just focus on the house saga.

Grandma will eventually need to be moved into an assisted care facility, although we are not sure when, so we have been exploring housing options off and on.  Last weekend we found a house. Actually, we found 3 houses.  We had a terrible time deciding which one to put an offer on.  Stephen loved this house, I loved that house, we both liked this house...

After asking for advice from various places, we ended up going with the one we both liked.  It seemed to be the best compromise.  We offered asking price if they paid closing costs. They counter-offered us $1000 over asking price and up to $3000 closing costs.  After another tortuous decision-making time, we decided to take the offer.

Then we got the paperwork for the roof, and found out it's a 10-year roof that has been there for 17 years. (We were told it was a 25-year roof and had been on there for 5 years... >:-/ ) Stephen got cold feet and wanted to back out, but our realtor convinced him to do the inspections and find out what exactly we're dealing with.  So we have two roof inspectors coming next week who can also quote us the cost of replacing it if necessary, in addition to the general house inspection later that week.

And that's where we're at.

The house is a 3-bedroom, 2 bath house built in the 70s with a great-sized, totally fenced, private back yard.  The kitchen is really nice and the house has overall been kept in really good shape.  The bedrooms are kind of small.  The big detractor is that the roof is flat.  Well, it slopes up a little and then is flat.  Not a great choice for a place where it rains half the year.  Those 60s/70s homebuilders... Sometimes I just wonder what was going on in their heads.  BUT other than the roof, it's a nice house.

The other thing about the house is that it is a 40+ minute commute to Stephen's work.  Right now he has a 25-minute commute.  This is going to be a problem with any of the houses we are looking at; we got priced out of the big metropolitan hub.  Stephen is looking for jobs closer, but we may just have to deal with the long commute.

Living With Less

One thing living half-moved in to a house has taught me is that I CAN live with less.  One area I have noticed this so far is linens.  How many towels, washcloths, blankets, sheets and pillowcases does a couple actually need?  Not as many as we have, obviously, because several of our towels are still out in our garage wrapped around framed photographs and have been for almost 2 months now.  And still we manage to dry ourselves off every day after our showers.  Most of our blankets we never use--not even in winter.  Why do we have so many?  And I don't even know where the rest of our pillowcases are.  I know we have a couple dozen, mostly mine, but I only know where about 8 of them are!  We'll need even less when this pregnancy is over and I don't pad myself on all sides with pillows every night.

Clothes is another area I've noticed I can live with less in, although partly that's because I don't really care how I look right now.  What 9-months-pregnant woman does?  What is fascinating, though, is that I am way more apt to throw my clothes in the hamper when they start smelling...less than prime...than I was when I had so many shirts to choose from.  I think it's because I realize I have fewer options once things do get dirty.  With my other clothes, I was like, "Oh, this probably needs a wash.  Oh well.  I have 2 dozen other shirts to choose from."  And I'd throw the shirt back into the drawer.  And now when the clothes are IN the hamper, I'm of course more likely to get the laundry done, because, good grief, I only have 3 shirts left!  So it's been very interesting seeing how having less in general affects how I live day to day.  It's a good change.  I hope I can hang onto it and use it to motivate me to thin out my non-maternity clothes.

I can do a similar thinning out of the baby stuff I've received.  I know they dirty things up a lot more, but I really like this extra motivation to do the laundry when something is dirty and I want to incorporate it into every area of life.  I got so many crib sheets for my shower that I think I can at least start there.

I can't wait to apply this to other places.  Maybe there is hope for someone like me after all. :)

-Stephanie

2013-2014: Year of New Things

The last year or so has meant a lot of new things for us.

Back in November 2012, I lost my job as a Saturday flower delivery driver thanks to new management at the shop I worked at.  I decided it was a good time to pursue floral design at other shops.  In January 2013, I offered myself as extra holiday help at a shop down the road from our apartment and let them know I was interested in a part-time job in design in general.  They hired me for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, and after that hired me on part-time as a designer and driver.  The first 6 months were hard as I tried to learn everything and become a better designer, and Christmas was utterly exhausting--my first 46 hour work week!  But by 2014 I was feeling really comfortable there and incredibly overwhelmed with gratitude for a good job and good coworkers and good hours.  It has been such a blessing and answer to prayer in so many ways.

Come June, though, I will be leaving, at least temporarily, to start a new phase of life: motherhood.

Stephen and I took a giant leap of faith and went off birth control back in September.  We were still in a dingy, dirty two-bedroom apartment that was, for all intents and purposes, a 1-bedroom apartment with a storage room that could absolutely not be a baby room unless something major changed.

But the Lord had His say, and we got pregnant in October, with a baby boy.  So we began another crazy journey: house-hunting for the first time in our lives.  Our budget was ridiculously small, but we were bound and determined to find a new home for this baby to live.  We searched the furthest ends of the suburbs around here for an affordable house that was also functional and safe.  There were some possibilities, and we even made an offer on one house, but the owners countered our offer and in the short time we had to decide what to do, we came to the agreement that it just was not right.

Completely discouraged by the hunt, we stopped house hunting for a while and pursued other, better apartments.  In the meantime, trying to be prepared for the worst, we bought a storage unit to move in all of our stuff from the second bedroom.  It was amazing the freedom that afforded--our apartment would have been finally livable!

But the Lord had better plans.  In March, Stephen's grandma came to us and offered up a suggestion for consideration.  She had a large house with a large master bedroom in it that could be turned into an apartment suitable to her with the installation of a kitchenette.  She would live there and we could have the rest of the house.

She left it open for us to decide, but the decision seemed pretty clear.  This felt right.  So after some talking about how it might work, we gave Grandma the go-ahead to begin constructing her back bedroom into an apartment.

Well, our lease at the apartment ended before everything could be perfected and ready, but we scooped out a place for our bed and Grandma's bed and started working together on readying the house.  It is still rather chaotic, but we all make slow progress on getting settled every day.  The baby at this point still does not have a room, but he does have a cradle in our room to stay in for the first few months, which would have been the plan anyway.

I absolutely love Grandma's neighborhood that we live in.  It is exactly the kind of neighborhood a family can feel comfortable in.  We have way, way more than we were ever hoping for while we were exploring other options.  God is truly amazing and we are truly blessed, and our little boy will be, too.

Two Important Things Learned From Marriage

A long, LONG time ago, my sister-in-law Kaile wrote a blog about 6 things she had learned in her first 6 months of marriage: http://aspects-of-me.blogspot.com/2014/02/6-things-learned-from-6-months-of.html  I enjoyed reading it and was inspired to write a similar blog reflecting on my 5 years of marriage and hoped to draw an equivalent 5 things out.

Well, I came up with two.  Very hard ones.  And had to stop there because it made me realize that there is a lot more hard learning that I still have to do.  I'm not saying that marriage is only hard lessons, but in marriage there is an awful lot of self-sacrifice, which for Christians is simultaneously the most difficult and most necessary lesson we will have to learn.

The tough lesson of self-sacrifice comes even more into play when two become three, and marriage becomes not just marriage but parenting--which is the milestone Steve and I will be hitting in the next 5-6 weeks when our little guy enters the world.

So I figured I better post what I've got before Baby Boy arrives and I have a whole new phase of self-sacrifice to learn and it's even harder to finish things I've started.  :)

So here are two of the most important lessons I've learned in my 5 years of marriage.

1. Communicate, even when it's hard.  This was a hard one for me to learn.  I grew up believing with all my heart that negative emotions should not be shared with others.  And that conflicts were best handled by not handling them at all.  To say that my husband did not grow up believing these things would be an understatement.  Our worst, longest, most brutal nights in our first years consisted of a horrible cycle: I got upset, I shut my mouth, Stephen tried to pry everything out of me, and the harder he pried, the deeper I dove into anger, pain, silence, and resentment at him for prying.

To this day, when through a conversation my deepest negative emotions are brought to the surface for all to see, I'm still reminded of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan takes his claws to Eustace's scaly exterior and removes his layers upon layers of dragon skin.  It is an extremely painful experience for Eustace.  And so extremely necessary.

While it's hard to face my own ugliness, God has given Stephen an amazing capacity to forgive, fully and without any consequences.  That forgiveness, I have learned, is SO much healthier in a relationship than simple conflict avoidance.

2. The difference between heat and thorns.  This is one I first learned from a counselor (Steve Green from Impact Biblical Counseling), and marriage became my platform for putting it into practice.  It is tied to Jesus' teaching from Mark 7:20-23, where he says, "What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery,  coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”  To paraphrase Steve Green in his article "The Gospel Makes a Difference": You aren't angry at your spouse because they "made" you angry.  You are angry at them because deep down inside you have anger.  In metaphorical terms, your spouse's words or action are the heat that was applied to you--but the thorns that came to the surface in you were already there.  The heat just brought them out.  And the solution is to turn to the Cross in repentance for your thorns, and let Christ do His work to heal you from them.

This is not to say that your spouse has no thorns of his or her own.  For every fallen human being, thorns are a given!  But what we've learned is that it is not your job to make your spouse repent of his or her thorns.  That is the Holy Spirit's job.  Our job is to continually turn back to Christ to heal us from our own thorns, and to pray and trust the Holy Spirit to work on each other's thorns. 

Summer 2012

Our summer has been surprisingly eventful, particularly toward the end.  In July, we went on a vacation to the Washington coast with Stephen's parents and alllllll his siblings, including Mary and Tim and their two little ones, and also Cari's boyfriend, Eric.  We just spent a week at a resort town in the process of development, walking on the beach, hanging out and playing games at the house, swimming in the pool and relaxing in the hot tub.  We each took turns cooking dinner.  We had some very tasty steak-and-veggie kabobs by Cari and Eric, a yummy Mexican meal by Tim and Mary, and Stephen and I made spaghetti.  It was a very relaxing, laid-back vacation all together.


Shortly after the family vacation, Stephen shot his first paid wedding gig.  There is a lot invested in wedding days, so he was under a lot of stress leading up to the wedding day, and also some in the photo editing phase as well.  But he finished it, and the couple was very, very pleased with the photos, for which we are very thankful.


In August, one of my college friends got married, so I flew down to Idaho and stayed with my aunt, uncle, and cousin and attended Mindy's wedding, which was butterfly garden themed--very pretty!  They put a lot of humorous personal touches to their ceremony and the reception was one big, fun party, complete with a photo booth and props. :)  I got to catch up with some old friends and meet some new ones and had a really good weekend all together.  I am really glad I got to go.

My car's A/C stopped working sometime earlier this year, and we finally took it to get checked out in August, and found out we had to get a new part and the whole thing had to be reassembled.  God graciously provided the money for us, and we fixed it toward the end of August. In the same month, I had to get a new car key, because the buttons on my remote-entry car key didn't work anymore!  And today I got into a rear-end car accident (I was rear-ended by a car who was rear-ended by a car), but I'm not hurt at all and the damage to my car is very minimal.  The accident was not my fault at all, so insurance will be taking care of everything.

We've had an Indian summer this September, with temperatures in the high 80s and 90s.  I think the weather is trying to make up for the very cold and dark beginning of summer we had!  For now I am totally okay with sunshiny weather....I know those cold dark days are coming again!


Our church got a new music pastor, an answer to prayer after 3 years of searching for the right person.  Our church is now able to do so much more music-wise than we were before, because our temporary worship leader was doing so much other work in his position as Communications Director.  Now at our women's Bible study, Mark (the new worship pastor) comes and leads us in worship with a guitar, and we don't have to sing off a CD!  I am especially thankful for that.

Another answer to prayer is that Stephen got a nice raise this year, and we are so grateful for God's provision there!  Now it is actually a possibility for us to move into a bigger apartment, although we won't be taking advantage of that just yet.  For now it does ease up our budget some, and we'll hopefully be able to start putting more money toward debt repayment.

Overall, I think this year has been an incredible year of growth for us and our marriage.  I've grown in my faith in leaps and bounds, and as I've spiritually matured, I'm maturing in other ways.  Praise God for His faithfulness!  I sense good changes coming up for us.  I'm hoping to find my niche in the church we attend, although I'm not sure what that is yet.  And Stephen will be leading our regular small group Bible study again.  This year we will probably be going through 1 Corinthians to go along with our pastor's sermon series. You can pray for us through that.  We want to help our fellow brothers and sisters deepen their faith, as many of them are new Christians or just aren't sure how to grow deeper.  So you can be praying especially for Stephen as he bears the responsibility of teacher, and for me as I try to figure out where I fit into the mix.

Those are the biggest pieces of news.  Thank you for your prayers and your support!  You don't know how much it helps. :)