He who fears the Lord has a secure fortress and for his children it will be a refuge.
Proverbs 14:26

Sunday, November 9, 2014

A day in the life 2014

I really can't believe that the first time I wrote a "day in the life" post was over 3 years ago.  (Here is that link- the girls were12,10, 5 and 5 months!).  It was fun to re-read and think about how much things have changed in 3 years which is why I originally intended to do one of these posts every 6 months or so!  Oh well!  

I decided in advance which day to post about in hopes that it would be a fairly normal day- it was.  I'd forgotten that the last time I did this, Jason was also traveling.  That's not intentional.  Maybe I just have more blogging time when he's gone?  Anyway, maybe next one, he'll actually be in town.  Or maybe not.  Actually, this trip Abbey also traveled with them.  We hope that all the girls will be able to take turns traveling with him on various trips in years to come.  

Anyway, back to my day.  Thankfully, unlike the last post, I have nothing to write about from midnight until I woke up since I was quite asleep- that's a pretty big praise since I don't typically sleep that well when Jason travels and the girls have been taking turns getting sick.  

So here it is, Monday November 3, 2014. 

5:45 AM:  My alarm goes off and somehow I manage to get up the first time.  Throw on work-out clothes, put daily load of wash in machine.  Grab handful of almonds while I finish fixing Naomi and Anabelle's school lunches.  Wake Maddie up and tell her I'm leaving for the gym and make sure her alarm is set to go off for 6:30.  Assure her that I will call to make sure they are awake and to talk to Naomi.  

(I joined Crossfit in June and am still trying to figure out which class works best for our schedule- especially when Jason's gone.  I like 6:30 AM because I get it done and it's only a 10 minute drive.  If I go to one of the afternoon classes, the same commute has taken as long as 50 minutes!  The downside of the morning class when Jason is gone is that Maddie has to get herself and Naomi up and get Naomi on the bus if I have a longer workout and don't make it home in time)

Head to the gym around 6:15.  Call Maddie at 6:30 right before workout starts to make sure she's awake.  She is.  Remind her to get Naomi up at 7 and assure her I'll call back. (I can't even begin to remember what our workout was that day!)  Call them again during a 2-3 minute break in the workout to make sure Naomi is up.  Talk with Naomi and and tell her I'd try and get home before the bus gets her (shouldn't have done that- this 6:30 workout is not looking so ideal today!)  Leave gym at 7:20 realizing there's no way I'll get back home before Naomi leaves.  Try anyway and call Naomi at 7:30 to tell her to have a good day when I realize for sure it's not happening...  She's grumpy but Maddie says she's been fine.  

Arrive home at 7:35 barely missing Naomi's bus.  Anabelle about knocks me over at the door- I love the way she always greets me like she hasn't seen me in a year!  Plus, this means she woke up on the right side of the bed this morning- you never know these days!  It's a good thing too, because this is her first day of school.  How is it possible that the baby that was 5 months old last and riding around taxi's in a mobi baby wrap the last time I did one of these posts is now starting school?!   We're leaving in 6 weeks for a 6 month period in the states and I am going to take Arabic classes (again!) for the last 6 weeks we're here so Anabelle is going to a little preschool around the corner from my school.  We have a few other friends there, and she is SO excited.   She's packed her back pack with a gazillion different things and is absolutely horrified when she finds the change of clothes I snuck into her bag at the teacher's request.  "MOM, you don't take panties to school!!"  Indeed.  Allow her to unpack the bag and then sneak them back in.  Not gonna fight that battle.  

Look over the schedule Maddie has planned for herself for the day.  (she and Abbey started Northstar online this year)  Give her my approval and head out the door with AB.  (I can't believe these pictures were less than a week ago and I was happily wearing shorts sleeves- it's COLD now!!).  


Maddie took a first day of school picture for us.  Anabelle is still super excited about school.  (fingers crossed!).  She has, after all, been talking about going to school ever since Naomi started back in September.  

Realize on the way that I forgot to send her a water bottle.  Stop at a small grocery on the way.  Arrive at Bumblebee preschool and deliver Miss Anabelle.  She marches in like she owns the place and doesn't look back.  Head back to the van.  Deep breathe in, deep breathe out.  My baby just started school.  Okay preschool.  For 6 weeks.  But still.  No tears this time- I'm either good at this by now or too tired to be emotional- pretty sure it's the latter...

Arrive back home at 8:30 and check on Maddie who is making good progress and working away.  Make sautéed veggies and scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Take chicken out of freezer for dinner and soak cabbage.  Make coconut/sunflower oil/ lavender mask for hair.  I found this DIY mask on pinterest and I love the way it makes my hair feel and smell.  I try and do it at least 2-3 times a week but usually not that much because I forget.  The water here is awful on my hair plus I've been anemic- anyway, doing what I can!  By 9:00 sit down with breakfast and hot tea and work on the bible study I just started- Beth Moore's Children of the Day study of 1 and 2 Thessalonians.  I'm only 2.5 weeks in but so far I love it!  

Head back to the kitchen around 9:45 to put the chicken in the crock pot for dinner and finish washing veggies.  Clean kitchen pausing every so often to think about how amazingly quiet the house is.  Weird.  But nice.  

Dig Arabic books out of bedroom closet and figure out what to start reviewing before I go back to class tomorrow.  The school I'll be going to has a different kind of curriculum but it's been so long since i've done class (2 years I think?) that any little review will help.  Begin rearranging stuff on Jason's desk in the bedroom to make room for a study spot and remember that there are flowers in the living room left over from a ladies event that a hosted over the weekend.  

Decide that will be a much better study spot...

Around 10:30 settle in with another cup of hot tea and my pile of Arabic notes from 10 years of on and off Arabic study.   The Starbucks Memphis mug is my morning tea mug.  That's my mug every morning.  Afternoon tea can be in a different mug, but morning tea goes in my Memphis mug.  Just because... 


Realize around 11:30 that I've left coconut oil mask on too long already and head to shower.    

Study for another 30 minutes before heading back to get Anabelle at 12:30.  Most days she won't get out until 1, but I need to go early to pay and make sure we didn't forget anything major.   Marvel again at how very quiet the house has been all morning- Anabelle must be loud!  Besides the occasional check in with Maddie (who is still hard at work), it's been a very quiet, peaceful morning and one that I very much needed.  

Finish paying at preschool and head home around 1:00.  Anabelle talked non-stop the whole way home.  Presumably she loved every minute of her day.  It went something like this, "My teacher just readed me a story, and I played with all the friends and their names were Lilly and Maya, not the big Maya, but the little Maya, and I played on the slide, and I ate my lunch and it rained at my school, and I sang a song.  And I speaked in Arabic and in Ainglish and in bonjour (french)  (REALLY?) at my school."  And on and on it went until we got home at which time she repeated the whole thing for Maddie not leaving out a detail and not missing a beat. 

 (Just to clarify:  I said she presumably had a good day because if you've ever put a kid in school for the first time, you know that day 2 and day 3 are the more telling days.  Well.  Let's just say day 2 did not go so well.  She pitched a full out screaming crying fit for pretty much the whole hour before we left the house on day 2.  At one point she was standing in front of my full length mirror watching herself cry.  Every so often she would stop and glance towards me and whimper, "are you still going to take me?"  I'd say yes and the crying would start again.  Before we left for the morning, she actually built a barricade of chairs by the kitchen table in an effort to prevent me from taking her.  I was strong and didn't give in.  Before you feel too sorry for her, she stopped crying the second I put her in her car seat and informed me that lovey should stay in her backpack and would I please inform her teacher that she didn't have to eat..  Well, if that's all it takes!  When I picked her up on day 2, she was again quite happy and talkative about her day.  AND, her teacher pulled me aside and said she had indeed been working with her in French because she seemed so interested in it!  So I guess she was write when she said she's spoken in "bonjour"! )  Oh, and below is her unsuccessful barricade:
Anyway- back to our day.  We got home from school around 1:15.  Maddie was already having her lunch- BLT.  I'm in the middle of a 40 day Paleo challenge at the gym which is unfortunately quite challenging when you haven't gone to the grocery in quite some time.  I had picked up a few veggies the day before so I sautéed some cabbage and green beans and mushrooms with a little bacon.  Sounds weird I guess but it was pretty good!  Add an apple with almond butter and there's lunch.  AB ate at school so she went to play in her room and was soon requesting that we have a tea party.  Which we did, complete with British accents of course.  

Naomi arrived home around 2:00.  Mondays are their shorter day- she usually gets home more like 1:15 or 1:30 but it was raining which throws traffic into a complete uproar here.  Yes, I said rain, not snow.  Not even storm.  Just rain.  Naomi joined in playing with Anabelle so I was able to grab a few more hours of studying for Arabic.  

Around 4, I headed back into the kitchen to finish getting dinner prepped.  Naomi has tutoring on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5-6 which makes for a pretty crazy evening and usually requires some sort of crock pot meal or leftovers or something that the girls can cook.  Dinner plans included the chicken from this recipe which we had last week and loved (but I was out of cauliflower, tomatoes and cucumber so that wouldn't' work) with the cabbage and avocado layers from this recipe.  The second recipe called for beef cooked with green chiles.  Beef here is not great and I haven't seen green chiles in ages which is why we went with the chicken from the first.  It was a really yummy combo that I would highly recommend.  So before we left for tutoring, I got the cabbage ready and shredded the chicken in the crackpot and turned it off.  

At 4:30, Naomi and I headed out to tutoring leaving Maddie behind with Anabelle.  Our tutor during a non-traffic time, would probably only be about 10-15 minutes away, but at this time of day, we always have to allow about 30 minutes to get there.  I brought my computer along with my Arabic to study and planned to just wait for her in the car.  Sometimes I make a quick grocery trip while she's with her tutor but I needed so much that I just decided to wait.  Plus, I didn't feel like messing with unloading groceries when we got home at 6:30 right at dinner time.  Anyway, off we go.  We got on the main street closet to our house and I noticed that traffic was ALOT worse than usual- and let me tell you, that's saying something!  I realized we may be in trouble when a good 25 minutes later we were still just minutes away from our house.   I texted Naomi's tutor that we would be late (don't worry we're in standstill traffic).  Naomi and I had all sorts of deep conversation time which seemed to mainly center on food and why I am no longer buying chips, snack cakes etc etc.  Seems that EVERYBODY else brings those to school and NOBODY else worries about eating healthy.  I may or may not have gotten on a wee bit of a soap box with that one.  But all in all, we did have some good mommy/daughter conversation time.  We are now about 15 minutes late to tutoring, have been in the car almost 45 minutes and have still not gotten more than a mile from the house.  Remember how I said rain makes drivers crazy here?  That's all I could figure!!  The traffic was completely and totally out of control.  I called Naomi's tutor back and told her I didn't think we'd make it to her house- she then told me that she still wasn't even home from school and had left to go home at 3:30- this was almost 2 hours later.  SOOOO, we talked about what Arabic Naomi needed to study at home, agreed that I'd send her Arabic teacher an email explaining that she hadn't made it to tutoring and we turned around and headed home.  At 5:30, an hour after we left, we got back home and really hadn't gotten more than a mile from the house.  I would say, "what a waste!" but I really think Naomi needed the quality time so it was worth it.  

Even though we got home at 5:30 instead of the expected 6:30 after tutoring, I still managed to not get dinner on the table until around 7.  While I finished in the kitchen, Maddie and Naomi played with Anabelle and did a quick straighten of the house.  At the moment, it escapes me why exactly it was a crazy dinner hour, but all dinner hours around here are somewhat hectic and wild and I'm quite certain this was no exception.   Especially since we had dinner around 7 and didn't get to our evening Bible reading time until about 8:15- chalk it up to dinner time craziness!  

At 8:15 we sat down to have our evening Bible reading.  Lately, AB loves to sit in my lap and turn the pages of my Bible and pretend to tell a story herself.  It usually involves something about God and a captain and a princess- at least she's getting one of the characters right! 


I've been having us read Colossians 3 over and over.  The big girls are working on memorizing it, and the little girls key parts.  

After bible reading, Anabelle led us in some songs.  (she somehow has the idea that she is in charge around here...).  We started out on the right track with "My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing my God cannot do, for YOU!"

...and somehow quickly digressed to a Frozen sing-a-long.  (not before we got our prayer time in, though).  It's a houseful of girls, what can I say?!


Unfortunately, the video of the singing is not wanting to upload- oh well!   I eventually put an end to the singing (and dancing) and finally got the little people to bed.  Maddie and I piled on my bed along with multiple loads of clean but unfolded clothes and folded clothes while watching the latest episode of Once Upon a Time. 

Sometime not very long after that, I sent her to bed and crashed amidst the piles of folded clothes- you can do that when your husband's traveling and you have a king sized bed!  It's amazing what can be stored on his side!  

So that turned out to be a pretty typical day in the life.  Hopefully I won't wait another 3 years before doing this again.  I can't even think about the fact that in that amount of time, my baby baby will be in first grade and my big baby will be in college, and the ones in between will also be far older than they are supposed to be!  Anybody have any tips for stopping time?  It seems to just keep marching on!  

Friday, November 7, 2014

New wall art- pictures that tell a story

I will be the first to tell you that I am NOT a crafty person.  I do love to create things if someone else will come up with the plan of exactly how to do it and give me step my step instructions- like counted cross stitch for example.  On the flip side, I can come up with ideas of what I would love to see happen, but have absolutely no idea how to carry it out myself.

I love decorating with things that are meaningful and tell the story of who we are for the season that we are living in.  I'm sure when my kids are out of the house, i won't have their framed pictures above our kitchen table (or maybe I will...) or pictures stuck by little hands in random places all over the fridge, or (for this particular season), pumpkins and construction paper leaves stuck all over the walls as "fall decoration".  But that's who we are right now and I love it.

We've had several home decor projects going over the last several months.  Here are some of the end results and the stories behind the crafting madness.

We moved into our current apartment almost 2 years ago, and for that time, I have had a very big, very blank living room wall.  I wasn't sure what I wanted to do there and since holes in walls over here is a lot more complicated than just hammering in a nail, I wanted to make good and sure it was something that I wanted to stay for a while.  One of my favorite verses for our family is Proverbs 14:26  "He who fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for his children it will be a refuge."  I started thinking about how to make that into some sort of art piece.  I even put a plea out to the FB world to see if anyone knew of artists who might could create something out of a favorite scripture verse.  I quickly realize that anything that would be big enough to go on my big blank wall would be next to impossible to bring back from the US (where all my FB suggestions were coming from).  Then my awesomely amazing friend KJ, reminded me that she would be staying in our house a few weeks this summer, and she would be happy to create some wall art for me- I just needed to let her know what I had in mind.  SCORE!   See, KJ is all things that I am not when it comes to crafting.  My sweet Maddie used to go spend time at her home when we lived in the same city just for the purpose of crafting.  We still have a paper mache snowman that she and Maddie created out of a water bottle.

Anyway, I told her that I was envisioning 3 long panels with the verse somehow on them.  I also wanted to somehow incorporate family pictures from over the years at various places we'd visited- specifically castles or fortresses.  That's pretty much all I told her- I sent her tons of old pictures including pictures of past homes, told her where my old magazines and scrapbook paper were as we'd talked about it being some sort of decoupage thing, and told her to have at it.

Y'all.  I am beyond thrilled with the end result.  She totally knocked it out of the park and created something that I never would have even begin to come up with.  


 Didn't she do good!  She used wall paint that we had leftover, magazine pictures, scrapbook paper and best of all our old family photos.   

Here's the whole look:


Here are some close-ups:

This one has a wedding picture, pictures of the castle ruins at Byblos (one of our favorite places in Lebanon), walking along the corniche (walking by the Med) in Lebanon, a shot of Jason and I with Abbey and Maddie at the Eiffel Tower in 2003 just to name a few.

Included here is our first "fortress" in Lebanon (where we actually did huddle down in the hallway one night when H'zbollah militants took over our neighborhood), Jason and I at Petra in Jordan and a family picture in Greece last summer.

This one has our first home in Clinton, MS, my parents home in Memphis and a few other family shots.

There are many other fun memories including visits to the Cedars in Lebanon, Jason and I at a castle we visited with his parents before we were married, several of our other homes over the years and numerous family pics.  Guess you'll have to come visit if you want to see the rest!  Thank you KJ!  I am beyond thrilled- such a treasure!

Naomi and Anabelle were in need of a mirror to go above their dresser.  We recycled the bathroom mirror from our old apartment and used purple and red buttons and ribbon and turned it in to something fun to match their room.



Things like buttons and ribbons can be a wee bit challenging to find here- or at least there is not a huge selection.  I think it turned out pretty good all things considered, and Naomi was thrilled so that was what mattered!

We've also had a big blank wall above the bed in the master bedroom that I've been wanting to do something with, but not spend an arm and a leg.  Our bedroom always seems to be the last place to get decorated as it also is home to Jason's workspace and is usually my laundry center as well.  Anyway, I enlisted the help of our in-home artist (that would be Maddie).  

I bought 3 canvases with the idea of painting flowers on each to match the flowers in our bedspread.  First we drew the flowers on the canvases with pencil to make sure we got them right...  
(I say "we" because poor Maddie had me breathing over her shoulder the whole time demanding that it look a certain way...)

(she didn't seem to mind...)

(AB had to have her own paints too so she at least thought she was in on the action...)

After penciling the flowers, we outlined them in sharpie so that the lines would show through the background colors and we could trace the flowers once the background was painted.  

I tackled the job of mixing the paints to come up with the right colors.  We had some wall paint that worked for the lightish beige, but it took several false starts to get the darker mocha color and the burgundy just right.  I was super thankful that Maddie always saves glass jars- much easier to work with.  We finally got the paint colors right, and Maddie set out to paint the canvases.  I think I did the background (as part of figuring out if the colors were right) but I left the detail work to Maddie.  The sharpie outlines worked pretty well but she did have to do some freehand work.   She's looking at the bed pillow to try and match the flowers

Didn't she do a great job?  I love the end result!



Finally, these last pics aren't exactly craft projects but they are very special and tell the story of our girls.  When Abbey was a year old, we had her first year picture taken by the same photographer in Vicksburg, MS who took Jason and his siblings one year photographs.  I had it matted and framed with the verse we had chosen for her as a baby.  The timing worked out to where we were able to take both Maddie and Naomi to the same photographer.  By the time Anabelle came along, Vicksburg was not really on our radar and I'm pretty sure the guy closed up shop soon after Naomi was born- his more traditional photography business had kind of come to an end in the digital day and age.  With our 3 older girls, I had to actually wait for the proofs to be mailed to me before I could get an idea of how the pictures turned out!  

Anyway, we had a family friend take Anabelle's picture.  I showed him what the other 3 looked like and he was able to do a similar shot.  I love all of them.  Amazingly, I was able to match the matte of the four pictures despite using different shops over the years.  The frames are slightly different and the writing for the verses differs a bit but I love the end result so much.  

The verses for each girl correspond so perfectly to that season of our lives as parents and as a family.  I love to see them all together as they tell the amazing story of God's faithfulness to our family in the precious girls He has blessed us with.  Because of the size of the plaque on each frame, I just included a portion for some of them.  I highlighted what is on the frame if not the whole verse...

Abigail: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."  James 1:17 

Madelyn: "Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift." 2 Corinthians 9:15

Naomi:  "I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted (my request) me what I asked of him."  1 Samuel 1:27

Anabelle:  "Your hands made me and formed me; give me understanding to learn your commands."  Psalm 119:73



Naomi and Anabelle:

 Maddie and Abbey:

Next on our crafting "to-do" list is the little toddler table that is AB's favorite place for tea parties.  We'll see if we ever get to that!