Unconnected jumble for the month plus pictures

It's time for another compilation of several thoughts and happenings from the past month.

First I'll share about the girl you all want to read about :) ...

Kaylee is becoming more and more interactive! As she has started to be more interactive and animated, I am learning more and more about the nature of the flesh. I’m realizing there are things we never even need to teach her or demonstrate for her before she picks up on them, like how to be selfish or how to throw a temper tantrum, while there are other things, like how to love and serve or seeing situations from others’ perspective that we will have to teach her. Unfortunately, because we are self-centered beings, I know that indirectly and unintentionally, we will demonstrate for her aspects of the first, but my desire is that she sees and learns and desires to have a God-centered perspective. 

But right now, aside from a few moments, she really is a sweet-natured, happy girl. I was told when she was 2 months old that the 2 to 4 month range is the most enjoyable time. At that moment, I was shocked and didn't see how this could be because Kaylee and I were both struggling with some health issues but this has definitely turned out to be a WONDERFUL season with her. She is a smiley little girl and I just love playing with her and hanging out with her as we do our daily tasks. She continues to change quickly. She has almost doubled her birth weight and has grown over 5 inches. Her new thing is she loves to stand and jump. She is great at holding her head up and rolling from her tummy to her back. 

The rolling from her tummy to her back is kind of a new thing. In fact, there is a somewhat funny, somewhat sad story from earlier this month when she was not yet able to do so...

Here's the setting: 
Kaylee is in the living room, crying while doing tummy time (a very common occurrence because she doesn't like her stomach but needs tummy time to strengthen her neck muscles)… I run into the office to do something… in the mean time, she stops crying… I soon realize that she stopped crying… I run into the livingroom… I find her, laying, face against the floor… eye closed… still as can be… I scream, thinking she is for sure dead… she immediately jolts awake and starts screaming uncontrollably... I breathe again and cuddle the poor little girl while laughing, yet almost crying myself, at what just happened. (She has NEVER fallen asleep while playing, let alone, while doing tummy time, but I guess there is a first for everything… gotta keep Mama on her toes… and knees J).   

I continue to learn lots as a mom and was thankful this past month for a Mom’s morning out conference. There were two wonderful women of God who encouraged us moms and there were a few thoughts from both that stuck with me:

1.       Don’t compare others outsides with your insides.

2.       Every stage of motherhood has reasons to feel guilty but He has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity.

3.       Motherhood is the culmination of thousands and thousands of decisions and our children are impacted by those choices so we need to seek wisdom

4.       Make your marriage a priority – to grow our marriages, we need to focus on what our husbands need from us… respect, a helpmate, intimacy

5.       Our value is not based on our child’s behavior

6.       Time flies... BE INTENTIONAL

Other Ponderings and Realizations for me to remember:

#1 One Sunday this past month, I was struggling with who I was and my shortcomings. Yet, it is so easy to cover them up and put on a show. However, on this particular Sunday I wasn’t up for another show, and Brandon and I decided to go for a drive, to just talk about heart issues and things of the Lord. On our drive, we passed a church, and their name, printed in big capital letters on the side of the building, was “BE REAL church.” That is what I had wanted that Sunday morning. A place where I could be real. Although we didn’t visit this body of believers, the name struck me and stuck with me, reminding me that I often need to be more real and it was refreshing to think that there are people (Christians in particular) that would be okay with that. I think this idea has in the past and will continue to affect my blogging. I often worry what people will think or the assumptions that will be made by being open and honest, especially via writing and not a real conversation, but in reality, I think growth and humility come with being real… so…. here we go…. J   

#2 Competing first loves zaps joy... A heart divided lacks peace.

#3 I’m realizing more and more that life never really slows down. As it continues to change, I have also realized that I need to learn how to continually embrace the new normal.

#4 At our wedding, Brandon and I tried to be very deliberate about what we included in the ceremony. Before getting married, we agreed that it is definitely good to have a gathering where a commitment is publicly made and a time is set aside to celebrate the two of us becoming one but we also realized that there is a lot of fluff and traditions that have been added to weddings that really takes the focus off what is important. Anyway, one of the things we incorporated was watering grass together. Sounds crazy, but we had a little patch of grass that we watered during the ceremony. This was to remind us and symbolize our need to invest into our marriage and focus on caring for our relationship rather than looking at the other side of the fence, where the “grass is always greener”. This part of our wedding has been on my mind recently and it’s been good to remind myself that it takes deliberate care and effort to keep our grass green! When incorporating it in our wedding, I thought of the other side of the fence as the temptation to think that someone else’s life looked greener or a life with someone else as better than the one with your spouse. Those can be very real temptations in a marriage but I’ve also realized that my struggle is often to think of the past as where the grass was greener. I think of life being so simple and easy as a child or being so fun and free in college or how wonderful it was on our honeymoon or how romantic Brandon was while we were dating. But in reality, this is just as wrong. God wants me to focus on the here and now and to invest in my marriage right where we are at! And it’s exciting that He will honor that!

#5 Since Brandon is a very logical person without a lot of emotion, I sometimes feel like my emotions are silly or unnecessary or not important and I have noticed that I sometimes try to suppress them because neither of us know quite how to handle them. Although emotions can take control and are not always good when evaluating life in a looking glass, a conversation with a dear sister recently helped remind me that emotions are not bad in and of themselves. Women often get a bad rap for being so emotional, and our society seems to say that emotion is inferior to logic but I have to come back to the fact that God created me with emotion. True, I’ve realized that emotions often need to be analyzed for validity, because an emotion-based view can lead to naive thinking or fallacious conclusions, but emotions also offer passion and a different insight, whereas logic, if our perspective is not correctly grounded, can tend to squash all the color from life. Neither Brandon or I are wrong in the way we think. Both perspectives have been useful in our marriage and God is growing both of us. Seems like God is using this pairing of a logic-based guru and an emotionally-angled thinker to demonstrate iron sharpening iron!          

#6 A while back, on the news, they were reporting that an anonymous individual was offering a $100,000 reward for information about who started the Waldo Canyon fire. That's a lot of money that will do nothing but punish the person who may have started the fire. It won't bring back the houses, it won't bring back the pictures or the lives or anything. And as I thought about this, it struck me how much we like resolution and justice. We almost love to see people "get what they deserve"... yet when it comes down to our lives, we have no desire for God to be just towards us.

#7 Nerd moment J : I was thinking about change, and my mind drifted to a graph in my science nutrition class. I though I want my change to be like complex carbs or protein instead of simple carbs with a spike of excitement but no long term maintaining.

#8 When the reality that we might not be in Colorado to much longer set in, we decided to visit a new portion of the state; one that Brandon has been wanting to travel to for a while. In late October, we traveled to Ouray, CO. It is referred to as the little Switzerland of America. Although Kaylee was struggling with a cold and croupe, we tried to make the most of it. It was really pretty... we drove through the mountains a little past Silverton to a lake with an incredible view, we hiked in to two waterfalls, we walked the streets of the small town, and just relaxed. At one of the waterfalls, I was mesmerized. It wasn't necessarily a super beautiful waterfall but you hike down into this little cave like area, where the water is coming out, and I loved it. It's a place where I could just sit and ponder all day. It definitely had the shrinking effect on me, where you realize the little insignificant dot you are on the globe while standing there listening to the incredible surge of water rushing down the cliffs and through the canyon. 

And now some pictures of Kaylee!!!

Snugglin' with Big Blue

 I praise God for this little girl 

I am so thankful I will have such an awesome little buddy to keep me company in Alaska when Dad is off at work.

She has figured out where the voices are coming from when we Skype with Mimi and Grandpa :)

It's so fun to see her stare at them and smile as the talk.

Enjoyed going to a pumpkin patch with little girl earlier in October

 <3

 Since a lot of our friends have young little ones, we decided to have them all come over on the 31st since it is hard to take them out. Kaylee and Brandon were Curious George and the Man with the Yellow Hat :)

 :)

Ready to explore 

Wearing Mama's sweater

Can't keep socks on this little monkey :) 

Friends