Jonah Turned TWO!

I love this little kid so much.  I am daily challenged in my walk with Christ, directly as a result of being his mommy.  This child demands so much love, attention, structure, time, food, discipline and GRACE.  I am learning to discipline in love, choosing my battles, and teaching him with grace more often, instead of responding in anger or fear (because that's what my flesh wants, and this whole 'die-to-yourself-daily' thing is LEGIT in parenting).

Jonah's party was fun and a great way to say 'Good-bye' to family we wouldn't see for a while.  John's mom hosted it and got him this awesome cake, that was even gluten-free so I could eat some, too! These are some pictures from Jonah's birthday party:

Jonah turned two on May 18th and we moved on May 21.

This sums up our packing experience.

Our lives have been extremely chaotic since then, and just now as it calms down a little, and I am learning how to juggle this new ministry/mommy life, I am able to go back and finish/edit posts.  I feel a little guilty that this is 4 months late.  However, I am a huge supporter of this slogan:

and my dad and my husband would probably read this book and say they should have just named her Little Miss Kelly.

  So here I am, celebrating my little guy's two year old birthday, 4 months after the fact.  This is real life, folks.  I do this to remember our lives as they are now, and hope that it helps others in some way.  This is not a job, it's a creative outlet.  I don't have time to make this into something that makes money.  I applaud and support all the bloggers who can!

SO, back to my Jonah.
These are some of the pictures Ashlea Chance at Southern Made Photography took in late December, so Jonah is 19 months old here:

From the time Jonah was 16 months old, until he turned 2, we lived with my father-in-law in Alabama while we waited, searched, and prayed for our next job to be more than a job, but a specific calling.  Jonah got to know all 5 of his grandparents really well.  They are all just wrapped around his little finger as tight as can be, and he knows it.  We don't mind much.  This relationship makes them all happy.  Plus, it means more adults are talking to, loving, playing with, and reading to him, which only helps his development! When people ask us, "Is Jonah a 'Mama's Boy' or a 'Daddy's Boy'?" We say, "Neither.  This kid is a 'Nana's Boy!"  He delightedly squeals when he sees one of his Nanas, and he cries when he has to leave them.  He did that, often, even while we lived 5 minutes away from them and he saw them several times a week.  Many times John and I would walk into one of our mom's houses to pick up Jonah while we had been gone, and Jonah would start to throw a huge fit because simply the sight of us was too much to bear, knowing that inevitably it would mean leaving a beloved Nana.

My mom, "Katie Nana"

John's mom, "Nana"

At the age of two Jonah's favorite things (besides his Nanas) were (and still mostly are):

Playing OUTSIDE.  Dude loves the park, and being able to climb, slide, swing, and watch other kids. He also likes just riding in the stroller for about a mile.  After that first mile he gets a little antsy, but can be calmed down with food, sticks, leaves, and promises of a park at the end of the run. He would stand at the door and beg, "Go Outside?" until he figured out how to open the door, and then we fought a battle every day of locking the deadbolt and hoping he wouldn't figure out how to unlock it.

Leaving the house to go anywhere.  "Go Bye-Bye?" He will sometimes ask even before eating breakfast.  He always asks after breakfast.  If we don't go anywhere all morning, he wakes up from his nap hollering, "Go BYE BYE!!!!!" Of course, at least 40% of the time we left the house, we were going to one of the nana's houses, which could have something to do with this.

Chick-fil-A, specifically the play area, which has been a wonderful alternative on very cold mornings, and was a great place for John to take Jonah so I could nap with the newborn (who is not such a newborn anymore.)  She was born when Jonah was 20 months old, so from 20-24 months for him, he and Daddy spent a LOT of time together, which leads me to:

Daddy-Jonah Outings.  This most often meant get up, go straight to Chick-fil-A, eat breakfast there and play for a while, then go to Lowe's and get some wood or tools or something, then maybe stop at the park and come home in time for lunch and a nap.  Other times this meant that Jonah would eat breakfast at home, then John would immediately take him running in the stroller, then let him play at the park.  Either way, Jonah was ready at all times for one of these to happen.  Mommy loved it because it meant extra sleep, or time to pump, or blog, or do a load of laundry.

Reading.  Jonah's favorite books are these "Look-and-Find" books or the "Lift-the-Flap" books.  He knows where everything is, and wants to find all the items on every single page and then just move on to another book.  I've been asking him to find other things in the pictures lately to challenge him, and he really enjoys searching for new items.

Thomas the Tank Engine and ALL other characters involved in that series.  Little dude knew names/colors/numbers of at least 10 trains before he turned two.  He watched Thomas on PBS every day at 11:30, then would eat lunch and take a nap.

Barnes & Noble Children section train tables are Jonah's favorite.

Combines, Tractors, Trailers, and other heavy farming vehicles, specifically John Deere ones.  Although, he is now also into the red ones (sorry "Case," he just calls you the 'Red ones', your name brand is obsolete).

Bathtime.  He is particularly fond of bubbles, lots of bath toys, especially large cups and other items he can practice pouring with, and he gets a kick out of peeing in the tub.

Elmo.  Now, he is tolerant, and knows the names of the rest of the Sesame Street cast, but he was particularly enamored with the little high-pitched red monster for several months. Elmo frequently was given rides in Thomas.

Eating.  Jonah has really exploded with new favorite foods this year.  He now loves eggs, biscuits, gravy, sausage, blueberries, bananas, most fruits actually, still eats an abundance of avocados and greek yogurt, and now even eats chicken!

Then, there are some things that Two-Year Old Jonah just hates with a passion:

Brushing teeth.  Y'all, we have to sit on this kid, holding his arms down while he scream cries in order to brush his teeth.  Somedays I feel like this is such a waste of time, because baby teeth fall out anyway, right? Just kidding. Kind of.

Big Tires.  John's dad brought home a tractor tire one day and you may have thought it was a living, fire-breathing monster the way Jonah carried on and shrieked at it.  4 months later he is still afraid of big tires.

Being put to sleep.  He resists naps and bedtime as though he may never wake up.  He fights sleep, and then wakes up in the wee hours of the morning to come and get in our bed. He would also insist upon having his entire stuffed animal toy menagerie in the crib every time he went to sleep.

Here is last year's post about when Jonah turned one (also late).  He has grown up a lot in one year.  It's kind of amazing.  The thing I have most enjoyed this year was getting to see him become a big brother.  I was so stressed out and worried that he would be insanely jealous or constantly try to hurt her, that it didn't even occur to me how beautiful and sweet it would be when he loved her.

Here are a few of my favorites of the two of them:

He really liked her nose.

A close second favorite thing would be to watch and hear his language skills blossom.

He's a struggle, but completely worth every second.  I am so glad God chose me to be his mommy.  I am learning to love more sacrificially, forgive faster, and teach more creatively.  My hope and prayer is to make him a disciple, a follower of Christ.

I Forgave King David

Confession:

I have never liked King David from the Bible.

As a self-righteous teenager who was very much proud of my own lack of visible sin problems, I just let my heart develop this real hardness toward King David because all I knew about him boiled down to this:

1. As a young teenager he killed Goliath with his slingshot and a rock. (I know the rock didn't kill him, but that was my perception.)

2.  He was a man "after God's own heart." (I didn't even know what that meant, but I was vaguely aware that it meant everyone else apparently liked him.)

3.  He slept with Bathsheba and murdered her husband to try to cover it up. (My naive self used to think of adultery as the absolute WORST sin ever.)

4.  His love-child died, but after that his life was peachy again. (My mean pitiless self actually felt like he deserved the death of his child - after becoming a parent, I know that the death of a child would be an awful, terrible punishment, and NO ONE ever deserves that.)

5. He wrote a bunch of the Psalms. (That's actually true.)

I was a high schooler who didn't struggle with purity problems because I had never had a boyfriend.  I wish someone had told me this:

Photo credit

This year I've been reading the One Year Bible, and as I began the story of David, I told John, "I can feel that God wants to change my heart toward King David.  It's going to be big."  I even confessed this issue to my Bible study group back when I was pregnant with Karis and we did the Priscilla Shirer "Jonah" study.  One of the wise women said, "Oh Kelly, if you think of David and Bathsheba as more important than you think of David and Goliath, then that's a heart problem."  I nodded.  I knew it.  I just wasn't ready to forgive him yet.  John finds it super silly that I had a forgiveness problem with a dead person.  I did though.  I really loathed the fact that David was so popular even though in my plank-filled eyes, he was such a perv.  I detested the thought that it was a good thing that Jesus came from his blood line.  When pastors would preach about David, I would just kind of mentally check out a little bit, like what they taught was somehow less important or useful because David was included.  When I saw that a psalm was written by David, I'd roll my eyes and put up a little heart shield that said "This psalm means nothing to me because that heinous David wrote it."  I was such a prideful Bible snob!  I was unteachable in this area for the last 15 years of my life.   Isn't that an awful shame?  I am shaking my head at myself.

Then, fortunately, a few months ago, (I began this post in May, but then we moved, and life has just been non-stop since) God put me back in my place.

I had never read David's entire life story from beginning to end before.  I didn't know anything about him other than the 5 things listed above.  I judged him, harshly, based on those things.  I didn't know how so stinking respectful he was to Saul, and repeatedly spared Saul's life, even as Saul was trying to kill him in 1 Samuel 24, 1 Samuel 26!  I didn't know how amazingly wise he was to continually ask God before doing something if it was a good idea or not in 1 Samuel 23, 2 Samuel 2 and multiple other passages.  I didn't know how David mourned the death of Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1.  I didn't know that he gave God the glory for so many of his victories:

2 Samuel 5:19 So David asked the Lord, “Should I go out to fight the Philistines? Will you hand them over to me?”

The Lord replied to David, “Yes, go ahead. I will certainly hand them over to you.”

20 So David went to Baal-perazim and defeated the Philistines there. “The Lord did it!” David exclaimed. “He burst through my enemies like a raging flood!” So he named that place Baal-perazim (which means “the Lord who bursts through”). 21 The Philistines had abandoned their idols there, so David and his men confiscated them.

I didn't connect that David wrote so many psalms as praises to the Lord until I read this in 2 Samuel 7. I didn't know that he hunted down Saul's family to try to be kind to them on purpose in 2 Samuel 9. I didn't know that he loved his kids so much that he let them rise up and try to steal his kingdom and then was so brokenhearted when his son Absolom was killed in battle trying to overtake his father's throne in 2 Samuel 18 and 19!  David lived longer and had a few other sin problems and few other victories for the Lord.

You know what I hyper-focused on knowing? I knew about David's sin with Bathsheba from 2 Samuel 11, and I judged David's entire life based on that mistake.

It broke my heart as I realized that I love so many people here on earth now because I know their whole story.  I forgive them, I even respect and admire some people I know really well (family and friends) who have also committed adultery, lied, and done many other unloving things.  I love them, and forgave them almost immediately after hearing of their adultery, because I know them, I know their whole story, and I know the amazing way they make their family work despite it all.  I know the forgiveness, the heart ache, and the consequences of their actions, and the joy and love on the other side, and I just love them.  However, I judged King David like nobody's business.  I didn't even know his whole story!  It was a huge reminder to never judge people based on the tiny slice of the pie that I see, because I will probably never know their entire life story.  Some people have had awful, tough, difficult lives, and what I see is only a sliver of what they are experiencing.  That old cliche phrase about walking a mile in someone else's shoes, has got a lot of truth behind it!  God changed my heart on this right as we were moving to Somerville a few months ago, but I have been so busy with the kids and trying to figure out how to juggle all of the things we deal with now that I had not made time to edit and post this.

 Then John preached an excellent sermon on forgiveness (part of a series on the Lord's Prayer), and he spoke specifically on the following verses:

Matthew 6:12-15New Living Translation (NLT)

12 and forgive us our sins,
    as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
13 And don’t let us yield to temptation,[a]
    but rescue us from the evil one.[b]

14 “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. 15 But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.

Ephesians 4:32New Living Translation (NLT)

32 Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.

Then John (my cute hubby preacher) said this:

"Jesus is saying that if you don't know show mercy, 

then you don't know mercy.

If you don't show grace, then you don't know grace.  

If you don't show love, then you don't know love.

If you don't show forgiveness, then you don't know forgiveness."

He's right.  Who have you been reluctant to forgive? If Jesus can forgive us of all our filthiness, than how dare we refuse to forgive someone else?  Looking at the cross puts everything back into perspective.  Realize the extent that God showed his mercy, grace, love, and forgiveness and extend it to others.

Others = ALL PEOPLE. 

I thought this was a great article about speaking and showing love to the immigrants our country is receiving:  Speaking Christianly About the Unaccompanied Children Crisis.

I will leave you with this thought.  I didn't forgive David, because I was judging him instead of loving him and the redemptive work God did in his life.  Who are you unable to love today because you are too busy judging them?

Photo credit

Please don't think that I go around judging others all the time.  I really don't.  I was just hanging on to judging David for way too long, and felt God asking me to share it with people.

Mommy Ups and Downs

Sooooo...feeding infants is disgusting.  I'm not sure why/how I forgot how nasty this process is, but I did.  Self inflicted amnesia, perhaps?

Today marks one week of feeding Karis "solid" (read: super runny goop) foods.  I growled, y'all.  I gritted my teeth, and I made some mean, ugly faces at that baby.  This is homemade baby food from organic vegetables and milk I pumped.  I worked for this.  Karis does not give a flying flip. She does NOT like to open her mouth.  She grins with her mouth closed while I'm trying to feed her.  She literally wraps her little lips around her gums, sucks them in, shuts her mouth and smiles at me, as if she knows this is an impossible way for me to get the spoon into her mouth.  That's annoying, but still mildly cute. I mean, she's adorable.

Ya know what's worse? When Jonah starts screaming in his high chair because he's finished about half of his turkey dog, apple slices, crackers, and watermelon, and he wants to get down.  So then she's turning her head at a weird angle, but opens her mouth, like she knows I can't feed her sideways! Gaaaahhhhh! So I'm mean hollering at Jonah,
"HUSH! NO WHINING! WAIT PATIENTLY!" He looks at me like I must be from outer space, and can I please send his mother back down to earth.  Now she's looking at me, she laughs and I sneak in a bite. She spits out 90% of it, I scrape it off her chin with the plastic spoon and shove it back in her mouth, and this time only 40% comes back out.  We do that a few times. Less than a full minute later Jonah starts whining again, repeat baby acrobatics to see him.  I angrily slam down the baby food, get up and drag Jonah's high chair into the kitchen and out of view.  I tell him, "You need to eat your food.  No whining."

I come back to feed the baby her carrots and breast-milk puree, and she decides she is not on board with this endeavor.  She now cries every single time I manage to get a bite in her mouth.  "BUT YOU LIKED IT YESTERDAY!!!! PLEEEEEASE! UUUGGHHHHH!"  I hear Jonah copy my final growl sound from the kitchen, "UUUGGGHHH!"  I'm so annoyed I can feel my face getting hot.  I'm a very cold natured person, wearing sweaters and hunting down blankets when people get all liberal with their air conditioners, so this means I'm for reals mad.

I yell at no one in particular, "I HATE FEEDING BABIES!  THIS IS GROSS!  WHY IS THIS SO HARD!? I HATE THIS! AAAARRGGHHH!"  I decided this was a mommy fit and it needed to end.  I took the 70% of the food she didn't eat back into the kitchen, put it down calmly, and then wiped Jonah's tray and got him down.  I put him down.  I went back and wiped off the baby and put her in her exer-saucer thing.

I felt like crying.  You may think this is a little dramatic if you are a person who doesn't have children, or has never had two children very close in age, or you did but you forgot all the tough stuff and you now just shell out wisdom like, "Enjoy every second, because you'll blink and they're all grown up!" To which I say please read this article.  If you were as sleep deprived and exhausted as I was because of long baby-filled night, you would be cranky, too. {I was up nursing the baby until after 1 am, then little toddler comes running and crawls into the bed at 3 am, and then baby wakes up at 4 am, so I put her into bed with me to do the whole side-lying nursing so I don't have to get out of bed and sit in the chair, and then I wonder if that was really the best idea, because now there are two grown ups and two babies in our queen sized bed, and why didn't we buy a king size a few years ago?   Then toddler wakes up before 6 am wanting to play, so I let him play in his room for a while as the baby nurses some more but doesn't really wake up.  Then I am forced to surrender to the "Go Down-Tairs!" whine/beg/yell combo the toddler has mastered, so I make sure baby is asleep then grab my pants and carry him downstairs to put on a Thomas video and give him a greek yogurt and some cheerios to shut him up, so I can lay down in the recliner and sleep until the baby wakes up an hour later.}

I looked at the time, reasoning that we had about an hour and half before we had to be out the door to go eat dinner with someone, and thought about the unseasonably beautiful weather (you know outside time just seems to heal you), and announced, "We're going to the park!"Jonah starts yelling, "Pay-Gown! Pay-Gown!" (playground, because he just prefers to say playground to park, I don't even know why).  He does love the playground though.

 I say, "YES! Playground! We need to get outside." I take off his dirty pajamas, and give him a puzzle he hasn't seen in a few days so I can dash up the stairs and grab him a clean change of clothes.  I quickly run up the stairs, grab his shirt and shorts from the drawers, and run back down the stairs praying the whole time, "God please don't let him hurt the baby!"  Usually when she's in the saucer he leaves her alone, especially if he's distracted.  Also, it's not like he can easily sit on her or attempt to pick her up from that position, so the most damage he can do is like hitting with a toy type of thing.  I bring the baby with me upstairs 98% of the time I go, but when I know exactly what and where I am going to grab something, I sometimes decide to just made a run for it (literally).  So I'm doing that and hoping she doesn't start screaming.  When I came back down, this is what I found:

I just kept laughing with them.
This happened for like ten minutes straight. At some point John came home and went upstairs, and I was too mesmerized by these little clowns to really talk, so I just tried to capture a little more of it.

It was so freaking adorable. Sorry the lighting is pretty bad because the baby is in front of the window, but you can hear the good stuff.  It was the most laughter she has ever let out.  It made me happy.  It made the disgusting feeding worth it.  I love them.  I love my life.  I love this. We did go to the park after that.  Then eating out, then church, then bath and bedtime, and a repeat of the long night again.

Parenting is hard, but it's worth it.  I wish I had more time to blog, and exercise, and clean, and read.  I dream about going back to be a teacher, and I love reading articles on new classroom ideas.  But this is my season, the baby/toddler times.  I've been in this season for three years now, although I only have a two year old, because last month marked the first day we started foster parenting.  I know it will go by fast, and some days are delightful, and they do go by quickly.  Then other days are disgusting and exhausting and long.  I alternate between guilt tripping myself out with thoughts like "all those people struggling with infertility would be happy to have your little mess-makers, and women in China are forced to visit an obgyn every 3 months to check that they aren't pregnant, and are made to get abortions if they've already had one child..." but then I give myself a little grace and say it's OK to be frustrated, I just can't dwell on it.  I have to turn it around quickly and bring the tone back to love and laughter. A good friend of mine said she says, "Mommy needs Jesus, too.  I'm sorry." I've been using that line a lot lately.

This is my job for now, and I am trying to become more intentional about it.  Then sometimes I get a little gem, a little surprise present of my babies just cracking each other up, and it is all beautiful again.