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Hawkeye’s Ode.
Hawkeye. Every time you laugh, I know you mean it. Your eyes are searching and your hand resting on my shoulder is a blessing to my core. Being your momma is a treasure and an honor and as often as you jump and hop and flit and wander off is as often as I think about how blessed and full…
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perspective. take twenty-eight.
Perspective. It’s a loaded word. You just drop it there and it means everything. I just did a search on my blog for the word “perspective” and gobs of posts filtered up because they featured the word. It’s a biggie. I’m always grappling with it, embracing it, dancing around with it, trying to see it with new eyes. It means…
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I will not define myself by my flaws.
Why do we define ourselves by the very thing we like least about ourselves? Victim. The shy one. Divorced. The girl with the scar on her left cheek. Like some dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps us low before anyone has a chance to push us back down. We do it with our homes. The house with the broken shutter. Right…
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slow down.
Lately my heart is beating to the mantra – “Slow down. Slow down.” I’m saying it to myself. I’m saying it to my husband. I’m saying it to the sky and to the wind and to the sunshine. And I’m especially saying it to the five littles who live under our roof and the one not-so-little who lives in another…
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real life conversations overheard.
Mosely and Bergen were chatting on the front porch. “Hey Bergen,” she says. “We have matching pants – both jeans.” “Yeah,” Bergen acknowledges. “Well, kind of, I guess,” Mosely changes her tone. “Your jeans are not really blue. They’re more like green and brown with dirt all over them.” To which Bergen Hawkeye responds, with a shrug of his eight-year-old…
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Prairie Primer – Beads
We’re near completion of book two in our Little House on the Prairie series. Our history study through this book has focused on the Osage Indians. The curriculum is full of great suggestions and good ideas for extra activities to enhance this unit of study. Five years ago I would have felt the pressure to cram all of the suggestions…
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the answer for the long days and the hard ones.
You’re sure the kitchen will never be clean. The yard can never stay tidy. The laundry will always be dirty. The dirt on the floors will always return. The water dripping from the tub can never be controlled. The mold fights back harder than you. The taste of hopelessness. The smell of it heavy and lingering on your clothes, like…
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The Two Nights Baby Timmy Was Missing.
Two long nights. For two very long nights Baby Timmy was missing in action. Baby Timmy. Otto’s precious sleeping/living/hang out blanket. (If you’ve ever seen Baby Timmy, you know “blanket” is a bit of stretch for that tired, tattered bit of has-been blanket.) But he loves it and we love Otto and so, by default, we all love Baby Timmy…
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cover blown.
Bergen is a night owl. I guess he inherited it straight from both of his parents. And occasionally a part of his solitary evening involves him lying in bed and working out plans to quietly enter our bedroom after we have fallen asleep and cuddling up under the covers with us for the remainder of the night. Now – I’ve…
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it takes years . . .
It takes years and raising children and late nights and early mornings and heartache and mending heartache to afford a person the opportunity to step back, look around, gather what you know (and what you’ll never know) and find some sort of peace with what is while still experiencing the pain of what the world takes from you – the…
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Merry Autumn Days
Merry Autumn Days By Charles Dickens ‘Tis pleasant on a fine spring morn To see the buds expand. ‘Tis pleasant in the summer time To see the fruitful land. ‘Tis pleasant on a winter’s night To sit around the blaze. But what are joys like these, my boys, To merry autumn days! We hail the merry Autumn days, When leaves…
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when play imitates life
These are the best conversations …… “Want to play with me momma?” “Sure – what should we play?” “Okay. I’ll be the son and you be the mom.” Umm. Alright.
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Sunday evening scratch scribbled on the blank side of a bulletin.
Grateful. People in a room. Strangers in so many ways. Words spoken into a microphone. Truth. Agony. Suffering shared and shared. We’re all a mess of ugly and grace, beauty and dark gaps. It’s all so much more than I could ever comprehend. And it bubbles up and trickles out and I wouldn’t stop it from splashing down my cheeks…
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Hey Clay: A Timberdoodle Review
