Not for the Faint of Heart

oh Motherhood! Oh how I love being a mother!!! well obviously i’m about to have baby #4 in less then 5 years. That being said when anyone tells me i have my hands full i always respond with how much i love it. I usually get something to the affect of how relaxed i seem or something to that degree to which i am quick to assure (mostly new moms with only 1 kid) I am not nearly that calm that this job is a lot of work. let me repeat this Job of mothering is A LOT OF WORK!!!!! I would not take back my choice but man somedays i am so worn out i can’t help but zone out, maybe cry, forget to eat, or yes scream along with them. There is no break in mothering you are mom 24 hours a day 7 days a week and although i think its done when they move out i look at my mom and my grandma and i realize wether they are 30 or 50 my job will not be done. It will be changed but not done.

Today though, today I am reminding myself why I choose this. Why I embrace God’s calling for me to be mom. Because he did, he blessed me and choose me to love and raise 3 of his precious sons and 1 of his soon to be born daughters. They are a blessing and i am thankful for them. and i need that reminder today, today on one of my toughest days of mothering yet.

We have been pretty lucky in our life after 5 years of life with 3 boys we’ve only seen the inside of the hospital for them three times. once when harvey was 2 and cut his eyebrown open and once for ollie about a year ago when he got a cut on his eyelid and once when harv’s blood sugar went wacky (how is it that levi the kid who has not been in the hospital but is our most daring most active? ). Today however we woke up bright and early for a scheduled hospital visit for Ollie to have surgery.  You see for those that don’t know we started our journey in January to find out that Ollie is having trouble with his hearing and as a result has a significant speech delay. It was decided that tubes may be the answer and so today we did that.

we have been blessed with lot’s of prayer. We arrived, they checked him in, gave him some meds to make him loopy. oh was he loopy!!!! totally had us laughing in tears. they carried him away him sill laughing at the nurse playing with an oxygen max. and then about 20 min later they called us back to our sweet baby who now had tubes. and so began our tough tough day. from that point forward that sweet boy cried and cried and cried. he cuddled me for a minute then wanted his daddy. and cried and cried and cried. had some juice, got in the car, fell asleep in the car, woke up 40 min later and screamed harder then i’ve ever heard and didn’t stop for hours. he’d go down to a wimper maybe even stop for a few seconds but he just cried. it broke my heart. i was hungry and thirsty, and well #4 was on my bladder. i took the 30 second breaks where i could. but i’ll be honest by 1pm my nerves were shot! and then at 1:30 he crashed cold in my arms and i finaly got to lay him down!

Yeah this mothering thing is not for the faint of heart. you try seeing a piece of you cry for 5 hours, scream so hard his body shakes, and look so miserable and not find your own heart broken to a million pieces. My nerves were shot, i was hungry, i cried, but truly i tell you i was so thankful to be holding that sweet boy. Motherhood may be hard, i once heard its like seeing your heart walk around outside of you and that is true, but it is also the most rewarding the most amazing thing i have ever done!!!!!

———– For those following Ollie’s story this is how it goes with links to pics and updates (sorry you have to do a little work to see the pics cause well i don’t have the capacity to figure it out right now, forgive me) —————-

- noticeable speech delay

-tested, diagnosed with a communcation of 9 month delay

- hearing tested (only hear about 50% and loud sounds)

- decided on a treatment of tubes to drain fluid in ears restricting hearing

-started speech Therapy

-said Mama for the first time

-surgery for tubes

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A time and a place

Oh my is God and life a crazy thing. I am blown away right now about how he is answering prayers i’ve had, changing my husband and myself, growing us, bonding us, giving us vision both for the future and showing us why things past happened they way they did. This season is pretty much a non stop every day we say or do something and then he shows up somewhere saying or showing us the exact same thing constantly affirming our path. Its kind of exciting! and well let’s be honest i may need to go back and reread when the heart waits as the impatient must do something personality in me is chomping at the bit begging to run but oh would me sweet friend who gave me that book assure me that i need to relax and be patient and wait. Everything has a God picked time and place.

No more real was that for me tonight. We had our life group as we always do on wednesday nights and one of the guys in our group who is really running with the mobilize vision of our church shared about this training he went to in Portland. i didn’t know until tonight but he went to a SOMA training. I’m pretty sure God didn’t want me to know til tonight cause if i’m honest my initial reaction was a little taken back. We have experience with SOMA we actually really love the vision but at the time when it was first brought to our attention it was one aspect of a larger vision of a church that while had good points also had things that just didn’t resonate with us. and no matter how hard we prayed and no matter how hard the people we loved who were involved wanted us to be involved we just didn’t feel God calling us that way. and so as i sat tonight and heard how our church vision was headed down this path my gut reaction was a little taken back wondering what is this going to look like, are we again going to not feel called down this or did we in fact miss something 3 years ago? and then i thought of that church and the community and what it looks like right now and how my husband and i love the vision of it and where they are at now and wish we were part of it or something like it and the things that didn’t resonate before do resonate now and how a couple months ago i began to really question wether or not that was something we were meant to be a part of and if we are now suppose to go back in time so to speak and join in. and there is so much more to that conversation things that were said or prayed that just didn’t sit right that make me now question our choices even thought at the time we were so convicted. It hit me heard tonight feeling a little like crap God did i miss something?

and then I heard him….. God’s timing is a funny thing i tell you. It hit me just this afternoon as i read interupted she spends a chapter talking about New Austin church versus other churches and she essentially says how grateful she is for the typical christian church subculture. and that even though she is now doing church in a way totally different, more gospel based and less about production. how she is focused more on the going aspect of the great commision then the bringing aspect that we still need to give credit to the churches whose focus is to bring people in. That different people need to be ministered to in different ways and that if those churches didn’t exist that there would be a lot of people not being ministered to. And you know what? As i sat tonight and listened and processed i found that encouraging. It was God’s voice assuring me so sweetly no i didn’t miss something 3 years ago or 2 years ago when we prayerfully made descision. because at that time our marriage, our finances, us as an individuals were in a place where we needed to be ministered to. we needed to be part of a church community where they had the time and the resources to pour into us as God worked to rebuild our foundation. we were in no place to be out giving ourselves away. We needed to recieve christ in a way we hadn’t before and that’s what we did. He even showed me how when we first got involved with the church we did at the time i in my typical self saw a need in their mops ministry and volunteered and after the first 1/2 I ended up stepping down recognizing i was not in a place to pour into moms like i wanted but rather needed to focus on my family. But  now 3 years later its different. i have grown, my family and marriage have change, we have surrendered and laid ourselves down for him in a way we hadn’t three years ago as much as we wanted to and so now is the season for us to not be part of a church that is all about its internal body but to be outward focused, to be missional in all aspects of our lives, and to do church a new and different way. Not a better way just a different way.

So tonight I’m grateful for the vision of where i was, the vision of where we are headed, and the vision to see it in the moment. I’m grateful for his little audible assurance that i didn’t miss something but rather that each has a time and place and this season is different then the last.

Hijacked

Its been 6 months since I updated my blog. I can’t really put into words why that is. I look through my journal for the last few months and I can tell you there is not tangible reason for it except the one we all know to well “busyness”. But it’s not really busyness that has kept me away I feel like my world is in the process of being hijacked. I don’t know for what purpose yet but I know despite that I feel busy my calendar is not as jam-packed as we have started saying No to lots. we did 1 birthday party not 2, we did family time last weekend not parties, we did 1 easter this year, and we celebrated christmas at home not driving all around the county to see every possible relative. I have even set aside a good portion of my  homeschooling ambitions this year and we have settled on one more year of Harvey home full-time before we begin what we hope will be a hybrid journey. (more on that another day) It feels good when I look at the calendar and I know that the exhaustion I feel has nothing to do with “busyness”. On the other hand the exhaustion is real and has no tangibleness to it, at least not yet anyway. Let me try to explain, bear with me, this is probably just as much for my own processing purposes if not more than to really share what is going on in our family for those of you who love is; because to be honest like I said there is no tangibleness to it.

So when Tyler and I first got together some 7 years ago we met because we were both signed up and excited to go on a missions trip to Scotland both for different reasons both on different paths prior but both knowing that we felt a call to a post christian culture. That has been a big part of our lives ever since. We regularly reevaluate the calling, pray on it, ask God what he wants us to do with it. We have applied for missions organizations researched others but God always shutting doors. and Shutting them for good reason I might add. one year it was about us learning to depend on him financially, that was a big and awesome year, I’d say contender for both the hardest year and the most rewarding. One year it was about stripping us of what we thought our life and marriage were to look like and rebuilding it wiping away the things we had corrupted his plan with. One year it was just about focusing inward on us and our children. In 7 years we’ve had all kinds of seasons and I’m pretty sure if I wrote a list of exactly every season we have been through i could in 20/20 see how that season has built us for a future calling.

So anyway with that in mind as we’ve gone through our season we have slowly shed and changed things about ourselves and our walk. We are slowly learning what is to be christ-like. I’ve heard said changes be called counter cultural and I like that description of them, it is more than fitting and I feel the tension of that in a good way.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well it feels as though we are getting close to that calling, I know ultimately God will always be working and we will probably repeat some of the said seasons but for the first time in a long time we are wrestling with a tension we both agree means God is calling us into something we just aren’t sure what yet. We have been talking to through the same things we have always talked through about being a christian in a post-christian culture, we have talked through the church and religion and community and where God is in this things. We have talked through our beliefs and how we act upon them cause let’s be honest our actions say more than our beliefs themselves. We are soaking in every scripture, every prayer, and every sermon, and every book we can get our hands on that might give us a glimpse of clarity in this season. To some degree we have pulled inward as it all feels a little overwhelming, the tension is strong and with no clear vision of what to do with it we are struggling.

As you can see I haven’t even described what it is we have been sitting in the tension of. That’s where the exhaustion comes in. We are convicted on blessing the bless, and convicted on calling things ours. We are struggling with the ministries and the church we are involved in and how the fit into what God is calling us to. We want to live a surrendered life a life where we are washing the feet of the people God puts before us. We want a life that is not about us but about him. and the tension of doing that in a culture that is self-centered is hard and overwhelming and well scary at times. We don’t want to defend our faith but at times we feel like we have to defend God’s work in our lives. There is this sense of letting go of control where the spirit is slowly hijacking us. we are willing but still unsure and as such are slightly reluctant.

A line you hear a lot in our house right now is “It’s not about you it’s about me[him]“. It became a regular line about a month ago but really its been the theme since september. Twice now since september i have done something thinking it was about me getting something for me. the first i returned to a bible study I love but had taken a break from and the second i went on a woman’s retreat with my church. I joined the bible study for 100% selfish reasons i wanted to drop my kids for 2.5 hours in an awesome childcare program while I got to chit-chat with friends. I promise that was my sole reason for joining but I hadn’t been there more than a month when a speaker spoke on this idea of all of us having a friday moment (RE:Good Friday) when you realize Jesus didn’t come with a promise you thought he had and i shared my story of our marriage and a week later God called me out and said use it to help someone else. SLAP!!!! Sherrie you are not in this bible study to chit-chat and have a good time you are here because someone needs to hear your story of God rebuilding a marriage. Sherrie it is not about you it’s about me! Then in March i went to the retreat as a prego mama with 3 small children I’m tired. I am desperate for me time and i couldn’t wait to go, to sleep and rest in his quiet and hear awesome speakers and be filled up with truth and have my world shocked. well my world was shocked alright nothing resonated, i got oh 20 min to myself (I Timed it). By Saturday night i was in tears the weekend was over and i had in no way soaked up any of him or been filled and i needed to be up early to return to the real world. I was heart-broken I cried to my husband on the phone as i told him how i missed the quiet reserved indiv time because i prayed with a friend instead and i told him how i didn’t get a nap because i was talking with a first time mom about mommyness and trusting God. I told him all about how sad i was i missed an early ride home and instead prayed with 2 other girls. I was a mess and bless his heart he kept his mouth shut til i got home. I got home the next morning still crying about my ruined weekend only to sit in church and have it hit me…. Sherrie this weekend wasn’t about you: you are right the message didn’t resonate because it wasn’t about you, it was about me. It was about you praying with my beloved daughters. It was about you writing prayers in journals that blessed the woman who received them. It was about you speaking truth and encouragement into my sheep. It wasn’t about you, I am enough for you you can live on my strength this weekend was about you doing my work. SLAP!!!! let’s just say my husband laughed when I told him what I heard God say in church as he told me what he bit his tongue on saturday night and as I repeated back what I had just been saying thursday before I left for the retreat.

and so its our theme that we are embracing…. It’s not about us it’s about him. and so here we sit in the tension of living that out, living out what it means to life a life hijacked by the spirit, where we surrender to his will all the time. we are asking big questions of ourselves and feeling the exhaustion of daily surrendering our wants, our entitlements, our needs in order to feed his people, love his people, live for him. We don’t know totally what he is calling us to or what it is we are supposed to do with this ultimately if anything. but we do know that for right now in this season our mission is to let him hijack our moments for his glory and so we are trying.

do you kick yourself?

Do you ever kick yourself after you leave somewhere for not saying the thing that was running through your head? Yeah that’s me tonight so that is spurring on this post. I felt that tug to say something at our small group tonight and didn’t. i don’t really know why i didn’t but i didn’t and when i got in the car my husband expressed that same tug and that same kick in the ass for himself for not saying what we shoulda. So now I’m saying it if for no one else’s benefit but my own for that future moment when i don’t say it again.

Ok so here it is. Our topic of sermon this week was on intimacy in marriage mostly sexual i don’t really know i missed it i was running a 5k and didn’t bother to download the podcast but really the topic is not totally relevant. The topic of sermon lead us to talking about marriages and struggling in our marriage and about being open and honest with others about those struggles. Which lead to a conversation about having alter calls for prayer for couples who were struggling in their marriage. Anyway my husband (whom i agree with) expressed his sadness that when our pastor does that no one actually goes up to receive prayer. It was then expressed back to us (which in part i agree with and i say in part because i agree and get it but i am convicted in that i don’t think this is what God would want of us) that people don’t go up because 1 it’s not the right forum for that kind of prayer and 2 you don’t want to be that couple that everyone then knows struggles in their marriage.

Ok so i kept my mouth shut but here it is…

I get that and like i said i agree with that. Maybe it’s not the right forum I mean it is the end of a service in a large group and we don’t have the time or resources to give the needs of each of those struggles. I agree but I feel convicted because there is no better cure for a broken struggling marriage than that of prayer. No one is asking you to share every detail they are simply saying if you are struggling we would like to pray for you and to be honest i don’t know one married couple who couldn’t benefit from a little prayer. I’ll be honest i always thought my grandparents had the perfect marriage and then a couple of years ago i learned about an argument my grandparents were in the middle of and i was blown away! i seriously thought they were above this they hold each other on pedestals they are the couple I’m sure will die together they are that much in love. If they can have major fights 50 years into their marriage then I’m sorry we all can use a little prayer in our marriages! we are broken people and broken people have broken marriages that is reality.

Now as for not wanting to be “THAT” couple. let me repeat WE ARE ALL BROKEN!!!! AND BROKEN PEOPLE HAVE BROKEN MARRIAGES!!! We are not all broken in the same way but we are all broken and therefor no judgment!

So then the conversation went on to be what’s next. How do we deal with this brokenness. And it was said that that type of altar call for prayer was not the way. and that even in a small group setting like ours it was probably not the best forum.

Again I kept my mouth shut. and again i half hazardly agree it does seem kinda not the right forum for all of us to spill all the ways in which our marriage sucks. I agree because again what benefit does it do to put it all out there with no resources to fix, change, help. But again here is what i wish i woulda said. It benefits us because we need prayer! and Prayer benefits us!!! Really people it does!! I promise we may not always see the fruits of prayer but prayer is fruitful!

Here’s the thing that has been running through my head and tugging at me all night. We are made for community we desire community and we desire to be known and to have vulnerability in relationships. But if we continue to justify our way out of those opportunities we are never going to experience that incredible intimacy that God desires for us!! And i know it seems awkward and scary, it does, the world says it is for heaven’s sake! But it seems that way because the world says that brokenness & those struggles are dirty laundry and we shouldn’t put it out there for all to see. But i want to tell you the world is wrong! Those struggles that we are experience, that so-called “dirty laundry” is not a bad thing, it is God working on us. It is his opportunity to prune and grow us and it his opportunity to be glorified. So yeah I’m not saying every moment is a great moment to put it out there but there are good moments to put it out there because sometimes we go through a struggle so that God can use it to glorify himself and make things new and redeem things!!

Here’s how i know this. I have experienced one of those broken dirty laundry taboo things in my marriage and let me tell you God used it to 1 bring me closer to him and 2 to prevent it from happening to someone else. 3 years ago my husband and i dealt with an inappropriate extramarital relationship. Seriously the moment it came to surface I didn’t know what I was going to do, but in the moment broken I went before God and handed it to him and i saw him work a miracle! Crazy miracle! He redeemed it, he redeemed us, and redeemed our marriage. There is still of course fall out from it trust issues and such a lot of struggles we have now can trace back to roots from 3 years ago. But so can a lot of good. I have never felt closer to God, I have never seen him work the way I did that night. It’s a crazy story for another day. But here it is because in that moment we were vulnerable enough to go to people we trusted and say we are struggling we met couples who had been there done that and could now pour into us and they did! because we were vulnerable enough to stand up in service and say hey we are struggling and can’t pray anymore we had friends and people we didn’t know who didn’t know what was even happening lay hands on us and pray crazy to the point prayers that have blessed us. and because we were vulnerable enough to share our story we have been able to speak into at least 1 other couple’s life that i know of who was dealing with exactly the same situation as ours. aside from them we have also had other individuals over the last couple years come back to us and thank us for sharing with us because they have been encouraged in their own marriage by what we have gone through.

So no maybe an altar call for prayer isn’t the place to lay it all out there but i would challenge all of us to be a little bit more vulnerable and a little more counter cultural and put it out there and say hey i’m broken and struggling. you don’t have to share all the “dirty laundry” details if you don’t want. But remember God uses our struggles and you don’t know how he may use yours.

Ok that is all. that is what I wish I woulda said

“7″ Final thoughts

Ok i have finished it!!! I still suggest you read it! I loved it!!! So here are my final thoughts on chapter 6 and 7!

Chapter 6: Spending

So I shared my point about overwhelming support for socially concious companies. and I am still trying to figure out what that will look like for our family but i’m pretty sure we will do even more shopping with such companies and less with big chain stores. Some of the companies we love that i wanted to share are Toms, Collabrative World, 31 bits, Remnant Uganda, Roma Boots, Roozt. Jen has her own list of companies in the back of the book.

Another point made in Ch 6 which really struck me was when Jen was talking about church spendimg. She talks a lot about the over spending & how we have accustom to the feast & we avoid the fast. But she mad a great point that left me wondering why i even myself sugar coat the truth & minimize the sacrafice that i am willing to make for jesus. She said in reference to the early church “It cost believers everything. and they still came.” Crazy huh???? nothing sugar coated & called to give everything including their life & people still flocked to hear the word. & here we are generations slowly turning their backs.

Chapter 7: Stress

There wasn’t much here i didn’t already know about the importance of taking rest and sabbath. In the book Jen pauses 7 times a day to pray. I love this! I love the idea of this and I going to try doing this. I’m setting alarms in my phone to remind me ( i tried this before it didn’t work, but we will try again). She mentions a book seven sacred pauses which i plan to look into. I have been over the last couple years trying to bring scripture more into our daily routine and i think this may be helpful. I notice the more i’m in the word the better mom i am the better wife i am  the better example of christ i am.

Well that is my take on 7. Overall i really liked it, I was reminded of practices i have lost habit of and i was inspired to new ones.

“7″

So i havn’t been great about blogging my thoughts as i go through the book 7. But mostly cause i’m still processing my way through it. I’m into chapter 6 right now the spending chapter. More on that later. First let’s break down the first 5. I promise i wont be to wordy.

Chapter 1 & 2: Food and Clothes

For food i ended up doing a mini smoothie fast and for clothes i did a mini version of dress month which i did a couple years ago. Both chapters were good reminders of why we have made the choices in our home to eat whole foods and let’s processed foods. And clothing week prompted me to give the boys my large dresser and to move my stuff into a much much smaller dresser, which of course prompted on a purge of clothes for everyone!

Chapter 3: Possessions. Oh man this is the chapter that worked me!! So here is the deal the week before i started reading this chapter i downloaded an app called home library. (which i love by the way) Anyway the app is designed to better help you keep track of your home library, one of the features however tells you aproximatly how much your library is worth and let me tell you i had only touched the boys room and ours was already worth thousands of dollars. Well the two combined prompted some very extreme purging. Well see for yourselves…

That’s not even all of it, that’s only 1 of the 3 car loads worth of stuff i purged. and all of it is intended to a friend who is having a garage sale to raise money for her adoption. I can’t tell you how good it felt to purge so much stuff from our home. But more importantly it felt good to give the stuff we purged to someone with a face the money is helping a little girl be adopted into a family. Its all very real people, we didn’t sell it to make ourselves money and we didn’t drop it off out goodwill for some random person we put it with a face and name of someone in need. That was something that challenged me about the posessions chapter, not just the idea of purging (which i do several times a year) but the idea from a quote by Shane Claiborne that the as christians don’t know the poor because we can give through organizations like goodwill. I think that will forever change the way i donate!

Chapter 4: Media

So at book club we broke out into small groups and one of the girls commented that this is probably not a chapter that was really stretching for me as we are all about limiting media in our home. and that is something i thought about all week. After all we own 1 tv it sits in our room and is only used for my husband to play video games when kids are in bed and the occasional movie. we don’t actually  have access to television. We do however love HULU and netflix, we have an ipad which my son thinks is his, we have 2 iphones, a macbook and and a mac. and our sons have an ipod mini. So while we drasticly limit the media in our home in comparison for a household with only 2 people who can really use the media i feel that we still have a lot. I thought about what a media purge would like for me and i realized it wasn’t about limiting the media it was about using the media wisely. A quote at the end of the chapter is what prompted me to this it reads “I discovered others didn’t need me to be as wired as i thought. Most of my media time was about me.” That killed it for me. I don’t feel the need to not be wired, i love seeing what my friends are doing and for the most part its the only way i can communicate with some friends as they live far away or our schedules just don’t mix, and well phone time with small kids isn’t the easiest thing in the world. So apps like instagram and facebook these things are a blessing and i love them and I am not convicted to fast from them. But what i a convicted to do is stop and ask myself before i post is this about me or this truly something i would share if i was in a face to face, will this benefit someone? I havn’t done a total 180 but i’m working towards it. Less useless FB posts and more quaility conversation engaging posts.

Chapter 5: Waste

I am still processing what if anything God would have me take from this chapter. So far all i can think is we are probably going to come up with a better system for recycling in our home. Its not that we don’t do it its that we started being lax about it. Other than that the things she talked about in terms of buying local or second hand so that the waste upon production is lmited is something we do, we limited the usage of our 2ed car a lot! I am loving the idea of a home garden and composting but its not something we are able to do where we live, maybe when we move!

Chapter 6

This is where i am at now so i’m not really going to unpack it for you yet as i am not finished but i did have one thought that jumped into my head while reading it that stuck out in light of the recent Chik-Fil-A drama and this is it…

People all over are choosing to patron or not at places such as chick-FIL-a based purely on the religious beliefs of owners & yet everyday we as a people purchase merchandise from companies who have sketchy supplier practices paying unfair wages & in harsh conditions. (companies, mind you, who treat their employees in a manner we never tolerate for ourselves) & we do this for cheaper prices! What an impact we could make if we demanded the same social responsibility of those companies we do our food chain owners.

I’m gonna leave you there and finish my reading!

Things i want to remember

There are so many little things everyday that happen in our home that i want to hold on to, that i want to freeze and remember for all time. That’s a lot of why i blog, not to be a big time blogger or change the world, but just to have something to look back on when my children are grown and remember our day to day life.

Right now i want to freeze Oliver. He is growing to fast to quickly. weighing in at 18lbs 7 oz and measuring 28 3/4 inches. At just 10 months old he can stand on his “own balance” as Harvey calls it. i want to capture that belly laugh that only he of the three has. He’s not a cuddler like harv but he isn’t an independent soul like levi. He looks so much like harv did and yet resembles so much of levi also. I’m excited to watch him grow and learn his personality but for now can i just freeze him?

With Levi my heart swells! I dont want to freeze him as much as i want to capture him. capture that sweet delicate face as he zones out and falls asleep. i want to memorize those eyelashes!!! i can forget that ear piercing scream with great joy but i want to capture the sound of your sweet voice, the way you all after harvey, or sing songs, the way you clap your hands and should AMEN!

I think that photo pretty closely captures as much of you as I possibly can in a photo.

And Harvey i don’t want to evre forget the way it feels when you hug my arm, the way you cuddle up. i don’t want to forget how you insist on saying hi to everyone or how you tell everyone your name is “Harvey Abrams Williams” (notice the extra s on your middle name, you love middle names! you insist on knowing everyones!) I don’t want to ever forget how you ask to play eye spy everytime we get in the car or your version of eye spy. It includes naming animals that you pretend are on tops of buildings and the car. i want to always remember how you tell me you’ve loved me for 3 years and levi for 2 and ollie for 1. These are the things that make you you, that give you your own voice and i don’t ever want to forget you and your imagination and your huge heart!

No matter how hard these days are the years are short and i don’t ever want to forget the little moments that melt away and blend in!