a new blog

It's been a long time in coming: I have a new blog.  Please come join me over at A Continual Feast, and update your links and blog readers!

Thank you to all who have shared in my journey here at Being Sarah Marie, some of you for a very long time.  I'm looking forward to getting back to writing more consistently, and back to reading many of your writings and blogs, too!

Holy Week, more or less

Holy Week came and went, and we are still walking {hobbling, in my broken-footed state} around in a catatonic state, humbled and grateful and all the things good church makes you but also {mostly?} exhausted.  Nathan works at a church and we have young children and I was doing Holy Week things at home and at church on top of regular work and life and a broken foot, so, I think the exhaustion was to be expected.

The Internet In All Its Glory has moved on from Holy Week, because this is 2016 and everything moves fast.  Ten years ago one could write a blog post a week after an event and consider it timely, but not today, no; it is mostly short-form social media and even where it is long-form writing it is the day-of or at worst the day-after.

And then there's me and this sweet little bloggity.

I still haven't blogged about things that happened almost three years ago that I truly meant to record in this little family space of ours.  So you won't be surprised if I'm sitting down to share a few glimpses of our Lent and Holy Week now, will you?

{our Resurrection Garden}

{a Maundy Thursday foot washing}

{the making of the hot cross buns, with little helping hands adding the raisins}

{the coffee beans, earned through small daily sacrifices noticed by Mama, and transformed into jelly beans on Easter}

{the Easter baskets}

{at church on Sunday morning}

{feasting and general festivity with friends}

Easter Sunday was a full day, and we ended up postponing our usual plastic egg hunt for the girls to another day, so a couple of days later, when it was particularly sunny and nice out, we had an egg hunt in the yard.  They wanted to wear their Easter dresses again!

 We hope you are having a joyful Eastertide!

our Ree girlie these days

We are in the process of attempting to determine whether Ree might be an undiscovered genius or not.  On the one hand, she is nearly two and seems perfectly capable of making the "N" sound - for example, if she wants to nurse - but chooses not to apply this sound to say the name of her dear big sister Nell.  On the other hand, when asked to say "Nell," more often than not her smiling response is, "Dumb!"  As to whether or not this is intentional and a mark of her giftedness, only time will tell.

I'm sharing some photos I took of her this past fall, because I was too busy to even look them over at the time when I took them, much less share them and jot down any notes or memories about Ree at the time.  So here we have photos from November combined with memories from... now.



She walked around the time she was one, and hasn't stopped moving since.  A common exchange between Nathan and myself is, "Oh, look at Ree doing ____.  Can Nell do that?"  Nell loves to have fun, but tends to err on the side of caution, whereas Ree will attempt to climb anything, reach anything, run anywhere, and do anything she can think of.

She started singing recognizable melodies when she was fourteen months old; we noticed it while visiting Grandma and Grandpa in California, and while I was wondering if I was imagining it (typical overly-proud mother, of course), my Dad commented on it first.  "Marie is singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star!"  And so she was.

Nowadays she uses singing to communicate at least as much as she uses words: singing "Six little ducks" when she sees a picture of a duck, "Rain, rain, go away" accompanied by wild jumping when she wants to go out and jump in puddles, "Five little monkeys jumping on the bed" when she wants to hold my hands and jump up and down, and even "Abide with me" to point out the similar cross shape on her plastic cereal bowl that reminded her of the image on the virtual CD cover that comes up when we listen to that recording on my phone.

A few of her favorite things to do include playing amongst and hiding behind the long curtains in the master bedroom, waiting quietly for me to proclaim, "Where could Marie be?!", and then yelling, still enshrouded in drapes of white, "BOOOO!"

She loves to play outside, particularly when it involves collecting gravel and small pebbles from our street, digging in the dirt, or helping with sundry outdoor chores like leaf-gathering.  (I wish I could say the leaf-gathering was all concluded in the fall when it ought to have been; sadly, the process is still ongoing here in March, since we never quite finished before winter set in!  But she is as eager to help bag up the leaves now as she was in the autumn!)

She loves grapes, clementines, kiwi, strawberries, eggs, potatoes, and rice, and despises cheese.  She hates sitting in her high chair and makes knowns via pointing and gesturing and pitifully crying "Mama!" or "Dada!" that she would really prefer to spend mealtimes in one of our laps.  

Trains, books, the play kitchen, and the car table are lots of fun, but nothing compares to the joy of putting shoes, boots, clothing, underwear, socks, and hats on and off all day long -- whether her own or someone else's.  I have to keep a watchful eye on the dirty laundry hamper, or Ree will often emerge suddenly decked in Nell's previously-worn pair of underwear, my bra, Nathan's dirty socks pulled up to her thighs, my black concert heels, and a winter hat from the hat basket to top it all off, of course.  

Her words include:
Uhbuh (other)
Muh (more)
Mah! (mine! a quintessential toddler word!)
Mama
Dada
Baby
Up
Down
Nuh (nurse)
Ashes (indicating she wants to do ring around the rosy... or perhaps she's just very liturgically inclined ever since the beginning of Lent?)
Hi
bye bye
dah! (yeah!)
No
eh-bow (elbow)
boo
ah duh (all done)
uh oh
shhhh
boom!
Aga (Uncle {Andrew})

Not a bad list in all, but the amount of frustrated screaming around here indicates that she wishes she had a considerably larger vocabulary at her disposal!



Lately she is all hugs and kisses and squeezes, and wraps her arms right around my neck, huddling her little body against mine for snuggles.  An adventurer by day and a snuggler by nap time, tired moments, and night -- oh, how we love this girlie.

a broken foot for Holy Week

In our household, I've spent the last nine years growing accustomed to hearing the phrase: “You weren’t being careful enough!” on a regular basis.  I know that this is more a symptom of Nathan's love for me than a criticism; the slightest accident on my part causes his fearful side to rear its head with utterances of cautionary advice.

Anytime anything happens – a twisted ankle, a slip on ice, a dropped bowl in the kitchen, a stubbed toe, a broken glass – this happens when one isn’t being careful. Nathan has made it his mission in life to teach me this underlying life principle, to write it on our doorposts and engrave it on our hearts and all that.

It’s true that I’ve been known to mindlessly wash dishes without focusing every ounce of my attention on the task at hand – now the faucet goes on to just the right level of water flow, now the dish in my right hand; now transfer weight for a moment to my left hand while I get a squirt of soap; back to the right hand, and so forth.

It’s also true that sometimes when I’m walking I’m thinking about other things than which foot is on the ground, which foot is in midair for a moment, and the precise angle at which I expect my metatarsals to graze the floor next.

So perhaps the man has a point.

Over the years he’s learned to decrease the cautionary words of advice, however well-intentioned they may be, and increase the empathy levels.  So, when I texted him on Friday to tell him I had tripped outside, dropped the baby (she's okay, thank goodness!), and injured the top of my foot, which was rapidly turning blue and swelling to the size of a golf ball, I received in response: “Oh baby!  Are you ok?” followed almost immediately by a phone call.  And not once in said phone call did he admonish me to be more careful where, when, and in what fashion I stepped with my right foot when walking out-of-doors. 

On Saturday afternoon, when I still couldn't put any weight on my foot without pain, that empathetic husband of mine drove me to an urgent care clinic where, after an hour of waiting, taking my temperature, asking me a series of inane questions unrelated to the obvious problem at hand, they finally did an x-ray and diagnosed me with a broken fifth metatarsal.  

Going into Holy Week seems like such a dreadful time to break one's foot.  

I can stump around the house slowly and painfully, to be sure, but the going is slow, the stairs are nearly impossible, and worst of all: no driving for the foreseeable future.  

I have things to do!  Holy Week menus to make and groceries to buy!  Easter plans to put into place!  Spring cleaning to be done!  Small children to care for!  Laundry to do, places to go, commitments to keep!  

Compounding the matter at hand, poor Ree was running a temperature today and wanted nothing but Mama snuggles and catnaps all day long.

And I found myself thinking that perhaps Holy Week is exactly the right time to break one's foot, after all.  

It's slowed me down to a childlike pace where I truly have no choice but to stop and let the little children come.

My every step is uncomfortable, to be sure, but can that even compare with the steps we remember this week: the slow and steady uphill steps of a man who carried his own cross?

A small broken bone in my foot?  The whole world is broken, and that is why he came.  Why he entered the world, lived among and loved the broken people, and finally, said, "This is my body, broken for you."

My broken foot will mend in time, but immeasurably greater is the truth that all the brokenness has already been overcome, and it is that celebration of resurrection wholeness that I limp towards at the close of this Holy Week.