I have not had a ton of time to blog lately. And so much of what I sit down to write about feels trite and shallow in the face of recent world events. But yesterday I read a wonderful bloggy entry by my friend Missy, and I just had to share it with you….it spoke to my heart, and is right in line with much of what we are discussing as we work through A Quest For More by Paul Trippe.  (Which, if you have not read it, is fabulous and I highly recommend it!)

For some background, Missy and her husband Walker have four young kiddos and are in the process of adopting a little girl from Ethiopia.

I hope you are as blessed by Missy’s thoughts as Jay and I were.  For those of you who do not like hot links embedded in text, click

HERE

to read her post entitled, “I Don’t Want My Children to be Happy!”

I put our favorite bread machine pizza dough recipe into the bread maker right before we left for (and were late for!) church.  For Valentines’ Day, we like to make personal pan pizzas. After separating the dough into six sections, we had this:

Get your toppings of choice ready. We like tomato sauce but have used alfredo in the past too. Other favorites are: fresh garlic, pepperoni, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, fresh chopped basil, and onions/peppers.

We start with a greased cookie sheet. Shape your dough into whatever form you like. It helps if you have really cute, chubby fingers for this step.

Some of us are very serious about shaping the dough.

All done! Before adding anything to our crust, we always brush a thin layer of olive oil onto our pizza. It adds such great flavor.

Let your brother add sauce to cover the surface of his pizza.  Wait patiently, this process can take awhile.

Sisters take even longer with their sauce.

Mustn’t forget the cheese! You can never have too much of this:

It’s time for toppings! Grab whatever you like. If you’re a kid, you’ll want to start with some uber-healthy pepperoni!

Sisters really like it when you make helpful suggestions for how they can top their pizza most effectively. Our most creative topping today was basil eyebrows for the face of Jonathan’s pizza.

Right before they went into the oven, our six pizzas looked like this:

While you’re waiting for your delicious pizzas to finish cooking in the oven, pour yourself a nice glass of red wine, and pose for a few gratuitous Valentines Day pictures!

It’s time to eat! Look what we made!

Happy Valentines Day, Everyone!

It’s been an inauspicious birthday week for him; our third child had surgery a few days ago, I am sick as a dog and so is he, and he’s been really slammed at work for a couple weeks now. There won’t be a ton of celebrating this weekend I’m afraid, but we are looking forward to some downtime and rest together as a family.

So, in addition to cooking him his favorite meal – lasagna – I am offering up the following list in honor of his special day. Here are, in no particular order, 39 things that I dearly love about my sweet, wonderful husband.

39 things I love about Jay…

1. that he’s mine

2. that he loves my cooking and tells me so, often, as well as anyone else who will listen!

3. his fierce love for each of our children

4. that I always feel safe and protected with him

5. the fact that he actually thinks I am more beautiful today than the day he married me

6. his amazing patience

7. his ability to just sit down and talk to most anyone, anywhere, anytime

8. that he likes to cook omelets in a plastic bag in a pot of boiling water

9. and somehow also finds time to make his own homemade yogurt for us

10. that he works hard for our family

11. that he loves to practice hospitality

12. the way he dances

13. his mind

14. that he can fix anything, and if he doesn’t know how, he will work on figuring it out till he can

15. his guitar playing

16. that he’s a gentleman: opens the doors, carries all the groceries, etc

17. that he loves to organize closets and cabinets

18. the way he lives out his faith every day in front of me and our children

19. that he buys me chocolates

20. that when I married him I got the best mother and father in law in the whole wide world

21. his amazing relationship with his parents

22. his humility

23. that he loves to fish

24. his innovativeness

25. that we share the same hopes and dreams

26. that he likes the beach as much as I do!

27. that he cuts his own hair

28. that he cuts all our boys’ hair

29. his love for family

30. his appreciation for so many different types of music

31. his attitude in the face of adversity

32. how much he loves to eat leftovers

33. that he regularly tries to send me out for some quiet and/or “girl” time

34. his wisdom and sensibility where finances are concerned

35. his affection for animals

36. his sense of humour

37. his generosity

38. that he loves God with all his heart soul mind and strength

39. that he doesn’t mind growing older…

Happy Birthday, Sweetheart! So glad to be alongside you in this journey we call life!

It was a hard week.  No one (the Mommy included) was too thrilled about resuming school work.  There was weeping, there was whining, there was gnashing of teeth. Ok, maybe no real gnashing, but we got pretty close!

Despite all this, things were looking up somewhat by Friday, and overall, we ended up accomplishing more than I would have thought we could. And there was some brilliance in the midst of the hardship, for this week, I finally got smart, and put my $5 roll of Ikea paper to work for me!

Each day during schoolwork with the older children, I struggle with how to effectively spend time with Josiah and alternately, how to prevent him from bringing constant interruptions to the flow of learning that is going on. It is hard, and admittedly, it is my least favorite part of homeschooling. When I complain to Jay that I am missing out on serious quality time with my preschooler, he reminds me of mothers who work outside the home, and never see their preschoolers between the hours of 8 and 5. That usually puts a stop to my whining. Ahem.

Nevertheless…I have continued to look for creative ways to engage my four year old, and earlier this school year I brought home this beauty from Ikea to help….

At $14.99 this is worth every penny!! Josiah has used the chalkboard and whiteboard happily for several months.  But on Monday, I brought out the drawing paper roll…and the real fun began! He put on his “smock”, we chose paints and brushes, and used these awesome little paint containers that my wonderful MIL bequeathed to us. (Thank you, Grammy Ruth…these are sheer brilliance!)

See the holes in the top? Just perfect for your paintbrush. After some trial and error, I thinned out the tempura paints with some water, and they were perfect for creating fine art!

When Josiah was done painting each day, I covered every paint container with that sticky saran wrap and we were able to keep the same set of paints out all week for him to use. He had a blast, and was so proud to show off his paintings!

I really like his use of color and mood in this one. Very modern.

This is a more traditional rendering:

Oh he is so yummy…

What I began today wasn’t a resolution per se…

I came across this on New Year’s Day. Hat tip to the ever-hilarious and very wonderful Missy.

The Bible in 90 Days is the very first thing I bought in 2010.

After looking it over, I decided it would be a helpful tool in accomplishing something I have always wanted to do: read the Bible through in it’s entirety, cover to cover. It seems almost shocking to me that I cannot at the ripe old age of 37 say I have ever done this. Oh sure, I have read my Bible. Portions of it so many hundreds of times I couldn’t begin to count. I have read whole chapters, whole huge segments of it in consecutive order, whole Testaments even at once, but have never quite accomplished what I think everyone has the privilege of doing: reading the entirety of Scripture as it was given by God to us. His whole book. Cover to cover. Genesis to Revelation. “In the beginning”…to…”The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen!”

We Christians today are so consumed with “Bible Study” – which is wonderful, I am not knocking it. But I do not feel that today’s church excels in a very basic aspect of the Christian walk: we do not, on the whole, train up our children, young people, or adults to actually pick up God’s word and just. read. it. I love what Charlotte Mason had to say on the subject of children and the Bible…

Let all the circumstances of the daily Bible reading–the consecutive reading, from the first chapter of Genesis onwards–be delightful to the child; let him be in his mother’s room, in his mother’s arms; let that quarter of an hour be one of sweet leisure and sober gladness, the child’s whole interest being allowed to go to the story without distracting moral considerations; and then, the less talk the better; the story will sink in, and bring its own teaching, a little now, and more every year as he is able to bear it.

Of course, we could all take the Bibles we already own, and segment the pages into 90 equally divided sections, but I was quite happy to spend my $14 on this nice, large-print edition!  I do not feel brave enough to even set a goal of doing this whole thing in 90 days…knowing me and my tendency toward initial exuberance and subsequent laziness, I would be ecstatic if I finished this in 6 months, let alone 90 days.

That said, I am going to do my ample best to complete my 12 pages a day in this before picking up other personal reading (children’s school reading excluded, of course!).  It is my hope that I will cherish the process, and that God will bless my feeble efforts to love and read His word more diligently.

I leave you with a simple yet profound thought from J.I. Packer:

God has spoken to man, and the Bible is His Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation.”

for Christmas are his

Gee, if he could only have his

Then he could wish you MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Now…as to what his Momma wants for Christmas: after seeing the difference in the pictures from my camera (top shot) and Auntie Jamison’s camera (other two pics, both of which I cropped from a MUCH bigger shot of 6 children, so it’s pixillated to the max!! <Classic Peg>….or however you say it in fancy camera speak), my wish is clear: I want Santa to bring me Auntie Jamison’s camera!

A good friend of our family’s spent much of the past week in the hospital with serious health concerns that appeared out of the blue; I am reminded that God is not surprised by these incidents, yet we in our humanity do feel shaken by such things.

And there are other rather serious concerns that weigh on my heart and mind…which makes this entry feel a bit frivolous truth be told.  But in the midst of various concerns, we continue to celebrate Advent, the Coming of Christ, and it has been wonderful to share this season again with our children, all of whom now cherish our Christmas traditions, and are excited about new ones.

One new tradition this year is the addition of lights outside to “festivize” our home! Little Josiah was adamant that he would like “Colorful Christmas Lights along the Roof of our House!” But Jay has not had much spare time to make that happen.  Aside from the fact that ladder-climbing is usually a precarious proposition for him given his physical constraints.

So we set our minds to decorations NOT involving Jay or the roof…and my little red-headed helper braved the freezing cold with me yesterday to finish out the lights lining the walk to our front door. Why we chose to string lights on the coldest day of 2009 I do not know…

Maybe it was because of the gorgeous sunset we got to enjoy while we worked:

And here is the finished product: I give you House of Horne Christmas 2009!

But on Sunday night, his grandparents brought over a little present for us all to open…inside were ornaments for each member of the family, including one for Jay and I. Taking his cue from Grammy, Josiah must have decided that even though it was not yet Christmas day, at least it was high time to start the giving and receiving of gifts. The next morning I found him hard at work trying to tie a piece of string around the same box Grammy’s ornaments had been packaged in.

“What are you trying to do?” I asked him.

“I need to tie the string on this box. It’s a present for you, Mommy!” he replied.

Of course I helped tie the string, which pleased him greatly. Beaming from ear to ear, he held out “his” present to me…

“Here you go, Mommy…it’s your Christmas present from me!” he said.

I opened the box to find these treasures:

A beautiful pointsettia ornament (strangely similar to the one my in-laws had given me just the night before).

A drawing of a turtle, done by Josiah himself.

And a magnetized chip clip.

“The clip is so you can hang my turtle picture on the ‘frigerator” Josiah explained to me. Well of course it is…how clever!

I love my present from my littlest guy! I love even more that at his tender age, he is learning that part of Christmas is about giving gifts to others, just as our Heavenly Father gave the greatest gift to us more than 2000 years ago.

into the microwave to warm them up before serving them to her family??

What happens at House of Horne is that you get Chips (and Bag!) Flambee (shout out to our good buddy Dave!)

Here is what it looks like after you stamp out the impressive-looking flames and douse the still-glowing embers:

Unfortunately, I cannot properly share with you the incredible smell that is created from such an occurrence happening in your very own microwave. You will just have to take my word for it: it is hideous!

Next time I’d like warm chips with our fajita supper, I will carefully place all chips into a microwave safe bowl before heating.

‘Nuff said.

And I can’t even bring myself to scold the child because I am so impressed with her creativity….I mean….on my best day, I am hopeless at making the hula hoop stay up around my hips. Heaven forbid I try to hula whilst reading the dictionary….how do kids do it?

It was difficult to take photos inside the symphony hall, but here are a few shots from the evening:

Shot of the pipe organ while we waited for the concert to begin:

Can you find Abigail in this photo?

The combined choirs with the directors in front:

And some close-ups just after:

I love this shot of our little songbird!