Today’s Truth from Small Mouths
“Not ALL babies in orphanages have China eyes.” - Ellie, in response to friends adopting from China
Bed etiquette
I had just stripped the bedsheets off Ellie’s bed and brought them downstairs to wash them. Ellie came running after me screaming, “Mama! You can’t leave my bed naked!”
It’s all about context
Toby: There’s just so many Mexicans! (referring to the number of dominoes in the Mexican train line during our game)
Mimi
Mimi: golfer, line-dancer, bush trimmer and card-player. Great-grandmother who flies alone with a broken foot and three flight changes. Oh yeah, and she’s two years away from 90. You go girl. 
The difference is noticable
Per Toby: Chihuahuas are small BOY dogs. Poodles are small GIRL dogs …..cause they’re fluffy. Now you know.
I know it’s a beautiful day, but….
Toby came outside and said: “I know it’s a beautiful day but there’s bees hangin’ around and I don’t wanna get stung so I’m stayin’ inside. OK?” Ah, a great example of how fear keeps us from so much of living.
mental floss
Caleb said he wishes his brain would stop remembering bad things. I asked what he meant and he said that bad movie, Coraline. admittedly, it was a scary movie, where a little girl enters a parallel world where her new ‘parents’ seem perfect – except they want her to sew buttons on he eyes. Yes, disturbing. But it got me to thinking of a play on words I heard once: mental floss. Sometimes we need a good length of mental floss to work out those bits and pieces of things still lodged in our mind. Images, words, thoughts, ideas that all remain wedged somewhere in the grooves of our mental processes that cause pain or grief. Mental floss. If I could patent and package it, I would.
Aaah…small successes
Toby looks up from his sandwich at lunch today and says: “Mama, congratulations, this bacon is really good.”
we are not superheroes
I was scrubbing the floor outside the room where Toby was playing a game on my iPod. Suddenly he yells out, “Whoever is making that scratchy sound needs to stop! You’re making my brain hurt so I can’t play my game. You need to be very, very quiet!” Of course my response to that was, “You can just put that iPod away if it’s a big problem!” He didn’t seem to have any issues after that. Hopefully by tomorrow we will have some definitive answer from our home buyers. I am ready for KNOWING. NOT KNOWING is terrible. Does this qualify as a control issue? We have had to postpone our inspection of our (potential) new house twice now because our (potential) buyers are extending this to the very last minute. DO you want the house or not? Really. That’s all we need to know. Sigh. In other news, talk around the house with the kids has centered on castles and superheroes (possibly connected in their brains as more awesome than real-life, now). Ellie says that if she had a superpower, she’d be a slime girl, who can throw slime on bad guys. Toby says he’d have a weapon that has a sheath that can change his weapon into whatever he wants it to be. He wishes we were a superhero family. (He said this with a great deal of sadness.) He said he wished that, but his wish didn’t come true. If you know Toby at all, you can see his head hanging with the great sadness of this. Precious.
updates along the way
We are waiting to find out if the people who have made an offer on our house have any counter-offers after the inspection. Anyone who has been to our house knows it is grand, with large, sunlit rooms and original woodwork. It was also built in 1920 and has the original windows, among other non-updates. Our hope is that our buyers love this house enough to JUST BUY IT, no matter what comes out of the inspection. While that has been consuming most of my thoughts, other snippets of things going on in my life right now include: - playing all the music for Good Friday and Easter sunrise services at church - getting preliminary staffing in place for VBS (should this make me as anxious as it does?) - completing paperwork for potentially replacing Toby’s hearing aid that we lost 2 weeks ago (nausea-inducing loss….) - filling about 200 plastic eggs for the church Easter egg hunt on Sunday (I got handed this job yesterday, when the original gal could no longer do it.) - trying to be smart about what I’m eating….the sunshine helps this! Peanut butter ice cream does not… - fast-forwarding to our vacation with another couple this summer to Washington State to hike. When I looked up the hiking in that area they mentioned that local wildlife includes mule deer, cougars, lynx, and black bears. Predators. Awesome. - and finally, in some back recess of my brain, I think about the house which we have placed an offer on, IF our house sale goes through post-inspection results, which we will move into this May. IF. IF. IF. I’m trying to guard my heart/mind from putting pictures on the walls and arranging our existing furniture in all of the rooms. But dang it, it’s tough. Amazingly enough, I’ve come to a peace about it all. God will do what He wants in this whole house adventure. We might just stay in this sunny, spacious home forever.
