Easter thoughts

I'm staying home today due to a resurgence in my dastardly cold, and I'm sad to miss the joy of celebrating Easter with my church family. For that matter, I'm sad to miss the cousins Easter egg hunt with family on the other coast, and dinner with our friends down the street. Even if I was well, we couldn't participate in all of those events, but I'm still blaming it on the cold. I did mention it is dastardly?

Anyway, as I stumbled out of bed for the DayQuil and ibuprofen, resigning myself to the fact that I would have to stay home in bed, I thought about why Easter is so special. It is even more joyful than Christmas to me (and I love Christmas!), but I don't know that I've ever considered why until today. Isn't the day God became Man equally as momentous?

Emphatically, yes! But here's my thought: the birth of Jesus is a miraculous event that changed the world forever...but he could have done anything after he was born. He was (is) God made flesh, a vessel of divine power and sovereignty on Earth. He could have chosen to destroy the world, rule over the world, turn the world over to the chosen nation of Israel, or, after realizing what it meant from a human perspective, chosen simply not to have taken our sins upon himself. He chose to die for all.

The hero of the story, hanging from nails on a cross while his life's blood pours out and soaks into the dry ground.

Those who trusted him, gave up everything for him, heartbroken and confused.

A tragedy, while the Enemy looks on in triumph.

Until Easter.

"We're Almost Adults!"

Those were the words (half-jokingly) uttered by my husband when I finished filling out our wills this morning. And you know what? It took me about twenty minutes, and that was with a headache, a baby pulling at my pant leg, and a preschooler whining to watch "Dora Snow Princess" on the laptop. But despite having to pause for a time-out (not for me!), I got it done.

Monday morning I'll call to make an appointment with a notary at our bank and it'll be all legal and official, and I can forget about it until we move or have an addition to the family.

I don't like to think about wills, because it's almost like I feel like I'm putting a sign on my back saying, "I'm all squared away, I can die now." As if that is somehow going to make it more likely for me to die early.

But even worse than that (irrational) thought is the (much more likely) possibility that Jon or I might leave behind a mess that could tear our families apart. We've both seen it happen to other families, even when there weren't young children involved. I hate even contemplating someone else raising my children, but without a will, a court of law will decide for me and that is completely unacceptable.

Now we have the peace of having a plan in place should the worst happen. It doesn't make the worst any more likely to happen, but it sure prevents a tangled mess of relationships and stress in the midst of grief.

If you don't have one in place, please, for the sake of everyone you love and care about, make a deadline for yourself NOW to remedy that.

Bee in my bonnet

So why did I suddenly get a bee in my bonnet to get this "responsibility stuff" taken care of? No, I'm not ill and don't expect to be ill...I haven't received any death threats over having the cutest children in the world...and I'm not headed to Libya to become a freedom fighter. The fact is, everything I'm planning on doing this month falls in the category of "very important but never urgent until it is too late". And that kind of stuff tends to get superseded by "not important but urgent" needs like laundry and dishes and watching the season premiere of America's Next Top Model to find out what the weird bubble-walking scene is all about.

Hence the arbitrary deadline.

I think the bee, however, is actually an offshoot of teaching/coordinating Financial Peace University at our church. We've been working our "Total Money Makeover" for three years, but there's a new energy to our efforts. We have our starter emergency fund in place (yet again) and this month we're completely paying off four debts. Instead of just running in place to keep it from going backwards, our "snowball" is finally gaining momentum and rolling down the other side of the hill. So now I'm looking at the other areas of our lives that have been neglected and I finally have the energy to deal with them -- and I'm making the time to do so.

Act Like an Adult: Week 1 Goals

It's here. March 1. Time to "Act Like an Adult".

Fortunately that doesn't mean that I can't spend the morning drawing castles and troll bridges on our chalkboard table with Aurelia. Or make funny faces at Baby Blaise until his belly jiggles to rival the likes of Ol' Saint Nick.

It does mean that I have three Big Girl goals this week:

1) Buy a waterproof fire safe for our important documents, a small cash emergency fund, and our back-up external hard drive.

2) Make a hard-copy list of ALL of our accounts, including account number, username, and password (if applicable). Place in said safe.

3) Sit down with Jon and actually fill out the will we purchased over three months ago from USLegalForms.com.

*Phew*...now my goals are out there and you can hold me accountable. :)

I'll update with progress later this week, and discuss why I think these steps are so important.

Gearing up for March

We're 20% of the way through 2011. Looking ahead at our plan for the year, it almost feels like the year is already gone. Time to get cracking on those goals!

To help motivate myself, because I'm a nerdy checklist kinda girl, I'm naming March 2011 the "Act Like An Adult month". All those responsible things that keep getting pushed to the back burner...they're going to the top of my to-do list. Finishing our will. Putting together a "legacy drawer". Buying a water/fire-proof safe. Acquiring renters insurance. Hurricane preparedness.

So keep your eyes open, folks. I've always said that you can't grow old if you don't grow up, but I need to at least pretend to be an adult for a month so I can go back to joining my three-year old in her world of imagination. March 1st. It begins.

Knowledge isn't judgemental

Yesterday over at To Love, Honor and Vacuum, Sheila sparked a bit of heated debate. Was the topic politics, religion, or sex education? Nope. None of the above. Try "decorating". A baby's room.

You can pop over and read the article yourself -- my post isn't really about the pros and cons of making a child's room into a suite retreat from family living. What surprised me (but shouldn't have) was the defensiveness of some of the comments. Several readers seemed to feel that Sheila was judging their choices and declaring a "bad parent" verdict. When all she really did was draw attention to several studies suggesting detrimental effects of having televisions in a kid's bedroom; in fact, she included hyperlinked references to the studies for readers to easily access the information she discussed.

Taking the results of scientific studies as a personal attack happens almost as often as policy-makers ignoring the results of studies that aren't "PC". And it happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves, but that might be my Vulcan blood showing through. Knowledge is knowledge; even if it has emotional repercussions or rocks your boat, please expend the mental energy to figure out why it bothers you and don't ignore the new information (or shoot the messenger).


I'll give an extreme example, one that I learned from a virologist during an "advances in immunobiology" lecture series. She led a research team trying to isolate the cause of a disease that was making a lot of people with AIDS sick, even killing them. The team eventually realized there was a correlation between the disease and owning a cat. This led to the discovery that the cats were transmitting an opportunistic virus. When this news was published, the researcher received death threats. People (especially those affected by the disease) were so upset by their (mis)perception that the researcher was suggesting they get rid of their cats that they wanted the study retracted. And an apology, of course.

Do you really think the researcher set out to conspire against AIDS patients having cats in their homes?

Sounds silly when you say it out loud like that.

Needed: One Perpetual Energy Machine

I often joke with my husband that a stay-at-home-mom's job in a nutshell is to combat the massive amount of entropy generated by her children. You know, "Super Pickerupper" versus the archvillain "What's That Do?" and her sidekick "Mr. Poopy Pants".

Well, I don't know what's happened this past week, but entropy is getting the better of me. Maybe it's because we haven't been able to go for our pre-naptime walks or perhaps we're still recovering from the sugar high of Sunday night's fall festival. For whatever reason, my toddler is beating me when it comes to naptime (again).

As a result, I've spent far too much time considering this problem: how on earth is someone supposed to find the energy to fight a battle that has no end? I keep hoping that at some point, some of the training I've worked so hard to instill in my daughter will actually stick. After the toddler years, it must get easier...uh-oh. See, there I caught myself in what I know to be a myth. Sure, the battles I'm facing now will (eventually) be distant memories, but every stage of childhood/parenthood has its own, er, challenges. I'm going to be battling on behalf of my children (even when that means against my children) for as long as I'm their mother.

So...how, how, how, WHERE do I find the energy?

How has God been able to withstand His children pushing back against Him for thousands of years? I have a whole new comprehension and appreciation of His patience and faithfulness toward us. I'm also relieved to know that even He gets emotionally fed up on occasion, because it means there's hope that I can be a good parent despite the fact that my pool of patience isn't bottomless:

And the LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff- necked people! Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them." (Exodus 32:9, partial)

So why doesn't He give up? What keeps Him going in His pursuit of raising us up despite our many shortfalls?

The key is Love. He loves us, so He doesn't give up. Even when He destroyed the world in Noah's day, He wasn't giving up on His children -- He was just giving a new beginning and setting the stage for our rescue on the cross.

So when I'm running out of steam (or feeling steamrolled by the planet), that's what I'll turn to as well. Love is the fuel for this marathon.

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