I Think Spring Has Sprung

It’s been tough this last week to stay indoors and do school work, house work, book work and laundry because that bless-sed yellow ball high up in the heavens has been shining down on us! A few days it was even in the sixties around here and no coats were necessary to be outdoors. Kaleb and I tilled our little garden patches, snipped dead branches from various bushes in the yard and raked up the last of long-dead leaves. Any excuse to be outside was a good one. I even mowed the lawn as nature is sure that spring is just around the corner. All my tulips and daffodils are popping up out of the ground and the buds on all our fruit trees are anxious to bloom. Woo hoo.


We were thankful this past week that our friends, the Roberts, from Montana, came and stayed a few more nights with us before heading back home. Kaleb just fits right in with their brood of four blonde haired beauties and we love them all like family (well, probably better than family). Kaleb liked that he got to skip a few days of school when they were here and I loved that Joni always made us breakfast. She makes the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever tasted. They are so yummy she even took someone’s suggestion and made a “how-to” video and posted it on You Tube so all the world can now have them each and every morning. In Montana, they raise their own chickens so going through a dozen eggs a day is nothing with all those mouths to feed but it’s so odd for me to have dozens of eggs in the frig at a time. Joni swears it’s the only way to keep the kiddies from complaining of hunger until lunch time – cheesy scrambled eggs and toast staves off the hunger pains, I can surely attest to that.

Kaleb is submitting his first draft of The Weekly Puppy website to his teacher tomorrow. I’m sure there will be a few things to fix, but for the most part, it’s done. He’ll go live with it very soon. I’m so glad to have it off the school schedule as that Web design class has taken about 20 hours a week to keep up with and it causes Kaleb to cry quite often when things don’t do what he wants them to do. I’m so ready for something else. His piano lessons are still going well though, so that’s good. And the amount of push-up’s he’s been doing has been slowly decreasing each day, so I think I’ve found the perfect form of discipline for him. Double woo hoo.

We started up a new home fellowship group this week with folks from our church. Our old group is only meeting once a month and we need more fellowship than that, so we started another group that meets twice a month. That should do us, for now.

Kory and I had our annual “business meeting” this past weekend at a local B&B. Once a year we go away and plan our year – what house projects we’re going to do (I mean, KORY is going to do), what vacations we’ll take and when, we set the budget, and plan out our time, month-by-month. It’s crazy that two non-working people need to be so organized, but it’s the only way we can get on the same page and not bicker about priorities. Now, everything is written down and we are in agreement. Hallelujah! Kory thinks the whole event is just a sneaky way for me to control his free time, but he tends to get distracted if he doesn’t have a road map in front of him. Over a month ago he went outside to start putting a roof on the summer kitchen. He got distracted by a large piece of wood he cut from a tree that fell in our driveway several years ago. He decided now was the time to make benches to set around our fire pit because the wood was “in his way.” Here’s the major difference between Kory and I. I would have just moved the wood to another location and gotten to the task of replacing the roof. He needs things written down or he forgets what he’s supposed to be doing. I was thankful he came right home from our meeting and started painting the bathroom – just like we agreed. Oh happy day. There’s a method to my madness.

A Long Weekend

We just got back from four days down in Oregon. We used the long weekend to go visit friends we haven’t seen in a while. We loved getting caught up with everyone and seeing how well they are all doing. It sure seems to me that the Portland area isn’t suffering from the economic downturn as much as the Seattle area. We saw construction going on, no one we know is out of work, all the restaurants we went to we had to wait to be seated and there were no vacant store fronts. Weird.

The main reason we went down is because a “friend” of mine is in prison down there. Actually, he’s been in prison since 1976 and I met him through an outreach our church did that Christmas. We’ve been writing ever since. The last 12 years he’s been in Oklahoma and was recently transferred back to Oregon so a visit was long over due. I looked at it as a homeschool field trip opportunity as I wanted Kaleb to experience up-close-and-personal what happens to people who don’t learn to obey or submit to authority. I think it made the point. He was literally bored to tears and wanted to leave after about 15 minutes. Too bad, so sad. We redeemed the trip for him on Sunday when Kory took him to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry – a place he dearly loves. I visited with other friends in Portland and overall, the weekend was fabulous. A little tax-free shopping didn’t hurt either.

This past week has had my thoughts consumed with the earthquake in Haiti. It happened only four days after I had that dream about the tsunami. We were planning a trip this month to the Bahamas but it never happened, which I can now see as the hand of God because we were going to visit a missionary there who works with Haitian refugees. She’s fairly overwhelmed at the moment. My heart has just been breaking over the devastation. We got an encouraging e-mail from her however. It’s good news in the midst of all the bad. She wrote to tell us about one of her pastor’s two daughters who were attending school in Port-au-Prince:

The younger daughter was taking a nap on the ground floor while the older sister was doing her homework on the flat roof of the two story building. Doing her lesson, she suddenly felt a tremor and saw the crack in the roof. Without thinking she literally jumped off the roof onto the ground below. SHE WAS NOT HURT….NO BROKEN BONES….NOT A SCRATCH……I WONDER WHY!!! When she ran around to the front of the building she saw her sister standing in the road, in front of the shambles of what was a house. She asked her sister how she got out of the house. She said she didn’t know but all she knew is that she was SLEEPING IN THE HOUSE AND THE NEXT THING SHE KNEW SHE WAS STANDING IN THE ROAD. I WONDER WHY!!!

What a miracle. Yes, thousands have died and I can’t even think about those trapped that are still alive and may die waiting to be rescued, but I do like to think about the angels that obviously showed up for these two girls, and who knows how many others whose lives were spared. I’ve come to a place of peace long ago, about death. The Bible says God knows the day we will die even before our days on earth begin. If it’s our day to go, we will go -  if not, he’ll send angels to protect us. Hallelujah.

Hmmmmm.....

We got all the Christmas decorations packed away and life in our household soon returned to normal. I spent time this week preparing for a speech I gave to the women’s group at His Place Church on this morning (Saturday). The talk went better than I expected, so I was happy to be used by God to touch so many lives. A friend of mine drove up from Renton to hear me and she said it was “worth the drive.” Woo hoo. Kaleb and Kory went skiing on Monday (see photo), and school started back up for one very reluctant boy. We’ve had discipline issues all week so I’ve instituted a “Give me five,” policy. If he gives me any grief, he has to give me five push-ups. For every one he can’t do, he’ll lose a week’s worth of electronics. His muscles are building up quickly. One day he had to do nearly 50, but he’s a quick learner and he knows now not to back talk, argue, complain, whine or make me ask him twice to do anything. This new year might be pretty sweet, or I might be building a monster, I’m not sure which.


Nothing out of the ordinary happened, until Friday, and now maybe nothing will be the same. Something is up. I don’t know what, but God was speaking to me loud and clear that day. I had a dream that was so vivid and powerful, I knew it was from God. I’ve yet to figure out its total meaning, but maybe I shouldn’t.

In the dream, we were at a Christian camp right next to the ocean. The waves were rolling in like they do off the Oregon Coast. There was a little sandy beach, then a huge sloping upward grassy field, which was the only thing between the ocean and the cabins that sat up on the hillside. Many kids were out in the surf playing and the adults were watching – many from a well built tree house near the shore.

The tree house was split in half – two rooms with two entry doors and the wall between them extended out into the deck in front of the doors. The parents were leaning over the deck, watching the kids and someone saw a big wave coming – nothing horrific, just larger than normal. We started yelling at the kids to get out of the water. The kids didn’t react quickly enough so I held out my hand and prayed “In the name of Jesus” that no one would be hurt. They all got picked up by the wave and washed in a little ways up on to the grass. In an instant I noticed that Kaleb and Carter (his friend), were back out into the water just as we saw a tsunami coming. I screamed at them to come up to the tree house, which they did, and all the other kids that had been washed ashore went scrambling up to the cabins.

We crammed as many as we could into each half of the tree house and had a discussion as to whether we should leave the door open or closed and everyone agreed to close it. I briefly stepped outside to be sure no one else was in danger and then I saw him – a little boy about 2 ½ crouched in the corner of the deck on the other side of the tree house. I quickly picked him up and brought him into safety just before the wave hit and crashed against the door. The water came rushing into the room and filled it up to our chests and I started crying, realizing if I hadn’t gone out to look, that little boy would have been swept away. He slept in my arms through the whole thing.

The water receded - everyone was fine. No one around us was injured. I went looking for the parents of the little boy and found them up in the cabins. They weren’t in a panic, they just said, “If we would have lost him, that would have been the death of us….” And I was just about to explain where and how I found him, when I woke from the dream. My eyes were wet from crying.

I laid in bed and wondered about the meaning of it all. It seemed to me that God was the one rescuing me, rather than me rescuing a little boy, so I went over all aspects of the dream again and again trying to make sense out of it. All I could think was – some kind of calamity is coming and I’ll be spared.

I told Kory when he woke up that I had a dream that I knew it was from God, but I didn’t tell him what it was. When Kory got up to make coffee, Kaleb came and cuddled with me for a minute so I told him about the dream to see what he thought it meant. He had no idea. We both got up and Kory was in the living room drinking coffee so we both joined him and he said, “Let’s see what Psalms 41 says today, and he picked up his Bible and read,

“Blessed is he who has regard for the weak;
the LORD delivers him in times of trouble.
The LORD will protect him and preserve his life;
he will bless him in the land
and not surrender him to the desire of his foes.

I said “Hey, that sounds just like my dream!” And Kory said, “Really? When I woke up I kept thinking about Psalms 41, like I was supposed to read it this morning for some reason…” Then I told him my dream. He too didn’t fully understand it but we all think it’s some kind of disaster that God will get us through.

Then all morning I was thinking I should write this down, but I was schooling Kaleb so I didn’t have time. As we sat for lunch I grabbed my daily devotions (I’m reading from “Come Away My Beloved” by Fraces Roberts) and today’s devotion started with, “Write those things which I say unto you. Write and hold back nothing of all that I will say to you. For I will speak to you in the darkness and will make your way a path of light. I will cry unto you out of the confusion around you and you will hear my voice and will know that which I do. For my way is hidden from the rebellious and from the disobedient, and from them that seek to walk in their own wisdom. But look unto me and I will be to you as a beacon in the night and you will not stumble over the hidden thing. You will walk in a way of victory though turmoil be on either hand, even as Israel marched through the Red Sea on a path which My hand hewed out for them. Yes, it shall be a path of deliverance and My spirit will go with you and you will carry the glad tidings of deliverance to a people that sit in darkness and captivity.”

Interesting.

God has certainly gotten my attention! I know NOT to have fear, as that doesn’t come from God, so I’m hoping that the dream represents me, as the baby, sleeping through the whole disaster. But I’ve never had anything happen like this before where a dream was confirmed with scripture and scripture confirmed with a devotional. Weird, and powerful.

We’ve been trying to make some travel plans for this month or next, to go somewhere warm for a little vacation, but things just haven’t worked out so we decided not to go, and now this happened. So just for the record, we were going to either head to the Bahamas or Cancun, and now if a tsunami hits either of those places, at least I’ll know God kept us from THAT trip for a reason, but otherwise, I’m clueless as to the meaning of it all. We shall see.

Happy New Year!

Oops – I wrote this last week and forgot to post it.

It’s been a whirlwind week with many “julbesøker” (Christmas visits). I have so LOVED that, as there is nothing worse than spending the holidays alone, if you ask me, but we’ve been blessed with someone at our house everyday since Christmas Eve! Kaleb had a few all day playdates with friends and my friend Paula from Colorado was here for 2 nights with her daughter – gotta love that. She was only out the door a few hours before my friend Dee and her husband came up for lunch and just stayed on for dinner and into the evening – we had a lot of catching up to do. The next day my step brother, Mike, came with his family up for a New Year’s Eve sleepover (see photo) so they were here two days and we couldn’t have enjoyed them more. And all the while, we’ve had a dog or two we’ve been dogsitting, so that’s kept the house hopping. The week just flew by and now I’m tired. I’m ready for a new year, new routines, new priorities.


My first priority is to purge! I’m finally taking the leap and cutting inventory, starting with my Christmas decorations. As I was putting them away today I kept out a couch full of stuff that will have to find a new home somewhere else. It’s so liberating. Then I need to purge a few pounds off my backside, too, but first things first.


For some reason it doesn’t feel like the new year until we hit Monday as weekends are not a good time to start up routines. Kaleb has already altered his routines by being so disobedient this week so he won’t be playing any of his new electronics for a while. He gets a little full of himself from time to time and I hate being the one that has to reel him in, but someone’s gotta do it. At least I have leverage by taking away his new “toys.” We’re in for an interesting ride.