Gigantor Lives!

Let me state up front that this is a long and rambling story. Sorry about that! A better writer would condense this somehow, but I am a talker, not a writer, so listen if you have time…

My Sunday morning started with an orange juice shower. No, it actually started with me making a (very large) pot of chili at 7:00 am. I have a bad habit of putting off the fellowship lunch preparation until Sunday morning. It’s a combination of being too lazy or too busy on Saturdays, but either way, it results in the family waking to strange smells. Then I headed to the shower, a real one. It was shortly after that the orange juice shower occurred. I wasn’t there to see the scope of it, and by the time I arrived on the scene it had been cleaned up, or so it appeared. Thankfully there were no church clothes involved, since a few of the kids are so short of nice clothes it would have resulted in a serious wardrobe malfunction. So I moved on to getting ready to leave.

Fast forward 20 minutes. I came back down to the kitchen, all ready to go except for my shoes. That’s when my feet stuck to the floor, and I discovered the scope and reach of the orange juice shower as well as the deficiencies of the clean-up effort. Now I have no choice but to mop the floor before church. Ok, I do now realize there were some other choices, but this was my feeling at the moment, which I know some of you can understand completely! I grabbed the two nearest boys who were fully dressed and they began to move the seven chairs and four stools out of the kitchen. One of them began to scrub o.j. off the chairs, too. I grabbed the bag of trash someone had pulled out but not really dealt with and sat it on the garage step (still not dealing with it). Then there was a flurry of super-fast aerobic sweeping and mopping. I ended up quite hot, asked another boy to get me some water, and dashed up the stairs for my shoes. We were still going to be to church on time!

Ticket to Ride

On Sunday afternoon we found ourselves with some extra time due to schedule changes at church. We had planned a trip to Duluth for Saturday and Sunday, but upon discovering that we could not spend the night on Saturday, we decided we couldn’t face six hours of car time on Sunday! Not enough recovery time from the last trip! So we had lunch on the sunny patio of Smash Burger (calorie loading) and headed over to Wayzata for a bike ride on the Dakota Rail Trail.

The Dakota Rail Trail starts in Wayzata near Lake Minnetonka and ends in St. Bonifacius. It is mostly level, crosses very few roads, and has several really scenic bridges over the lake. (If you are from the south, you’ll appreciate knowing that the new bridges smell exactly like Six Flags! Good memories!) There are shady portions that felt like heaven on that sunny but probably not much warmer than 70 day. There are also a couple of good eating spots right on the trail, including the Minnetonka Drive-In.

A Few More Miles Before I Sleep...

We took a quick trip to Alabama last week and saw the entire family!  It was a great time, but we are still recovering from nearly 2800 miles in 6 days.  So, in lieu of a real blog post, I'll just put up some pictures from our trip!

Oh, and we are having some work done on the house this week, too (and steaming toward the end of the school year!) - exterior painting and new doors - so there will be some before and after shots in the next couple of weeks.  For now let's just say, "Goodbye orange house!"

The Comfort of Sovereignty

You may have noticed a theme in my last few posts: the sovereignty of God.  It is such a comfort to me to know that God is in control of every. single. thing.  There is much to be said about the subject, but for now I just want to share a link to a quote that sums it up so well.  Today's post at Girl Talk is short, but well worth reading!

Saw it Coming

A long time ago in a land far, far away (Florida), we had David, born right on his due date after 20 weeks of labor. (Don’t worry: I am nowhere near ready to write about our long and complicated child-bearing history, so that is not the point of this post.) It was the beginning of a baby parade that wound down just over seven years later when Daniel was born here in Minnesota. Now Daniel is seven, and we are fresh out of babies. We’re not even a parade any more. Just like that – seven years pass and things are totally different.

Now don’t get me wrong; I am not pining for the days of sweet babies and toddlers. I enjoyed those days immensely, but I thought I would miss them much more than I actually do. I am thankful that God gave me just as many of those sweet, trying days as He had planned for me. I’ve had just enough days with diapers to change (ten years straight!), just enough days of packing a huge bag before leaving the house. I’ve had just enough days of scheduling around naps, just enough days of saying, “Hold on to the cart” while trying to navigate the grocery store parking lot (in the snow). While I am sure I have not answered the “Are they all yours?” question for the last time, people ask that much less often now that the kids look more like a gang of friends than a pack of babies. “Who in her right mind would bring 5 kids under 8 years old to Sam’s Club if they were not all hers??” I wanted to scream more than once. And yes, we are aware of what causes that.