Family | the honey home

nine months

December 09, 2016

Elvie Kay turned nine months on the 3rd of December.

I have to stop there at that date for a moment and reflect. December 3rd is the day I had a D&C after my first miscarriage in 2007. It’s the day I found out I was pregnant with Clive in 2011 (was it really that long ago?) I am grateful to add another happy marker to that day–three-quarters of Elvie Kay’s first year.

Every month that passes for a baby is another mass of amazements and new abilities. Elvie has grown so much in the past month–her personality has grown, if that’s even possible! She started to really resemble her brothers in some ways and to starkly differ from them in other ways. She’s more herself than she’s ever been before. It’s both a joy and a profound perplexion; how can this little person, the fourth to come from us, just us, be so like her brothers and so unlike anyone else we have ever met? I suppose that’s why these monthly updates are so fascinating for me.

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ephraim and the sun and perfection and me

December 08, 2016

In hindsight I may have reacted too harshly, but this was his eyesight we were dealing with, and I knew that any damage done would be permanent. And he is more and more thinking himself The Wisest, probably because he is the oldest and, compared to his brothers and baby sister, he is the The Wisest, though he has yet to learn that that sampling of four children that he dominates is hardly a cross-section of the entire world’s population.

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the lure of slow living: on rest

November 30, 2016

This past year has given space to much thinking and evaluation–much contemplation on busyness vs. diligence, on valuing people and making a home, on routine (oh, how I have evaluated and re-evaluated our routine!) on birth and the eternal perspective, and on so many other things that haven’t made any appearance here because they haven’t matured into coherent thoughts, able to be shared.

The concept of rest is something I have been thinking on for several years. Oh, I know that thinking on is such a tame word for the process–I use it for the same reason as that nebulous word interesting, which we use because we can’t think of any other phrase to express so many things. My husband constantly stops me after I’ve called something “interesting”: What do you really mean when you use that word? Strange, repulsive, curious, funny, fascinating? When I say “thinking on” I mean obsessing over, evaluating, wrestling with, trying to make clear.