a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices!

Happy December, friends! Christmas snuck up on me this year.  How is it 3 weeks away?   A few things I've been challenged by this Christmas season are:


This Jesus Storybook Bible Advent reading plan.  Henry is 3 and may not get the details, but I want to start with this early on so he hears it many times and it begins to take root in his little heart.  We will be starting late (like I said, Christmas snuck up on me!) but better late than never, right?!?!

This:
http://jenhatmaker.com/blog/2011/11/29/the-christmas-conundrum

It's enough to chew over for years to come, as Christmas becomes less about Jesus and more about (as Jen Hatmaker would say) 'ALL THE STUFF'.  Glad I read this when Henry was 3 and not 13, but I still feel like we need to change our approach to Christmas as parents.  I certainly fall under the category of 'in the absence of a better plan or an alternative rhythm or - let's just say it - courage, we feed the machine yet again, giving Jesus lip service while teaching our kids to ask Santa for whatever they want, because, you know, that's really what Christmas boils down to.' 

I am definitely over the feeding of the Christmas machine.  I won't do anything cray-cray and stop buying gifts altogether, so all you haters can back up off me.  But, as I am learning in life, I need to use my God-given brain before mindlessly following the masses and just doing things 'because everyone else is doing it'.  AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT!  I just want to be intentional. Amen?

Another thing challenging me is the people in this photo below.  They are important to me, and serving and loving them really well could take me the rest of my life to achieve, but it'll be a life well lived. Don't I have a beautiful family? I look at them and feel true joy from a Jesus who gives me things I don't deserve.  He is good when I don't get what I want, and He is good when I do.


Merry Christmas, my people.  Happy Jesus being born.  Henry has decided Jesus needs a Spiderman birthday this year, and God help me if I won't be making that happen.  Might get my nog on once or twice as well.  What does your December look like? If you are reading this, I'm guessing I'm grateful for you in my life.  Blessings to you and your family this holiday season! See ya in 2014!

no woman is an island

I just came home from a week in Dallas. It was my first time going back since we moved a year and a half ago.
We lived there for 5 years.  When we arrived, we were about 2 weeks old in the marriage department.  2 months off of college graduation.  Wide-eyed.  Totally in love.  Scared/excited.  Unemployed.

It was all very romantic.

Here I am in my home in Kansas City now, as my husband and I sit in comfortable silence on our separate devices on the couch.  Still in love. The kind I have grown to appreciate even more than the new stuff, since we've weathered storms together and made it through.  {coincidentally, also the kind of love where you pee with the door open} We are now parents, and employed.  It's all quite different.  And beautiful.

Back to Dallas.

I stayed with a friend who I met 1 week after giving birth to my first.  We are forever bonded because we met in a time when we were both grasping for anything to hold on to that felt normal after having our worlds rocked by our 7 lb humans.  She is gracious and real and an amazing mom who challenges me to love my kids like Jesus would.  I also saw a friend who loves refugees with everything she has and has a heart more beautiful than she is--and that's saying something.  Another friend stopped by who has 4 children ages 6 and under, and is the picture of grace and peace in this crazy world of motherhood.  Nothing seems to shake her.  Another friend I caught up with is mom to 1 and expecting another, and has the driest and best sense of humor you'll ever experience.  Her intrigue and attentiveness to her little guy is a beautiful thing to behold.  Another girl I saw shared difficulties with her little guy that challenged and, I'll be honest, encouraged me, as I am going through the same struggles with mine.  Her honesty was like a breath of fresh air.  I also saw the girls I met regularly with after our first babies {some might call it playgroup, but I'll refrain so as not to allow my sister the satisfaction of a good laugh} who are all on round 2 of kids now.  I love seeing how we've all gone from insecure and terrified to somewhat confident in the role of "Mom".  We are all different, but learned to appreciate that instead of compare and tear one another down.  I love that about those girls.

On my way home, I had some time to reflect {8 hour drives will do that to you}, and I was just so grateful to have had a week to be surrounded by such different but beautiful women.  Waking up at the crack of dawn with Alina {because, duh, that's what time kids get up} and looking at eachother like, "This day is already starting??".  Breaking up fights between our kids for the millionth time and laughing about it instead of screaming.  Seeing all of these moms do the work mothers do and knowing that every day, hundreds of miles away, they will be doing just what I am doing.  Picking boogers.  Waking up in the middle of the night.  Trying to survive until 5 {or 6. or 7.} when Daddy will walk through the door.

As if we didn't already know it, I realized that this life is not meant to be lived in isolation.  Should we all live in communes? Maybe.  Sister wives? Probably not.  Getting in each other's space even if it's not easy because we know it will encourage and renew us?  Abso-freaking-lutely.  Even the introverts of the world--I know you're reading this! You too.  God made us for relationship.  As a mom, I have found that it can be strangely lonely--I literally can't pee alone--to be home with children.  I need the conversation, commiseration, and encouragement to seek Jesus in the day to day. Dallas girls, I love y'all! Thanks for a great week and renewing this girl's spirit just when she needed it!

Ingrid is seven months.

Typing that feels a little bizarre, as I am certain she can't be that old. At this age, Henry had several posts dedicated to his ability to breathe air. Ingrid has maybe 2? I am assisting Ingrid with second child syndrome big time.  She is no less important to us than her big brother, of that I am sure. Let's get to it, shall we?

7 month stats:

She likes....
~avocado and sweet potato
~sticking her tongue out
~her big brother
~sitting in front of the mirror
~bouncing like crazy
~her paci

She doesn't like....
~being alone. ever.
~green beans
~tummy time

Milestones....
~sits up alone
~loving her some solids!
~sleeping 8 hrs at a time
~rocks like she's thinking about crawling
~has survived 3 colds, a virus, and food poisoning (tough girl!)

Ingrid is such a happy little lady and blends into our family seamlessly.  She has special smiles for dad and big brother, and likes mom just fine too!  She seems pretty social, as she is happiest when you are right in her face.  She loves to touch your face with her hands when you get close enough.  She likes her jumper (just like big brother!) and looking at herself in the mirror.
I feel much more laid back with Ingrid than I was with Henry.  This is probably a good thing:).  I am more able to see her as God's child who is in my care during this life, as opposed to this human who I am 100% responsible for, including all behaviors at all times.  I am less anxious for the 'next stage' and more content to accept what is.  I love seeing who Ingrid is becoming and pray I will always come alongside who God has planned for her to be and support it 100%, never breaking her spirit or tearing it down in any way.  I am certain to fail at this as her mother, but so grateful God is gracious.  I am hoping He has an extra dose of grace for those of us who have parented children!:)
We love you, sweet Ingrid Rose.  It's been 7 months of sweetness with you in our world. Keep 'em comin, baby girl!

love, mama.

rice&beans

Awhile ago I wrote about a bible study i was doing on the topic of idols, and how it had affected me as a mom and follower of Jesus.  Essentially, I felt like my idol of control caused me to stay 'safe' as a mom and not branch out when it came to daily activities, but more importantly not letting Jesus 'wreck' my life for Him.

I am far from the place where I want to be in that process, but I am happy to report I have taken some steps towards living a life in service of Him and allowing my children to be there every step of the way. I alluded to some plans I had to serve with my kids, and those plans involved serving refugees. For whatever reason, God has placed this population on my heart (Leviticus 19:33) and I love serving them in any way I can.  I found an organization called Mission Adelante here in KC that does great work with Latino and Bhutanese people and got in contact with them.  I went to volunteer training and got hooked up with Molly, whose heart is gold, I tell ya.  The best way for us to serve at this time involves helping clean up the resource center (kind of like a thrift store) weekly and fill bags of rice and beans that go to refugee families on Saturdays.  Glamorous? Nope. Direct contact with refugees? Sometimes.  It took me awhile to get OK with this 'behind the scenes' work.  I have a vision for direct contact in the future, involving casual ESL classes for moms of these families, but for now this is what we do.  It allows us to work at our (slow) pace, and allows Henry to participate.  I can bring them both without major stress, and feel like we accomplished a little something by the time we leave.  We don't go every week, but we go when we can.

Why do I talk about all of this? Do I think I'm amazing? Certainly not.  There are moms that would put me to shame on serving others, being crazy creative and giving of their time.  I only share it to encourage anyone who reads this, not to make anyone feel guilty/jealous/crummy as a mom.  It took some persistence to organize serving with the kids.  It took a bit of determination.  But now that we are doing it, I'm so grateful to have something regularly that does not serve to entertain my child, but to teach him about something beyond himself.  It's at an elementary stage right now, but we will get there.  Right now he knows we go to help and fill bags, and that on the way there he will get to see real live trains (we drive past train yards on our way).

If you have been on the fence about stepping out of your norm as a mom/worker/spouse/child of God, would you consider just doing it, Nike style?:) It took me long enough, and per usual, once I did it I wished I had done it ages ago.  But there were all these barriers--pregnancy, busy-ness of life, etc.  Don't we always have a really good excuse?!?!? I know I do. Would you consider doing the thing that doesn't make sense, and people have maybe even recommended you not do because it would be too 'stressful'? I imagine God will meet you right there.

love y'all.

we went viral

i have new appreciation for the trendy phrase 'go viral.'  by definition, it means, 'to spread rapidly among a population by being frequently shared by individuals.'

over the last couple of weeks, our family went old school viral. we just straight up got nasty sick. the kind where you're in the fetal position, begging for mercy, going to the 'bad place' and wondering if you'll ever function as a part of society again.  this blog post proves i have indeed rejoined the human race, and that my serial diagnoses of ebola, brain tumor and 'death virus' were happily inaccurate.

i am blogging this purely for remembrance sake.

'remember that time our carefree cabin vacation was just a precursor to 2 weeks of terror, bloodshed and death wishes?'
'remember when we were both reduced to tears and moans from the headache to end all headaches?'
'hey, hon, ya know that week we thrice went to the ER and required assistance to bathe?'

i literally didn't have the energy to be jealous of all the cute people participating in society on facebook over the 'lovely' labor day weekend.  that should tell you something.

but, seriously. God is trying to send us some sort of message, and i honestly don't want to miss it.  so far i have this:

1) Megan. You were training for a half marathon and even being a decent wife and mom and thought you had it all going on.  Then I struck you with my special virus and you now find yourself weak, needy and indeed very human.  Do you think you might finally grasp that you do nothing on your own power? That it's by me, through me and from me that you receive all things?
2) Smitty.  You were only struck with physical illness.  I didn't even wreak havoc on your financial (ER bills pending), emotional, familial, or spiritual state.  I could have, but I didn't because I'm gracious.  Can you imagine if I did? You would certainly survive, but just imagine my omnipotent abilities.  In case you forgot, I. AM. GOD.
3) Meg. Did it ever occur to you that when you were at your lowest (3 AM. puke bucket. head throbbing. OR...... ER. 2 gurneys. wailing infant. unable to care for her or my sick husband.), that I met you there? And guess what? I might even like you most with your puke bucket and your helplessness.  You're a lot more attractive there than when you're flexing your human muscles at me begging me to look at how 'supermom' you are.  When you are weak, you finally allow me to show you my real strength.  And you don't like to be weak very often, Megan.  You should try it more often.

Sincerely,
--God of your virus

These are all just initial thoughts in the acute post-illness phase, but I imagine there is truth here.
In the mean time, I am going to enjoy waking up in the morning, sitting up and playing with my kids, preparing food for my family and cleaning up after them, and breathing the air outside....because it's so much fresher than the indoor stuff.

i went dark

The Smith family just returned from our first official 'family vacation'.  For some reason, it takes having more than 1 child for me to really feel like we can legitimately call any trips for pleasure 'family vacations', but either way--worth every penny we spent, and we sure didn't spend many!
We started off our trip on Sunday after church by grabbing some Jimmy John's (freaky fast!) and hitting the road to Des Moines where Jer had landed us a sweet hotel room downtown.  We unloaded and did a quick walk along the river and grabbed dinner at a brewery nearby, then headed back to our room for the night.

If any of you have done a hotel room with kids, you realize it is not actually a hotel room, it is a very classy prison of quietness and darkness. Our pain was eased when I ran down to the hotel bar to grab us drinks (IPA for him, Diet Coke with lime for her) and super expensive candy from the gift shop.
The next morning we headed out around 8 to our final destination, Edgewild Resort, in Fifty Lakes, MN.  We started it off wrong with a breakfast at McDonalds (Jer insists that all Smith vacations have to include this--I would personally like to nix this tradition) that included a completely wrong order and me waiting for 95 elderly persons wanting a refill on their coffee so I could get an Orange Juice.  Things smoothed out after this, and we cruised along, stopping for lunch and groceries to stock the cabin with at Target and arrived at our cabin around 4 on Monday.

Cabin #7, folks, in all its glory.

We easily had the shabbiest cabin of all, but our vacation eyes only saw peace, quiet, outdoors and beautiful time together as a family.  That was frankly exactly what we had, too.  We kayaked in the early morning hours (because when you have little little kids, you get the best morning time on the beach, when all the other families are still crashed), we hiked daily, we sipped coffee while building 'birthdays' in the sand (cakes/sand castles/mounds of dirt), we ate lunch on the paddle boat and dinner on the pontoon.  We sat on our deck in the evening and chatted about life. The weather was per-fec-tion.  I swept our floor that got covered in sand daily, and did dishes at our sink that overlooked the lake and honestly didn't even mind it. It was everything we wanted vacation to be.

Contrary to first glance, Ingrid is not wearing a doo-rag on the paddle boat.

Henry is actually driving the pontoon here-Jer and I were ROFL.

Teaching Henry to skip rocks--life, made.

Girls/Boys

Jer and I took turns making yummy dinners. Here is my fajita night!

 So much great time with her. Can't believe she's 5 months.

 Legos in the cabin. Stolen from the lodge.

Ice cream on our last night! This is in a nearby town called Crosslake. Henry had 'Superman' ice cream that night. Let's just say the bright colors combined to make for a shocking surprise in his potty the next day.

I am sort of convinced that part of why it was so great was that I 'went dark' for the majority of the vacation.  I could say I 'unplugged', but Jack Bauer would be so disappointed in me.  It was a personal decision, and I certainly didn't 100% adhere to this the whole vacation, but by and large I did not use the internet portion of my phone during our trip.  I took photos with it and used it to log a few runs I did while there, and did log in a few times while kids were napping or asleep for the night.  But I honestly haven't felt that present and a part of my own life for quite some time.  When Henry was playing, my phone was on a shelf in the cabin, as if it was (ha!) just any other material posession, equal to shoes or deodorant.  It wasn't in my hand or sitting nearby, just begging to be checked.  I wasn't painfully trying to get Henry to do something cute so I could Instagram it, or even worse, thinking how neat it was that people might be at work envying our super adorable family vacation.  I won't be making some bold statement about how I'm going to go back to my Motorola KRZR because being iPhone free was so liberating, but I certainly will take to heart that I was a better wife and mom during this week because I was a bad smartphone user.  I'll take that any day of the week.  That said, I did take photos of the vacation for the blog and our own family purposes.  Remember the good old days when you would develop a roll of film, choose the good photos and put them in an album and people might come over and flip through them while you had a (face to face) conversation? I kinda miss those days.  I do love having this blog for digital documentation of family events, but I also realize that our generation is undeniably headed towards quantity of relationships over quality, and I want to be keenly aware of how that is affecting my children and myself.
Has anyone else done a self-imposed media fast? What were your takeaways? Anyone want to make it more of a lifestyle change? I certainly am planning on that to at least an extent after this trip.  I have even researched some apps like this one that limit your notifications when activated so your phone isn't buzzing and distracting throughout the day.

I can't forget to mentioned the grand finale of our vacation--my brother's wedding!  We headed just a bit South of our cabin to celebrate with family and friends over the union of a couple great kids! It was beautiful and emotional and tons of fun!  Jer, Henry and I were all involved, so it was also very busy!  We are so excited about Kristi joining our family.  She's a great complement to my little brother and I am so glad he found a girl who can appreciate his crazy sense of humor:).

 Bridesmaids!

Chatting with the groom.

Today was an absolute vacation hangover in which I did little to be productive, and the kids and I all took 3 hour hangover naps and woke up still tired.  I did manage to get groceries, so at least it's not ketchup for dinner like it was last night.

Smitty, out.

Christ, Chipotle and choo choos, respectively.

I'm going to try something new and different and just say that, yes, it's been awhile since I posted. And it's possible it will be a long time before I post again. Or not. I am non-committal that way.
Also, who stole 2/3 of the summer straight from under my feet? How rude.
What have you been up to this summer? We have apparently been busy!  Let's see...there have been graduations, road trips, holidays, anniversaries, friends visiting, family visiting--and also life is happening and the wee ones continue to grow before our eyes. We have had fun in the midst of it all, I assure you! Want proof? Here she be.


There are now 5 Smith cousins.  Contrary to popular belief, we now know we are capable of producing the female variety of human. Amen!


Hanging out in front of Standard Style on the plaza, having a snack. He is Jerry's son.


Schliterbahn fun with Smith's for Abram's 5th birthday.  A good time (and a good tan) was had by all.


Hanging in Arkansas with Jon, Tonja and co.  Nani helped my fearful swimmer gain confidence in the water.


Though I have never done even a smidge of yoga in my life, my child can do (what I am told is) a plank. W2G Henry!

Cousin Kya came to visit.  Happiness ensued.

This? This is just life happening.

This boy and his trains...

As a side note, I want to share something I've been trying to embrace as a mom.  Do you know those people who you see at Target? Or Chipotle? Or the DMV? And they take a brief glance and say to you, (all together now!) "Wow, you've got your hands full!" I have never hated these people, but as I have learned, many moms do.  Some even come up with sweet (albeit cheesy) phrases like "Yes! Full of blessings!", etc.  I have no cheesy phrase to offer. I have no deep wisdom.  I do have this though.  Those people represent myself in about 20-30 years.  I will be a grandma or something like it.  My house will be quiet and my laundry minimal.  I genuinely will miss the constant noise/correction/bodily fluid that goes with the little ones.  I hope I won't miss it too much, but I guarantee I will think once or twice, "I wish I had been patient when it was the hardest" or "I wish I had left the laundry on the couch and played trains with Henry when he asked me to for the 35th (I kid you not) time that day."
I am trying to genuinely live now as if I am that person who misses their children once they're gone. Is that weird? It's the only way I can figure to have perspective on this crazy time in life.  I don't have a beautiful bible verse to go with where I am headed here....but I do believe God shows up in the midst of this.  Fine, take this one if you need it: Titus 2:11-14.    Either way, God has taught me this: Megan, I have given you this life. My gospel is not separate from parenting, not separate from being a wife, not separate from household tasks or finances.  How will you choose to let my gospel intersect with it in those million moments throughout the day when you often choose to bypass it?
If I don't at least try to figure this out, I guarantee I will have lots of regrets. I am working on it, as I imagine we all are learning to see how Christ's grace can intersect with the moments in each of our days. It's hard work, but I am seeing moments where I (shocker!) actually get it some shade of right.

-----get ready for whiplash.

I am trying to recreate this tank top that I have an outlandish affection for.

Why? Just, why? I have no answers. I am working on it.

Also, I have never shown pics of Ingrid's room, because, well, it's still in progress.  Here is what I do have:

But home is where the heart is, right? Not where the decor is perfectly coordinated or timed in accordance with your birth? I'm counting on it.

This may well be the only blog in the world that addresses gospel-centered living and a motorbike tank top at once.  That might just be me in a nutshell though. Thanks for visiting.