(xaris and shalom)

Shel Silverstein's poem "Helping" ends with the stanza And some kind of help is the kind of help That helping's all about And some kind of help is the kind of help We all can do without. (helping (?) in the kitchen!) For some reason, having an 11 month old Bean causes me to think of these words frequently.  But particularly, for the last day, I've been pondering how she loves to "help" me fold the laundry.  This little girl derives the greatest of delight from sitting on our bed when I dump out a full basket or two of clean laundry.  She used to simply enjoy playing with the socks and dryer balls, but recently she's begun taking a more active role in "helping" -- namely, grabbing articles of clothing and throwing them over her shoulder and off the bed as quickly and enthusiastically as you can imagine. Yesterday Jason and I met with our pastor and were discussing various ministries, our involvement in them, and the disappointment of not see

This space has been pretty quiet, hasn't it? Knowing how much I love writing (and need to write), friends periodically ask me what I've been writing and how it's going, but the truth is that I am writing less these days than I have in a long, long time, and thinking less about writing stories than I have probably ever since I started (so... grade school!).  I still journal sporadically, write emails, update Instagram accounts as a sort of public journal, and have recently been working on an essay for this year's ACNA contest, but an awful lot of my creative energy is poured into the small human I spend most of my days with.  Watching her grow is a joy and pretty consuming!  Cooking and baking is my other main creative outlet, and more fun than ever with consistent folks to feed.   All that being said, I wanted to pop in here for a few minutes to reflect on the past year. It's been a rough year for the world, catastrophic in many global theaters, but it's been a

Last night I told Jason, "I feel like I have a parenting secret." No, the Bean doesn't sleep through the night.  Some nights she sleeps longer in her crib than others, but she always wakes up after a few hours and cries for me, wanting me to pick her up and feed her.  And then she doesn't want to be set back down in her crib; she wails like a little door alarm if I try to settle her back in the crib. So I don't -- I snuggle her close and we both go back to sleep. And while, some nights, I still want to sleep on my stomach and have blood circulating to my arm, mostly I love it.  I'll be a little sad when she doesn't want to spend every night cuddled up against me. She's seven months old going on about one and a half, full of confident tenacity and big opinions.  She's easily delighted -- cheerios, her sippy cup, a bookshelf, successfully pulling herself to stand, hearing her name, seeing a familiar face coming in when we arrive to get her from her n

Well, it's been a quiet season on the blog, although not so much in our lives -- my days are full of caring for a small person and her growing personality, and there's all the regular running of a household and being part of a church community and celebrating holidays with friends and family even as we grieve the losses brought by the past year. My head is bursting with words and thoughts, but my fingers are a bit out of the habit of writing.  So maybe it's time to get back into it.   I had no idea that having a child would lead me to think so much about theology, but my goodness, it does.  Loving Isabel is totally different than love that I've experienced before, even though other relationships have held hints of what this type of love is like.  I loved my students; I've loved friends' kids, but it is not the same.  None of those relationships demanded, day after day (and night after night), that I give it my attention, time and energy.  None of the people in t