Time ...

It gets away from me.   I had the kids the last two Mondays, and oh the joy.  Mid-morning this Monday Callie came up and flung herself into my lap and laid her runny-nosed head right on my shoulder.  She stayed.  I let her.  Even though I knew it just meant she needed to go down for a nap, I pretended otherwise and just hung on to her sweet self for awhile.

Lexi is turning into quite the packrat.  She has a desk here now, ostensibly for her art supplies, but the top two drawers are filled with her 'really special things.'  She brings more every time she comes over - as of now they contain a random set of keys (anyone lost theirs?), several baby pictures that her mother probably doesn't even know are missing, a couple of marbles, a Coca-Cola badge, the cloth bag that contained some coffee B.J. brought back from Guatemala, a plastic bear, a random piece of green glittery wrapping paper, and her favorite book, "My Pretty Kitten," which is a baby book that she has memorized and could read herself anyway, but which we read before bed every time she spends the night.

I was talking to Mason and Lexi on speakerphone today, and Lexi was telling me about her pillow pet thing that she got for Christmas, and I reminded her that I was there on Christmas morning when she got it.  Mason:  "So were you the one who came down the chimney?"  Um, no.

I'm going to a scrapbooking event at the church this weekend with roughly 150 other women.  Don't laugh.  I know.  I'm hopeless at this sort of thing, and big crowds make my heart beat fast.  BUT I HAVE A PLAN!  I'm working on typing up all my often-used recipes, printing them, encasing them in plastic protectors, and putting them in a nifty new binder my friend Amy got me for Christmas.  And several friends will be there, so it is likely that I will do more talking than typing anyway.

I'm really loving my job.  Really.  I work with great people, and it feels like a really good fit.  Right now planning is in full swing for our April retreat, "Free to Be Me," about how to be content with how God made you and who He made you to be.  It's shaping up to be a pretty great weekend, if I do say so myself.  I get to teach Bible study on Thursday mornings, and I've been with the same group of gals since September going through the book "Boundaries."  It is dynamic, life-changing stuff, and very hard work.  These are my favorite two and a half hours of my week, I think.  We have traveled enough trails together to be real, and honest, and vulnerable, and authentic with each other, and that is a marvelous thing in a day and age where we hide behind our respective masks because of fear or shame or simply not feeling safe.

And hey, KU is playing some pretty darned good basketball these days, right?