Besides the Homecoming...

...there has been lots of other good stuff this week. I feel like life is so pleasant these days!

One big event this week was a Paint, Draw, and Be Merry class that Josiah took at Blue Ridge Community College, as part of their Learning Can Be Fun summer kids' classes. (I'm not sure what I think of the "Learning Can Be Fun" title. If it was up to me, I probably would have called it, "Learning Is Fun"...but I guess not all learning is. It just sounds funny to me though to admit that the program can be fun...it might be...or might not, I guess.) :) Anyway, his class was fun; and David, Tobin, and I joined him today for his "art show."

I'm always trying to figure out, "What's his thing? What is Josiah's passion going to be? What is he going to want to pursue? What is he going to be good at? What will drive him in the years to come?" I haven't figured it out yet, but he's got artistic ability in his genes (from his paternal side, not mine at all!) so I always wonder if that will come through more in the days to come. Not to worry though...I'm not being an obsessive mother, pushing him to excel in art at 6 years of age. He's just having fun with it, and that's exactly what he should be doing now.

~ Josiah with his pile of creations to show me
~ Josiah with Miss Jenny (who, I found out today, teaches at a Christian school in the Dominican Republic during the school year and returns to the U.S. during the summer)
~ it was fun to look back at a picture from Josiah's class last year, and compare it to this year: Josiah and David are taller this year, and there's another brother in the picture! :)

Other random pictures from this past week, all part of the pleasantness that is life right now:

~ Jeff fixing the chicken coop as soon as he got home from Israel...his two little sidekicks were not far behind; they didn't want to let Daddy out of their sight for long...plus, the calves waiting to be fed; they are always hungry, it seems
~ the brothers, enjoying the gorgeous weather yesterday evening
~ Josiah thought this cloud was so interesting yesterday, so he asked if I could take a picture of it...the crepe myrtle is blossoming like crazy and adds beautiful color to our yard
~ I must be getting old--either that, or I'm really becoming a country girl: as I drive around, I notice all the cornfields and think how lush they look since we got some good rains at the right time that helped the corn shoot up...and when I see a field that doesn't look up to its potential, I think, "Well, I guess that farmer didn't get his corn planted early enough" or "Maybe they didn't get the rain over here that we had in our neck of the woods"...I don't remember appreciating cornfields quite so much in my earlier years, but this year I think the fields of corn around here (including our neighbor's, pictured here) are just the prettiest thing!

Another happy thing from this week: my weight is down to 149.6 pounds--the first time I've been less than 150 in quite a while! That was a sweet triumph. :)

And two things that have struck me from the world of blogging this past week: first, I could not have invented a better object lesson to drive home a truth to my boys if I tried. Jeanette from Blessed by Baseballs and Bows wrote about an incident with her daughter Elizabeth in which Elizabeth didn't come when her mother called and, to make a long story short, got a bad burn on the bottom of her right foot from walking on hot pavement, which is terrible and my heart goes out to her as I pray for her recovery. However, I shared this story with Josiah and David to illustrate how important it is for them to obey so that they stay under the umbrella of God's protection. I don't mean to imply that bad things never happen to God's people because of course they do. If nothing else, the book of Job makes that abundantly clear. But I do talk often with my boys about how important it is for them to obey so that they stay under God's "umbrella." And sweet Elizabeth's mistake showed clearly how serious and painful consequences of disobedience can be. If you need a good object lesson to share with your kids to drive this point home, you'll find it in Jeanette's blog.

Second, Polly left a comment on one of my recent posts and mentioned that she and I buy our maple syrup at the same place (she knew that from a comment I had left on another blog). With such an intriguing comment, I had to check out her blog. :) So yesterday I read through her Wet Cement blog and realized that even though she and I approach parenting very differently, we both love our children very much and are thoughtful and intentional about how we raise them...and we can still respect each other. It's so good to have respectful relationships, even in Blogland! What has really stuck with me though from her blog is the quote (from Anne Ortlund) that her blog title is from: "God is wonderful about developing our gifts according to His own schedule for our lives. He knows which are the years when there is no substitute for parenting. It's the job that must be done then, not later. It's when the cement is wet." How true is that! The cement is wet, but won't be forever. May I seize these moments and these opportunities before they're gone...