About Me . .

So my friend, Katie, "tagged" me in her blog (which I didn't even know you could do) to write a blog about myself. Specifically, a "five things you may not know." So I am obliging. Here are my five, on various levels of vulnerability and you probably wish you didn't know. :-)

1. I love layers. In the winter I am typically wearing three layers. Like, two long sleeve shirts and a sweater. Or, a long sleeve shirt under a short sleeved shirt under a vest. The new short sleeve baby doll sweaters--totally up my ally. I admit, I bought three (ack!) this winter. This corresponds with the fact that I HATE being cold. I have learned that layers are this African girl's answer to the Nebraska winter. The only drawback--layering can be expensive.

2. I love Christmas season. Everything about it. The lights, the music, the cookies, the Christmas tree, the nostalgia. In my family on Christmas eve we tried to make it feel like Christmas by stoking up a huge fire in the middle of the African summer time. We often had the windows and doors open to compensate for the unnecessary warmth. Then we made homemade doughnuts, hot chocolate, and egg nog. We ate till we almost popped and got to open one gift. I want to continue this tradition in my own family. We will be doing it for the first time this Christmas. I am a little nervous about the making doughnuts part. Krispy Kremes anyone? No, I will try for real. 

3. My current weight loss plan is to sit on my duff watching hours of old 24 seasons (my first time to watch them and I am totally hooked) while eating cookies from the cookie dough tubes you can buy at the grocery store. I totally need to get a new plan :-). On the weight topic, I lost 35 pounds of water weight the first week after Corban was born, due to the fact I had preeclampsyia. Yikes--if only I could repeat that!! 

4. I have two most valuable spiritual life lessons to date. One is to really internalize that God's grace reaches me. To understand that I am spiritually free----not to live under an obligatory/check list style of Christianity. The second is one that I have to continually work on and work on and work on. This is understanding that my approval and worth comes from God---the fact that I am made in his image and his child. I don't need the approval of others but can rest in the fact that I am designed to live out the Christ in me and nothing more. I have a huge tendency to seek approval and try to be really good at whatever I do (parenting, decorating, teaching, counseling, whatever . . . ). I am learning to rest in the love of my creator and not care about my status or the way I am perceived in the world.

5. If I could make on wish come true it would be that I could live by my sister. And by my mom. Without giving up living by my Heartland's family. And this location would be on a beach. But it would have winters with snow for Bryan. I guess I can't wait for my heavenly home when all the pieces of me can finally come together in one place and I can feel whole. 

That's all. These were totally random and just came to me as I was typing. 

Ha Ha--One more thing (reminds me of the John Mayer song . . .)

6. About the pic: I had a hard time finding one of just me (I thought that would make the most sense). Corban is in ALL our pictures from the last two years. This one was taken for an event that we did called "Displace Me" where we camped out in a park with thousands of other people in homemade cardboard shacks to emulate a refugee/displacement camp. It was one of the more social activist type things I've done. My brother James got us into it. We were pretty much the only people there with a baby (Corban was eight months or so) and it was a great experience---put on by invisible children.

OK---I'm supposed to tag some others. So, I tag Julie, Rebekah, Robin, and Jared to do the same.