A couple of things felt really hard this week:
1. Eve and Griffin were emotional and tired and with me a whole lot this week. It makes a lot of work and worry for me. They will be fine. I will be fine. It will all be fine! Our heavenly parents love them even more than we do and they are here to learn and grow. And me too.
2. I get resentful about medical care that I feel forced to receive (hello, my dear parents!). I was trying to get it all over quickly this week when I went to get fasting labs drawn and a (rather rough!) mammogram. I underestimated how long it would take me to recover from that quick morning. I am still being very careful about stairs and bouncing, and I have a few chest bruises blooming. I almost made this title have a lyric with the word "bosom" in it, but you should probably never do that. I will be fine. It will all be fine! God's eternal plan includes things that may hurt but are for our benefit.
My pictures prove that the blessings outweigh the hard.
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| Mariah and Mac! I love these flowers too! |
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| "Mom, with tights on I look so much better when I kick!" |
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| Snow day? |
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| Asian bowls. Photographed by Eve |
And here are a couple of favorite things this week:
1. A Valentine's date! Alan worked this weekend and when he got home on Saturday we went to a new Italian restaurant at Town Place in Leawood. It was really fun to check it out. The decor and ambiance felt like a hip new hotel. The menu I could navigate better next time knowing now what they serve. And the dessert was pure delight! Then we came home and put our kids and our cats to bed and watched a really thoughtful movie about cystic fibrosis patients who fall in love. It really made us appreciate being able to touch the ones we love.
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| Prettiest, most fun dessert I have had in a long time! Before it was cut, it was a gorgeous iridescent red chocolate ball resting on a bed of dark chocolate cake crumbs with a giant thin wafer of grilled chocolate resting geometrically over the side of it. |
2. We had a regional Communications Council zoom meeting where they trained us in incident management. The North America Central expert on this trained us. He works for a global PR firm and does it for his calling too. They put us into stake chat rooms and had us come up with media statements for a situation where we just found out that a building in our stake was on fire. And the fire was spreading to 6 nearby homes. And the police just took a suspect into custody who was a youth in one of our wards. As we discussed, we were supposed to look at the bullet points below and remember that the message every statement from the church is supposed to reflect is "we follow Jesus Christ". It was SUPER fun, and really centering and grounding to look at that list of truths as we received escalating updates on the situation we were supposed to address.
And here are some very close runners up on the blessings list:
-The temple! The people in the temple! Like Sister Lehnhardt (my trainer) and Sister Duncan.
-Talking to Paige AND Kirsta on Wednesday! And Dad on Thursday!
-Lawrence Corbridge's talk about standing forever and talking to Jenny and Shawna
PAIGE says, your training of how to speak of disasters in terms of a belief in Christ, was a worthwhile and eye-opening exercise. You sounded like you really enjoyed it. Sound, even more than reading it, I enjoy listening to you speak about the temple in person. Thank you so much for your lovely talk. Also, for patiently listening while I express my frustrations. I hope that your beautiful children get a little bit more stable soon. Having kids who are dancing on the edge of being sick is no fun at all. What a wonderful dessert you had with your honey!
ReplyDeleteI thought I commented on this earlier! Oh my! Where is my head? Your flowers are gorgeous. What a fun gift to get regularly. Ivy and I made two Trader Joe's arrangements for Valentine's Day and it has been such a delight. I'm even more scared to get a mammogram now. Yikes. Did you get good results at least?
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