just growing...

What have we been up to these past few weeks?

• Well, I thought I deserved the best mom of the universe award because I successfully ran errands with two children :) All of you with multiple kiddos...way to go for all this time!!
  
• Celebrated Thanksgiving...and it was so wonderful to celebrate with both sides of our fam.
  
• Grown in a new friendship with the Maness' family...they are stellar and such a life giving couple...you know the kind of friendship that God just knocks you over with His love and kindess?! Yep, the Maness' are those kinds of friends and we have already been so added to by their zeal, simplicity, and simple Christlike love!
  
• We decorated for Christmas with Aunt Aub and Uncle Will. Will wore flashing red santa headbands and of course we had to listen to Christmas music compliments of Pandora...we put our monogrammed stockings on the mantle and it was so fun to pull out the blank/unmonogrammed stockings and know that one of those is Kiva's! (which is now at the monogram shop :)
  
• I have totally gotten into Essential Oils...more to come on that later...but WOW how amazing the Lord is!
  
• Brian and I (along with Kiva) went on a date night! So fabulous.
• Jada has been going through 3 year old/change in our family pains. It has been pretty tough on this mom, I am not used to spanking this often (deep breath) but I am hopeful that this won't last forever! :)
• Kiva has been getting bigger...she has just been happily growing! See...
  

Which leads me to the blog title: Just growing! I read the beginning of a simple book that Aubrey loaned to me called "Creative Counterpart". Here's the sentence that got me "A creative counterpart is more than just a helper. She is a woman who, having chosen (or having found herself in) the vocation of a wife and possibly a mother, decides to learn and grow in all the areas of this role and to work as hard as if she were aiming for the presidency."

Ok, so I never really want to be president of anything, BUT...

I have literally been learning and pondering many many things over the past few months in regards to this type of mentality...simply put LIVING FULLY! Going for life...fully alive! Every day...each moment...ALIVE! You know what I mean? With all of my raw gifts and weaknesses...just going for life like never before and not worrying about being perfect at it all.

Here are some ways I have thought about this and am moving forward in this. I took a knitting class :) I am really bad at it so far, but so? It is fun to learn and who knows, one day I might make one of you a fabulous scarf or something. I am LOVING learning about essential oils and am confident the Lord has opened this up for me to keep learning and growing and seeing Him move through! And I have actually put myself in front of the camera more...which is a strange thing for me. I am letting go of that weird thing that speaks to my insecurities of not being photogenic...and I am just having fun with my unwashed hair and no make-up self and taking pics with my girls! I am experimenting more in the kitchen and it has been fun to not know if dinner will taste great or not, but having fun anyway.

Lucretia said something recently that has stuck to my heart, she simply said that as she has gotten older and is entering a new place in her own life, she is/has learned to really love people (our children, husbands, neighbors, parents and ourselves) right where they are...not loving them by anticipating who they will be when something changes personally, spiritually or circumstantially...just really enjoying and loving them right where they are. Isn't that what Jesus did?

This 'season' of life feels like I am re-learning many things about myself, Brian, Jada, and about how cazy extravagant the love of God is. I have felt uniquely lifted in a spiritual way and I believe a big part of that is God's redemption through our sweet Kiva.

So, in short...we are all just growing!