Welcome to my weekly Sunday post where we take a break from money-related posts and I share about what I'm loving right now and give you a little peek into our life from the past week.
What I'm Reading
I finished the Lilac Girls audiobook and I have to tell you (now that I’m finished with it!) that I loved it. I think the fact that it is so well narrated has made it such a good listen and I’d highly recommend it on audiobook. It's a really compelling, tragic, and gripping story of the horrors of concentration camps.
(Note: I almost stopped listening to it because there was some edge-y stuff in the first part and I was afraid it was going to get worse as progressed. But it ended up getting quite a bit better as it progressed. Do note that it it is very much PG-13 and I would only recommend listening to it with headphones in if you have kids at your house!)
I’m also almost finished with Different by Sally & Nathan Clarkson and have found it to be pretty good. It’s been encouraging with fresh ideas to love my children and their individual unique personalities well.
This week, I'm reading: Thou Givest, They Gather (an old Christian reprint), Unashamed (a spiritually encouraging book), 10% Happier (a story-driven book), and The Big Leap (a book on life improvement).
{See my Reading Goals for 2017. Also, see the 33 books I've read so far in 2017 here.}
Speaking at Abundance in Phoenix with LifeWay Women… #neverunfriended
Posted by Lisa-Jo Baker on Friday, March 24, 2017
What I’m Watching
In addition to watching some basketball games (and mourning the fact that all the Kansas teams are out of the tournament!), we also watched the latest episode of Designated Survivor.
I also enjoyed watching this clip of my friend, Lisa-Jo Baker, speaking on friendship at a conference this week.
What I’m Listening To
I have listened to this song on repeat this past week. I just love it. Such a powerful reminder. (I actually love the rendition on this album best. It’s available to listen to/download in Amazon Prime Music.)
I also loved the Cultivating the Lovely podcast with guest Mystie Winkler on Myers-Briggs. I have so much to learn about Myers-Briggs and just loved the insights that Mystie shared!
What I’m Loving
I know I’ve talked about it before, but humor me as I talk about my frother again. Because I just adore this appliance!
Who needs coffee when you can have a Rooibos Chai Latte made in just a few minutes at home? Go here for the recipe and a video of me showing you how to make it/use the frother.
It’s SO easy, so yummy, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much better I feel now that I drink this instead of coffee!
What I’m Celebrating
As of this past week, Kaitlynn is landing her Double Salchow!!!! This girl’s fierce determination inspires me so much.
Learning your jumps means you fall way more than you actually land a jump. And a lot of the falls are the kind of full-on falls that you can hear from the stands. OUCH!
If I fell like that once, I’d likely need to be taken off the ice on a stretcher. But this girl, she just gets right back up and tries again.
Watch a video here of her landing this jump.
What I’m Learning
I had one day this past week where I was just “off” all day. I felt like I was in a funk… unmotivated, uninspired, and undisciplined.
I felt like I was just productively procrastinating all day. And at 2:30 pm when Jesse texted me from the ice-skating rink to tell me the repairman was coming over, I still was in my sweaty workout clothes from the morning!!
After running in circles most of the day and wasting time on the internet, I started mentally beating myself up. I expressed my frustration over my lack of discipline to Jesse and he said, “You’re allowed to have one bad day every once in awhile. Look at the weeks and weeks of good days you’ve had recently and cut yourself some slack.”
He’s right. Not every day will be an amazing day. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know what an amazing day was because there would be no bad days to compare it to!
What I’m Pondering
“Mom, it just felt like you were trying to control things. That bothered me.” I was surprised and taken aback when one of my kids told me this matter-of-factly this week.
We had just gone to our first Escape Room as a family. (Where you get blind-folded and hand-cuffed and left in a dark room and you have to find clues and crack different codes to unlock various locks that lead to more clues that finally lead to the code you need to successfully escape the room before an hour is up.)
Truthfully, when we were there, I had felt sort of impatient with the kids all hollering out different numbers and ideas and trying to figure out clues. It seemed like they were just going around in circles and not really helping much. But I never expressed this aloud.
However, they sensed it. And after we had “broken out”, they told me they wished I had let them try to figure more things out themselves instead of me trying to “lead” the experience and get us out in time.
Honestly, I thought I was being helpful by doing so. But their words reminded me that I need to step back more and let my kids work on figuring things out without my micro-management. I need to give them space to try. Space to fail.
They aren’t babies and toddlers any more. They need to learn lessons through trial and error. They need to make some mistakes. They don’t need me to fix everything for them or solve everything for them.
I want to work on doing a better job of walking with them in this season. Holding their hand when they need a hand to hold. And letting go of their hand giving them the space they need when they need it.
I will be on the sidelines cheering, but, as they get older, it’s not my job to be in the race carrying them to the finish line. They need to learn to run themselves.
I want raise self-sufficient/God-sufficient adults to send into the world to make a difference, not children who constantly depend on me to fix or solve every problem for them.
Letting go is hard… but it’s one of the most loving things I can do for them as they grow older!
In Case You Missed It
My posts from this past week:
My YouTube videos from this past week:
