Fun at the Farm

Eli had a couple days off after Thanksgiving so we ventured to the Farm, a Horn family gathering place in Cambridge.  I forgot to bring my camera, but was able to capture some of the fun on my phone.  The Farm is a huge old farmhouse with lots of space to run around, so Caleb was in his glory.  Eli's mom even helped him make a "playground" inside and he was sliding and running and jumping all over the place.  By the time we left, Caleb was saying, "Fun at the farm, fun at the farm" over and over because, indeed, we always have fun at the Farm!

Kai also had a good time, exploring Grandpa Horn's new tractor and going for his first sled ride.  I was elated to find a toboggan in the barn because it reminded me of sledding at my grandma's house.  My Grandma and Grandpa Clark's house sits on a hill and I have many memories of piling cousins onto their toboggan and racing down the hill to see if we could make it into the woods and whether everyone could hang on by the end!

We also helped Caleb build some tiny snowmen on the porch during several rounds of the Battle of the Mittens.  That boy refuses to wear his mittens.  It's been a battle for several weeks because he apparently thinks that frozen fingers are just fine and he all-out refuses to wear mittens!  Sometimes he gets distracted enough to forget that we've just forced them on, but he always comes back to the realization that, woe is him, he has to keep his hands warm.  I find myself regularly reminding him that we live in Minnesota, as if that means anything to him.  Anyways, Caleb wore his mittens on/off while making tiny snowmen and throwing tiny snowballs, and it added to the fun at the Farm!

We're grateful we had time to be with family during the Thanksgiving holiday, and we're thankful for such a great place to gather.  We're looking forward to spending more time at the Farm over Christmas!

Creativity

On Thursday I spent the night by myself in a hotel in Canal Park.  It was the first time I've spent a night away from Kai and the first time in a long time that I've slept through the night.  Me + Benadryl + a cozy bed all to myself = bliss.  It was wonderful!

The reason I spent a night in a hotel was not to get a full night's sleep, however.  That was just a perk.  A major perk, but still just a perk.  Rather, I went there so I could be creative.

I love to create things: stories, pictures, songs, scrapbooks, afghans.  I've even tried my hand at pottery.  Being creative is a huge part of who I am.  I'm wired this way, and nurturing the creative side of myself is important not only because it maintains my health, but also because it's partly how I bear the image of God.

I do not pretend to have a comprehensive idea of what it means to bear the image of God, but being creative like the Creator who created me seems like a plausible way to bear His image.  God is Creator.  And I see myself as a creator too - a creator of words, of music, of pictures, and of many other things.  And although some of my creations are shown to other people, many of them are not, because creativity doesn't require a final product or a round of applause or an audience of any kind.  Creativity is a virtue in its own right.  I love to create for its own sake because the process of creating something makes me more like God.

But creating something takes time and energy.  It doesn't always happen on its own.  The ideas, the motivations, the passions - those occur all the time.  But sitting down to act on those ideas and do the work of creating?  It takes time and energy, which, as it turns out, is in short supply with a toddler and a baby running around.  So I don't actually create much these days.  In fact, I'm often suffering from creative constipation.  Ideas are constantly swirling in my head.  A lyric here, a scene there, a color combination in the back of my mind...  They're always there, churning away, begging to be released.  But the time and the energy required to unleash the pent-up creativity simply does not come around much.  So I regularly suffer from creative constipation.

On rare occasions, however, I have the chance to let some of it out.  And that's what happened on Thursday night.  My beloved husband offered to stay home with the kids so I could get away and have the time and energy needed to create.  I was originally planning to go farther from home, but ultimately chose to stay in town and save time driving.  So I stayed in Canal Park and settled into my room by spreading out all of my scrapbooking supplies on the spare queen bed.

I haven't scrapbooked since before Kai was born and I've been feeling the itch.  But if writing or crocheting is hard with little kids around, scrapbooking is impossible.  It requires lots of space and there are lots of things that little hands could wreak havoc on.  If there was any hope of being creative in this way, I knew I'd have to leave the house.  So I did.

I spent Thursday evening and Friday morning scrapbooking and it felt so good to be creative!  Cutting paper and arranging pictures and finding color schemes and placing stickers made my head recharge and my heart ignite!  I love figuring out what looks good on a page.  I love paying attention to detail and I love accenting photos with paper and stickers and explanatory notes.  I love helping photos tell a story.  And that's what scrapbooking is to me.  It's storytelling.

So I started telling a story by starting a scrapbook, and I was blessed by the chance to be creative for a night and a morning.  

Many thanks to my husband for encouraging my creative ways and for making a night away possible!  And thanks be to God for blessing me with this sunrise over the harbor in the morning!

The White Witch Has Returned

On Monday, mid-morning, it started to snow.  It was a light snow, falling slowly and delicately to the ground, but it snowed all day and into the night.  Our particular area only accumulated about 4 inches, which isn't much compared to parts of Wisconsin and the U.P. that got upwards of a foot, but still, it was enough to make the roads hazardous and enough to merit shoveling and snowblowing the next day.  And we weren't even halfway through November.

Welcome to Duluth.

It would seem that the White Witch has creeped her way into the weather yet again this year.  The past two winters have been fairly brutal here in the Northland and it looks like we're in for another long winter.  I'm already tired of it, to be completely honest.  Getting two little kids into coats, boots, hats and mittens and into the car and anywhere on time is quite a production.  But it does look like Christmas, and since we live in Duluth and not Narnia, we do have that to look forward to.

Speaking of Narnia, Eli and I have been blessed with joining a Small Group at church this year that's reading through the Chronicles of Narnia together.  I can barely express how amazing it's been.  It's a joy and a delight and a thought-provoker and an encouragement all at once.  It's a diverse group of people and it is life-giving for me and Eli to talk about books with other people!  And these books are, well, they're Narnia, for goodness sake!  Need I say more???

So we discussed the White Witch a bit last month as we read through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and this week we were confronted with her handiwork as the first winter storm of the season hit us so early.  Thank God Aslan is on the move and that, despite how much it feels like an eternal winter in the thick of it, Spring will eventually and certainly come.

The Day the Digger Came

One day in September, when Eli was gone hiking, I was standing in the kitchen and heard a noise from the basement like that of water gushing onto the floor.  I was doing a load of laundry so I went downstairs to investigate and discovered that, indeed, there was water gushing onto the floor!  The washer was on the spin cycle and all the water exiting from the machine was backing up from a pipe instead of draining down it because, as it turned out, our entire drainage system was having a rebellion.  Our landlord was marvelous and got a plumber in right away who was able to fix the problem temporarily, but who also discovered a bigger problem at hand.  We survived the next several weeks with only minor issues as we waited for an excavation company to do the major job of fixing the major problem.  Then the Day arrived.

Monday was The Day the Digger Came.

To say that our son Caleb was excited would be an understatement.  Nothing could have prepared him for the absolute jubilance of this momentous event.  A digger was in our yard!  AND a dump truck had come to drop it off!  Could the world get any better???

It was big and it was yellow and it was "working hard", a phrase Caleb always associates with machines at the construction site.  Thankfully, the digger didn't dig up our actual yard.  It dug a decent hole in the ground below our deck, where the workers ascertained the broken pipe to be.  They found the pipe in question and replaced what needed to be replaced and our septic system was back in working order before the day was done, which made me very happy.  Caleb, on the other hand, could've cared less about our water predicaments.  I mean, there was a digger at our house!  Did I mention that it was big and yellow and working hard???  Caleb didn't want to leave all the work to the construction guys either.  He found a shovel and started pitching in, as any good digger-loving boy would do :)

As if his life couldn't have gotten any better that day, the workers also invited Caleb to sit in the digger.  They even offered to take him for a ride, but that proved to be a little too much excitement for him to handle.  But sitting and playing in this big machine was enough.  Indeed, it was the apex of his digger experience!

It should be noted that Caleb toted his own digger and dump truck with him throughout the morning.  No man left behind.  Those machines were working hard too :)  Caleb loved watching the big digger as it drove off the trailer attached to the dump truck and he's been practicing with his own machines ever since.

We also discovered a hard hat in the digger.  He wouldn't wear it at first, but then he came around.  He was an official "construction guy", another phrase that's entered his vocabulary recently :)

Eventually Kai joined us too.  He was almost as eager as Caleb.  Almost.  He liked the buttons and knobs and handles even if he didn't want to help dig dirt.

Caleb didn't want to go inside, even when his cheeks were numb with cold and his hands could barely hold the shovel anymore.  He might have had a meltdown, screaming, "Go outside!  Diiiiiggggger!!!!!" when I carried him inside.  He might have asked about the digger the moment he woke up from his nap and stood at the window to watch it the rest of the day.  And he might have slept with his own digger and dump truck that night.  That boy loves big machines!

It was all very exciting.  Caleb had the time of his life on The Day the Digger Came!