Today.

Today is a good day.

I'm reminding myself of that a little more than usual today. Today i have 2 sick 2 year olds, 10 am appt. for my 13 year old to get braces. (which meant NO BSF for me! again... :( ) A 2:30 appt for my 7yo for vision therapy, and 5:45 appts for Asher and Leif, Leif for wart removal, and Asher for an ear recheck- (which i'm actually really glad is today since ever since the weekend he's been acting like the ear infection is BACK.) So inbetween appointments i'm trying to get the house cleaned up, BLOG :), check email, and tie up any loose ends with Leif's registration for MP3 and Nik's curriculum order, both of which we are trying to get pushed through ASAP. Its much easier to do school with the intended curriculum! Regardless, we are getting on just fine without it. The only major thing Nik is missing is his language arts, so he's working on time-4-learning until that comes and doing misc. stuff we have around.

Anyway, its days like these that tend to stress me out. But today, i'm taking it in stride. Maybe its because I just had a good long talk with Nik, as he agonized about his new braces. I keep trying to convince him he's SUPER handsome in them! See?? isn't he handsome?




We talked about how its under pressure that we really have the chance to grow and learn and develop our character. And if we never had trials, we'd never develop into who God wants us to be. And i TOTALLY feel authorized to tell him that, since i'm far from a stranger to trials! He knows that too and takes it well for me. We had a good, fruitful discussion, and then went home to have our emerald city smoothies and the little guys had a subway sub. I love that I have such a great relationship with my children, especially the big ones. There's something really great about watching them each grow into such diversely different people and to have that bond with them. I still can't believe i'm old enough to have teenagers!

Today i'm hanging on by little more than the promise that He's provided us, that:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

And its pretty obvious in our lives to who's purpose we've been called. I still have to stop what i'm doing every once in a while and say "I can't believe i have TEENAGERS!" "I can't believe I have TWINS" "I can't believe i have 7 CHILDREN!" "I can't believe I've been married nearly half my life!" Its so strange and cool. I wish I had better vocabulary to articulate that, but i can attest to this- God REALLY does work for the good of those who love Him! and He really does give us what we NEED and want, but don't know we want! I'm so GLAD He knows what I wanted better than I did. Because being a high powered trial lawyer would have been fun, no doubt. But i'd not trade THIS life for that, If i could go back, i'd do things differently for sure, but there's 8 people in my life that I wouldn't change for the world.