long time coming

I want to write more often. So badly. Between the obligations of each day, and the perfunctory joys I find little time for the things that are solely for me. I accept that as this era, this glimmering moment in time when my babies are little and my husband is away many hours. This time just isn't for me.

Even so I am learning to revel in the minors, the details that make me savor. I've so enjoyed waking up to the sunrise in my kitchen, pulling back curtains to feed the little vase of flowers I keep, observing how the flowers I planted have grown and are thriving all the more even just from the night before. Planting and growing and making the mundane beautiful is a gift, I've felt so often that kneeling in the dirt with flats of flowers and border vines is soothing to my soul, and that God speaks to me in those moments. My children run about in the yard with shovels of sand or wands for making bubbles and He speaks to me about creation and my place in it and sometimes things make sense to me there, that would otherwise have remained a mystery.

I've started REALLY praying for my husband for the first time in six years. Not just the mundane "Please help him, Lord"s but a daily list of specific details for his life that I would otherwise have never known to speak. It makes me feel more connected to him, to what he is when he isn't here. I never worry that he is not the same man, I married a man whose strength is his integrity, his penchant for honor and truthfulness. All the same, praying that he enjoys his day, his activities, his relationships outside of our family, even praying over his manliness as he strives to pattern it after Christ is helping me see him a little bit differently.

I know that soon, likely less than 8 weeks from today, my mornings will be shared with a new little wide eyed soul. Fresh and innocent to the ups and downs and striving of this life. I have a responsibility to maintain that innocence as long as possible, my children have a right to savor childhood as long as possible. It is so much up to me to ensure that, and to do so I must make myself innocent in my example. This is so hard to do in a world with worldly pressures. Even now I'm at the crest of deciding painful things that will speak volumes in the lives of others, the question of do I meddle and in trying to do what's right, potentially do harm? Or is more wrong done in simply ignoring otherwise unseen evils? These are hard rocks I face and must protect my children from for now.

It's 7am now and time for everyone to rise, but this simple thirty minutes of expression feels good, I think I need to make more time for times such as these.