a wide place

Our boy turned 11 years old on New Year’s Eve. Now I feel like we can officially say all our kids are teens or pre-teens, don’t you? Doesn’t 11 somehow feel much older than 10?

Birthday gifts included lots of Pokemon, a mini-scope for examining bugs plus some more bug catchers, books, and Haribo gummy bears.

David had just preached on Luke 2, so he made Noah a birthday crown entitled “Augustus” — which is not actually someone’s name, but a Latin title, meaning “majestic, great.”

The boys’ birth family comes over every year to celebrate Christmas and his birthday, and we enjoyed a leisurely evening with Christi and Kim (sadly Christi’s husband, John, couldn’t be here this time), opening gifts and hanging out at our house, then heading over to Steve and Linda’s for a majestic fire pit.

Kim and Christi love to jump right in and do whatever the boys are doing, whether it’s video games, a puzzle, building Lego’s, or playing badminton.

We couldn’t possibly be any more grateful that God brought these four into our forever family. They make us better.

Noah is our king of fires (or “pires,” as we still call them since that was his word as a toddler). We don’t burn Christmas trees on New Year’s Eve anymore after our run-in with the fire department several years back. So Steve built Noah a log tower for our birthday s’mores, and he approved.

Noah had a rolling birthday. A week later, he celebrated with dinner at his cousins’, Owen and Oliver’s house, then with my parents the week after that when they were back in town. We love rolling birthdays!

This is a sweet season of life. I know you hear me say how much I enjoy have older kids.

But it’s not without it’s challenges. This is an interesting time to be blogging because I want to protect my kids’ stories. There’s a lot I don’t share here or even in conversation with you all. By the very nature of the internet, you see the best parts of our lives, not the worst.

Be assured that we are a very normal family, with normal sins. My being a stay-at-home homeschooling mom doesn’t prevent that. Gabe and Noah fight every bit as much their cousins or friends who go to public school. David sums up their current relationship with the phrase he used for his relationship with his own brother growing up, “Best friends, worst enemies.”

I guess what I’m saying here is as much as I love this parenting season, it’s also humbling. We’re always learning on the fly, trying our best to keep up with our ever-growing and changing kids. David and I are called to be godly, intentional, faithful parents, and we see great fruit in that. We see much goodness come from the hours we invest together as a family, reading aloud, making new memories, working through conflict, and just having fun laying around watching Survivor.

We’re also getting glimpses of how little control we ultimately have over our kids’ hearts, and one day, over their life choices. This brings us to our knees in prayer, and causes us to be determined to cultivate our own relationship with God all the more.You’ve probably heard me say what I once heard from an older friend who’s a social worker: “In most, if not all families, there is one child who wears the family’s secret sins on the outside.” It is very tempting for the family to make that child the scapegoat, the “problem in our family.” But beware. What if the child is not an anomaly — a “black sheep,” as it were — but a mirror, showing us our own sins that we become so adept at ignoring and covering up?

I’m pondering that a lot more these days.

When I get angry with my children I’m learning to stop and say, “Lord, what are you showing me about my sin in this moment? Is this child really the problem here or is he/she simply reflecting what they’ve seen in our home? Or is their childishness or sin exposing my own sinful responses when things don’t go my way?”

This drives me to Jesus.

I want the mirror, painful as it is. I want to be free from “respectable” sins. I don’t want to point my finger at my kids; it’s so easy to blame them. But I want to take ownership of my emotional and spiritual growth.

Happy, happy birthday Noah! You bring us more joy than you’ll ever know.