life lessons from a turtle

When we moved here last Spring my daughter found a baby turtle.  She really wanted to keep it, but we had just moved and I didn't want to add another living thing that needed tending to into the house.  I made her release it.

This Spring she was with a group of friends when they found a new freshly hatched turtle.  One of the other friends took it home, but also was told to release it.

My daughter told me about this and she began crying, because she desperately wanted a turtle.  As her tears fell I told her that her tears would evaporate and then they would eventually turn to rain and then the rain would fall on a turtle and that turtle would know she wanted it and it would walk into our yard and if that happened she could keep it.

She smiled, but being almost 12 she knew that wasn't going to happen, but at 12 one still has some spark of hope left in things that seem magical and wondrous.  So every time a tear would fall thinking of that turtle she didn't have she would take a finger, wipe under her eye and then wiggle her fingers up into the air....."evaporating tear" she would whisper under her breath.

One day she was off playing with friends and I was outside cleaning the van.  I had finished and was stepping out of the van when something in the grass had caught my eye.  The cutest tiniest little turtle was in our yard and it was walking right towards me.  I think I may have squealed.  I picked him up and did a little dance because "evaporating tears!"

Those evaporated tears found their way to heaven on a prayer and they rained down on a cute little turtle that walked right up to me.

Assuming that our turtle is a boy his name is Fletcher Madan.  We recently moved him into a turtles paradise complete with waterfall, warming rock, and floating plants to nibble on and hide in.

He has a heat lamp and a UV light.  He needs both.  He needs the heat lamp to keep him warm, but he needs the UV so that his shell will grow properly and be hard.  Turtles that don't get enough UV end up with a soft pitted shell.

The heat lamp gives him warmth and comfort, but it is the UV light that he stretches out towards.  The light that helps him to grow properly and makes him strong is the one that he lifts his head to and puts his focus on.

I think this turtle is teaching me some life lessons.

Five Minute Friday: Laundry

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but on this five minute Friday I think they might just be worth a thousand minutes. 

Quite possibly even 1000 pieces of laundry.

As a mom of seven I get laundry.  Like, really get it.  I get lots and lots of it. 

This immense amount of laundry in my life can sometimes seem never ending and insurmountable. 

Wash, fold, put away. 


                           REPEAT!

                                            REPEAT!

                                                    REPEAT!

Will I ever be able to climb Mt. Laundrosuvius??

note the crazed eyes as the oxygen levels begin lower at these higher laundry altitudes.

But ..........

 

 

at the end of the day and the piles the little laundry trolls who make all of these mountains are totally worth it.

 

The youngest laundry troll.  Isn't he cute?!

 

 



It Is Good To Remember AKA How I Met My Hubby

As  promised in my last post, here is the blog about how I met my husband.

 

I was the ripe old age of 22, on the verge of turning 23 and felt like an old maid.  I was the girl who wanted to meet and marry my high school sweetheart, but no sweetheart ever materialized during high school and here I was five years out of high school with still no sweetheart.  Not only no sweetheart, but my last few tries at love had failed miserably.

I decided to give up on love, romance, and the hopes of a long term relationship and just have fun dating, so with that notion in my head I searched online and found a personal ads website.  PersonalAds2000 to be exact.  Very Y2K in 1998. 

I uploaded a blurry low res picture of me in baggy sweats, a ponytail, and holding up the teensiest little fish that one could catch on a fishing pole unless they had been fishing out of a goldfish bowl.  Although to be honest, my Aunt's gold fish were bigger than that sad little fish that I had caught. 

*I cannot find that particular picture.  Bummer.*

Along with the picture I added this poem:



Touch me - NOT with your hands, but with your soul.

 Hear me - NOT with your ears, but with your heart.

See me - NOT with your eyes, but with your emotions.

 Search for me - NOT because I am lost, but because without me, a part of you is.

Find me - NOT alone in a park, but within a crowd of people.

2/10/98

 

 

And that was all I put....oh I did also break the rules and write my homepage address on there.

*a homepage was sort of like a blog/scrapbook that was around before blogging was actually a thing.* 

That webpage has been lost to time and sadly you will never know how charming I must have been on it.  It was called Terabinthia's World (Terabinthia was my handle for the internet chat rooms I chatted in....wow I really feel as though I am dating myself here.....).  And the only thing that I can for sure remember what it said were the words, "there you have it, the jiffy lube of me"  or something along those lines and it also talked about my goals for the future and where I wanted to be later on in life. Literary GOLD was written there, I promise you!  Shame that it is gone. 

That little ad brought in over 200 emails.  Some I responded to and some were just your typical gross responses to a personals ad.  Out of those 200 hundred I met 2 in person.  I also met up with a guy who had his own personals ad that I responded to. 

 

You have to love the hair.  Notice that difference
between his fireman hair here and his Navy hair
in the wedding cake pics.  =)

The first person I met with I have blogged about before, but I fear I sound a bit shallow in that post so I won't link up to it on here. Let's just say that it was the most uncomfortable date that I have ever been on and could be a PSA on why you need to choose the people you meet and the locations you meet at wisely when it comes to internet dating.

 

Steve, my now husband, was the other guy that I met off of there.  I was also corresponding with some others, but those didn't last after meeting Steve.

 

Steve and I emailed each other back and forth for about two weeks before actually meeting.  I lived in Federal Way at the time and he lived in Bremerton.  They are about an hour apart from each other. 

 

Our reception at my parents house after our Justice of the
 Peace wedding. I had yet to hone my scrapbooking
skills here.
 

Our first date was on July 3, 1998.  He wanted me to feel safe, so we decided to meet at my Aunt's house in Gig Harbor, which was half way between the two places.  He came in met my Aunt, Uncle, Cousins, and my Grandma who was visiting.  Then we took my car and I drove, because again he wanted all of us to feel safe.  I think he even left his car keys and drivers license with my Aunt. 

 

I remember walking out of my Aunt's house when he got there and thinking, "WOW, he is really cute!  He will never go for me." 

 

We went and saw the X files movie, ate at Burger King, and then we went back to my Aunt's and laid in her yard talking for a long time.

 

The next day was the Fourth of July and my Aunt always had a big party, so I invited him to come.  He came and met the whole family and extended Micronesian family on my Uncle's side.  After that we were pretty much inseparable. Every free moment that he wasn't at the fire station he was at my house, or I was at his. 

 

Our baby pictures.  No one thought that Katie looked
like me then.  Now everyone says she is my mini me.

We were married in March of 99 and had our oldest, Katie, that May.  Whirlwind.  It was a whirlwind everything. 





My plan of staying out of a relationship made God laugh I think.  I do remember at one point having a choice to make, because I knew that Steve wanted commitment and I wanted fun.  I can remember hearing very clearly God telling me to "choose Steve". 

 

There have been times when I have questioned that voice and my decision, because let's face it marriage can be hard.  HARD with all caps.  The kind of hard where all your breath comes out in the saying it and the D at the end is loud and harsh:

 

HHHHHHAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRD! 

 



And this marriage has been that at times, for both of us.  Trust has been mishandled, misplaced, and abandoned on both sides in various ways and to varying degrees.  But we are still here, working through those hard spaces.  Sometimes it can feel like a belly crawl army style through the mud kind of working at it, but even that slow crawl has moved us forward to today.



It is good to remember how we came together, because that gets lost in the hard and the hurts much too easily.  It is good to remember how his early emails made my stomach butterfly and how he would drive me back home on the freeway going 45 miles an hour just to make the time last longer and it still felt too fast.  It is good to remember, because honestly I fear that I forget too easily.

the whole family 14 years and 2 months after that first date.
taken 9/12

Thank you Karmen for suggesting that I do this and for helping me to remember.



An open letter to pastors

I wrote this letter to my new pastor.  Really it could have probably been written to any pastor anywhere about the deafening silence coming from the pulpit about sexual abuse and how it has a huge voice that needs listening to in discussions of sexual purity.

July 1, 2013

Dear Pastor .......,

                I sat through service yesterday and listened to you talk on purity.  At one point the room went hazy and it became hard for me to see, so I knew it was something I probably really needed to hear.  But the more I heard the angrier I became.  Angry, because for every time I have ever heard a sermon preached on purity not a single pastor, not one, has ever touched on the sexual sins that adults commit on children and how those sins fundamentally change those children.  Not one!  And so I wanted to stand up and point my finger and shout out:  “Okay, OKAY!  I HEAR what you are saying, but what about us?!  What about those of us who were used as others sexual dishrags before we had any say in the matter, or when we were in that in between stage of child and teenager and we were so confused by what happened and our reaction to it that we felt somehow to blame for it?  What about those of us who grew up thinking that our purpose in life, or worth, was nothing more than that dishrag we were used as, maybe even made to be?  You tell us to be pure, to control ourselves, but you never once touch on how to do that when someone else’s actions fundamentally has changed everything about whom God created us to be. It changes who we are, how we see ourselves, how we see the world around us. Pastors love to speak on how sex is a gift.  I have never known it that way, so I understood when you spoke of the man who asked for his sexual drive to be taken away.  To me sex is more like a poison.  It isn’t intimate, it isn’t holy, and it certainly has never felt like a gift.  It is and always has been a thorn: a deep piercing, infection producing thorn, so how about we as a church discuss that sometime.  Because I know that I am probably not the only one.  I am guessing that just about 75% of any congregation at any given time has been or will be sexually abused, maybe even more.  So where are the sermons on that?  Where are the sermons telling the adults to stop using children as rags for their desires?  Where are the sermons talking to those raggedy children turned adults addressing their shame, their guilt, because they had desires from the time that they could remember that the church says is impure and wrong.  Where are the sermons that will stop making them feel shamed and guilty and start helping them figure out how to change those desires, because shame and guilt sure aren’t getting the job done.  Where are the sermons that discuss how to move sex from the shame/guilt/ poisonous thorn in my side box to the intimacy gift box, because boy I would sure like to know how to do that?!  Are pastors afraid to discuss this?  They aren’t afraid to talk about homosexuality, adultery, pornography, etc., but I am pretty certain that in a large number of these issues if you did a little digging that you would find that the root of many of these sexual sins would be childhood sexual abuse.  So yes, I am pointing my finger, yes I am angry, because why don’t we as a church, as a people address the root of the weed instead of just pulling at what we see coming out of the ground.” 

Please understand that I am not really angry with you.  I am angry with the situation, the silence, the deafening silence from the church when it comes to sexual abuse.  Do people think it doesn’t happen in churches?  That Christians are immune from this plague?  Are pastors afraid to offend the abusers or is it just nicer in general to pretend they aren’t there?  Because trust me they are there, in your congregations, sitting in your pews, invisible, but there and so are we… the sopping wet or crusted over stained and used dishrags. 

Sincerely,

Karmen Madan

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Kalen's snowman.  Made all by herself. 

Our tree covered in snow.

Does this remind anyone else of Narnia?

Here is me with droplets of snow all cozy and warm in my bedroom.  I love to watch the snow.  Tonight I am spending my evening watching the snow, crocheting, and watching the movie "Date Night"  all at the same time.  Oh and did I mention that all the children fell asleep without a fight tonight?!  Yeah, this is a perfect evening!!!! 

Beautifully, Bless-ed-ly Boring

I admit it, my life is pretty boring.  When I want to complain about the laundry, the dishes, the piles of baby snacks that find their way onto my living room floor, I have to remember the times when life wasn't boring  and be thankful for this time, when the everyday is the norm. 

With my oldest son being in Occupational therapy twice a week I see families that have daily struggles beyond my comprehension.  I am guessing that my "boring" would their blessing.   I remember when Karson (my now 2.5 year old) was sick and had to spend 3 days at the hospital taking test after test to figure out what was wrong.  Life was not boring then, it was crazy, and a bit scary, filled with the un-known.  I would not ask for that again.

I think of now as I wait and wonder what is afflicting my body and I have to say as difficult as the waiting is I think of those who have Cancer and other debilitating diseases and think of all the non boring things that they have to go through and again I would choose my boring life. 

I think of those who don't have a home to get messy, or a place to wash their belongings, maybe not even owning any belongings.  That kind of a life would not be boring, but it is not an exciting that I would ever ask for or wish on those who live it.

So as I look at the couch filled with laundry waiting to be folded, the piles of dirty laundry waiting to be washed, the dishwasher that is ready to be emptied, the dishes that still need to be washed, and the floor that has baby snacks spread everywhere....I have to say I am happy.  Happy to have this boring life filled with everyday tasks, because they are beautiful, I am blessed beyond measure.  My life is beautifully, bless-ed-ly boring.

 baby snacks lovingly strewn about by the baby

 clean laundry waiting for me to fold it

 dishes waiting to be washed

the laundry pile slowly getting smaller.

A Pictoral View of My Life.

A Baby who likes to be inside a box.

He won't sleep in a bed, but give him a box and he is sound asleep, what is up with that?

 Because drinking out of a clean bowl in the kitchen is just not as tasty as drinking out of this large porcelain one.

After a drink from the cleanest bowl in the house it is best to climb trees.  Even fake ones that live inside.

 And of course sibling rivalry must follow.

Being caught is never fun.

Someone around here is usually ready to pull out their hair.  Typically it is me and not the kids though.

It appears that craziness runs in the family.

And what night is complete without watching a movie together as a family?

So, there you have it, a bit of my life in pictures. 

I forget sometimes.......

Oh

how I hurt.

Hurts so deep that my skin is

bruised and tender.

I get stuck in the hurt.

I get stuck

and

I forget.

I forget the song that I used

to sing to myself.

The song I sang when hurts were being

shoved deep into my

soul

like thorns.

The words tender and sweet.

Melody soft and simple.

Like a soothing ointment with promises of love.

Love

 from He who wore thorns shaped like crown.

Who knows how deep they pierce.

Promises that His scarred hands would touch me

and cause my eyes to see.

And these words that I forgot
fly to me
fresh.

Beautiful, Beautiful, Jesus is Beautiful

and Jesus makes beautiful things of

my life.

Carefully,

touching me,

 causing my eyes to see.

Yes, Jesus makes beautiful things of

my life.

linking up with Emily and her imperfect community today