Accepting the Unacceptable
I thought we were finished with this rollercoaster. It had been many months, over 5, to be exact, since she last had a seizure. And prior to that, it had been quite a few months from her previous episodes. Over the last year they have been fewer and fewer with further time in between and this last stretch of time, I felt would be permanent, uninterrupted. Recently the baby monitor wore out and I was reveling in the fact that it was no longer needed. Or so I thought. Tonight proved me wrong. She had a strong seizure. It broke the normal pattern for her of occurring sometime in the early morning hours, usually between 5 and 7 am; it arrived before she was fully asleep, at around 9:30 pm. and she couldn’t stop it this time. By the time we realized it was...
An unspoken question, answered
Truth to be told, I have very few good memories of going to church as a child. I tend to remember the hassle of getting ready to go, the complaints of older siblings, the dreary loneliness of being the only girl in my Sunday School class and very few of us total, at that. The mild torture of sitting through a boring and incomprehensible church service, the awkwardness of static in my skirts and gross gum stuck to the undersides of the church benches. As an aside, allow me to balance that list. I loved when Daddy was the song leader and I loved Nancy Brubaker’s quavery voice when I was in preschool and she was the teacher. I loved putting stickers on charts and playing wild games of tag with the large group of older kids after church. I loved the smell and...
The Stars Aligned
I love lovely coincidences. I believe that is called serendipity is it not? Unexpected pleasure. Today I was pleased to be rewarded with such a happening. I will attempt to explain, but first I need to back up a bit For quite awhile now my one daughter has been begging me to “read through the Bible in a year” with her. Normally my knee-jerk reaction would be to say, “read it through yourself”, but since she is just nine years old and reading is not yet her strong point, my better judgement intervened and so we have commenced this journey with the new year. It is quite a different task to read to one’s self as opposed to reading aloud, particularly to one who is young and hearing things for the first time. I suspect we shall need to...
How Great is our God!
Here in the Nyveldt homeschool, we are currently studying ancient history, specifically, Egypt. Being the type with an inquiring mind, I was prompted to do some more research about how and where the Hebrew nation fit into the Egyptian timeline. I was curious to know if there were any significant marks and effects left by the supporting role of the Jews in Egypt from a secular point of view. I was not coming up with too much until I compared a timeline of ‘key dates of ancient Egypt’ and a timeline of ‘Jewish history’. From the World History point of view, 1550 BC is noted that Egypt, in a phase called the ‘New Kingdom’, is at it’s largest and wealthiest. On the Jewish timeline 2216 (1546 BC), Joseph was sold into...
Fear No Eagle
It is always quite humorous to hear the botching of perfectly good lyrics, words and phrases that children come up with; sometimes eyebrow-raising, even embarrassing, but yes, always funny. I spent a good deal of time today thinking about how one of my children has interpreted a certain verse out of Psalms 23. “Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no eagle” Perhaps it begs some explanation as to why a small one would hear, absorb, and conceive this as making sense. A while back, my husband procured a game for the kids to play on the Ipad called ‘Oregon Trail’. In this game, you choose your characters and various criteria about food, money, and I don’t know what all, as you travel by covered wagon...
Lucky Girl
My son wanted to stand on the back of the bench in front of us while we stood to sing in church today. This is not unusual, but normally it is his Daddy who holds him balanced there. Today it was me. As we stood there with his arm clutching tightly around my neck and he leaned against my head for added stability, my ear was pressed to his chest and I could hear his heart beating. I glanced up at my young son, watching him follow the words of the song on the wall and suddenly I saw him as he may be 20 years from now. Tall, strong and handsome. And it will be someone else’s little girl that he holds close to his heart. Some other woman who gets the privilege of hearing his heart beat and feeling his protective arm around her. There was a catch in my throat as...