Wrap around

I'm trying to wrap my head around the things we will be doing this year with travel.  They are all good things.  They really are.  I just struggle with the anxiety of not being in my element of home at times,  so it brings new challenges.  I like predictable things.  One may laugh,  as I have four children and they are never predictable, but I do like to have things be familiar.
This year,  its different a bit.  We have three big trips planned.  One to middle TN, one to Indianapolis and for Stella and I one to Germany/Iceland/France. I want to say I can do all these things with flying colors,  but the truth is I can't.  I am going to be relying on a whole lot of God's grace to get me through.  They are things that stretch me to be who I am not normally, an adaptable person.  Which is funny,  because I think to the outside world,  perhaps I think I come off this way, adaptable.  But maybe it's just that I want to know more of who God is and I am trying to trust that he's got me like he's got all the birds.  I'm being held through it all. 
So I make these plans and jump,  because I am a jumper.  Despite my wanting to control and be inn n the familiar, I know I'll only grow by taking these risks outside my comfort zone.  And even if its hard,  God is there. It's something I'm often learning and I need to not forget.  He will always show up and it won't always be easy but he is there always in love always ready for a hug.

Ups and downs and prayers

I'm 34. Relatively that's still young.  Sometimes, though, I'm amazed at how much has happened in the past few years. I'm sometimes caught in between sorrow for the hurt and glee for the happy.

The other day I bought a ticket to see a friend who moved across the pond to Germany with her little family.  It brought so much happiness and it was just a crazy moment of the fact that I am going and doing something I never thought I would be doing any time soon. The expense seemed too much. The leaving the family too much.  But a friend and I and the baby we are traveling together in the fall to visit this dear friend together, and I hope we have some good adventures around the continent together.

I'm terrified to be traveling with a 18 month old overseas, but at the same time I think its going to be one of those experiences where I am stretched in a very good way.  Where I learn to be more go with the flow and less rigid with myself.  Where I learn about the always caring hand of God in my sleeplessness and unfamiliarity. I'm excited and I hope to be less terrified as the time comes.  Come Holy Spirit.

Just a few days after this, a friend had a stroke.  A friend that was part of our 4 family Destination Imagination co-op and it was just shocking.  I had just seen her 4 days earlier and she was fine. I'm struggling with what to say here. Perhaps because I know in tragedy, its so easy to say the wrong thing and so I won't say that I own this, there are people, her children, her husband that are hurting so much. They are loved and we are praying, but I think so much day in and day out we take our people for granted without even knowing it.  And when something like this happens, it opens our eyes to see how each life has value. How she is someone significant to her family, to us to other friends.  She makes us know the love of God through her life.

At the last DI meeting, we were helping the children hash out what the storyline of their play was to be.  And so my oldest was drawing and narrating his version to this friend.  She sat there so patiently taking down his narration.  She didn't bat an eye at his crazy, probably Ninjago themed, version of the play beginning. She just was who God wanted her to be at the moment.  She's often told me that I'm level headed and creative, but then I look at her with her extreme willingness to let the children express herself in whatever way they can and I think she has something there.  Perhaps its a Martha and Mary thing. Perhaps, I am a Martha.  In many contexts I am, perhaps this is why our co-op works.  But I'm thankful for her.  She's got a willing heart, a patient heart and I'm thankful to know her.

She's stable now and out of a coma, but needs a major surgery to correct the issue and God willing if it goes okay will be a long recovery. If you would like to partake in a spiritual bouquet for her, email me at kiera.kurak@gmail.com and I will give you the details.

00 Echo

The day has come. Tommorrow, I will let go of my car that I have had for 18 years. Technically, my dad owned it the first few years, but I drove it, and the most I was without it was about 4 months, for my first semester of my freshman year.

It feels funny to be sentimental to a hunk of metal, but there are so many memories with this car.  It drove me to my first college classes, my job at the library, to soccer practices while I was still living at my parent's house.  It was my work transportation when I worked summers at Hershey Park.  I remember many cries and songs being blared in it, as I sang at the top of my lungs down the highway.

It was how I got home after my freshman year and took a passenger too to get to my big sister's wedding.  It took many trips from PA to TN and vice versa during my college years. It lived through at least 2 tornadoes during these years in TN. One time, some playground equipment suit lifted by tge tornado, dented in the trunk badly and the tornado shattered every window except the windshield.

It survived me getting rear ended on the highway, just before my 21st birthday. It oddly then would be rear ended again a few months after it being fixed.  And then another time when I lived here in OH someone backed into it while it was parked on the street.

I remember the car being towed off the Washington Mall when we took a trip in it with some friends to DC when we accidentally parked too long in a street spot. I remember late nights chatting with my future husband in that car outside his apartment. I remember scarily getting caught on sudden ice on a trip back to OH from TN and spinning out into the median of the highway.

I carted around my first two kids in this car and I loved it. It had this shelf that was a perfect foot rest. I would always drive with my foot resting on this shelf on long drives. This car even had a song written about it by a dear friend.

It was a quirky car with basic features and it still had roll down windows and I loved that about it.  My husband complained that it didn't have intermittent windshield wipers, but I was used to having to have a rhythm with clearing my view so it didn't matter too much.

Its last few years were spent as a commuting car for K at his programming job and he probably enjoyed it as it was the only non hybrid I knew that got 40mpg. Filling it at the has pump was not something to break the bank.

This car was loved and it witnessed a good chunk of our lives and it was good to us. As we donate it, not fully dead, we hope that it can be used by someone else in need of cheep wheels.

00 Echo, you were loved.

Tiddilly bump

I've been thinking about this quote by C.S. Lewis that I saw the other day:

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” - taken from the Screwtape Letters

It's making me think that perhaps I need to listen more and shout less. At times, I feel like perhaps we want to be know, hello social media, and for me I like to be right a lot. But maybe its okay not to be.

I just finished a biography on Pope Francis, and I like him as a pope, I mean I did before this book, but I think I understand him more now. I do think he's a bit crazy in perhaps his ways of doing things, because he doesn't want to be in the spotlight, but he's in a position where he is all the time, and I think he forgets that often.  But perhaps, its good for us to remember that he's a person too.  In the biography that I read, it said that he was who he was because of the mercy of God.  He has always had a huge heart for the poor and being that he's from a country that had a lot of upheaval and really crazy things happen under their governments it makes more and more sense. He saw daily how much people were marginalized and not seen as humans and just murdered senselessly. Think of Syria now, and that was a lot of what happened. 

Anyway, I think you either love or hate this current pope of ours, or perhaps you are indifferent. But I kind of like him. I think his heart is there. I think he's reforming some things that need to be reformed for the church to be a better version of itself.  I think he's teaching us that we aren't better than our neighbor. Perhaps the pope's maybe not making sense to us all the time, but I hope that God's grace will shine through it all. God's got this, so lets be his instruments. 

A baby that likes to be held

I've had one of these before. A baby that likes to be held constantly. That will only sleep when touching you. I know this brand of baby. Sometimes I'm bitter about it, sometimes it tries my patience and I need to leave the house by myself. Thankfully, my husband can and will accommodate this. We love her this baby, and I know she won't need me like this forever. For now, we are here.

I think that actually having this type of baby helps me to see that my worth doesn't depend on my productivity. Because if it did, I would be goner right now. I am stuck when she naps and I am stuck when she goes down for the night. So I sit and I knit or I read or I read to the kids. But I can't clean the house and I can't do a lot of active things.  Sometimes, if she needs a nap in the afternoon I will strap her to my back and we will walk around the neighborhood. And it is okay.

My intention is not to complain about this sweet girl of mine, but just to say how she is. She reminds me of her older brother who wanted to be carried until he was almost 4. He is still probably the best smuggler I know. Well, except for maybe this sweet girl.  But I think it definitely has taken time to adjust to her being this variety of baby. My last, I think, just needed me differently, so its an adjustment for sure.

She is amazingly sweet and I love that she is at the stage that me drinking something while she is held is of utmost excitement to her. Me grabbing a snack, well, to her that's an invitation to share.  And if I did by chance put her down and have her be content, for sure she will crawl to find me and call, "ma, ma, ma, ma" until I respond.

Sometimes I will put her down and she will then find my pant leg and she will pull herself up on it and then I am left being stationary from the waist down but trying to move the upper half of me around the kitchen to prepare food for the family. It's actually quite entertaining. And if I'm in the right mood, it makes me laugh.

Babies don't keep and soon enough she will be like her second eldest brother so very independent, who once was like her in her neediness. And so I am writing this to remember her and to try my best to love and enjoy her as a gift from God.

New Years Resolutions

The year ends and a new one begins. Its time for resolutions. We went to a friend's party this evening as a family and on the way home I told the kids that usually when a new year begins people make resolutions. So here is what the kids came up with:

Stella - the big kids agreed that she is to learn to walk and talk in the new year.

Helena - she said she would get her own cereal bowl in the mornings

Ephraim - that he would get his own cereal bowl and spoon in the mornings,

Ben - To say Helena correctly.

And for the adults:

Keith: Read 20 books, blog 15 times

Kiera : journal or blog at least weekly. Read 20 books. Celebrate the little things more as I got the word Toast as my word of the year. I think this is a really good word for me as I need to work on thanksgiving more and this feels like it is in that realm. I also got the Saint Wenceslaus as my saint for the year so I am hoping to learn from him and to invoke his intercession often.

The kids love saints and so I think tomorrow I will generate a Saint for the year for each of them too. For those of you interested in a Saint name for the year or an inspirational word head here.

I'm just going to write.

I originally wanted to keep this blog as a record for my daughters to look at and not feel alone in their motherhood when or if the time arrives.  At least perhaps in their adulthood, God willing. I have been having a lot of ideas pop into my head and then I would drop the ball when I got to writing. I even set a day and time to write and that just fell through.  But I want to write.  So I think for 2018, I will make it a goal to write at least twice a month. It can be about the day or what life is having me thinking about. A lot of times, what I wanted to write about I couldn't share on the internet so much because it was too new and well it involved loved ones so I didn't feel right.

So here goes, Christmas at home with the kids has been enjoyable. If I have any advice it's to have good inlaws. But seeing that you don't get to choose your inlaws, only your spouse. Well I pray that you have the grace of having some family or friends that surround you in love somehow. And that is what my inlaws are to me. I think its taken time and that the relationship has had its bits of strife but I think we are growing to understand one another in a way that its okay that we are different in how we carry out things but we still can be ourselves and laugh and love together.  Its good, and it makes for enjoyable Christmases and holidays all around.

And then today, today was a pajama day. The chaos of the outside world just didn't come into the house and instead we built with legos and played DDR and finished a movie and colored and just were. We made a cake for Jesus and Helena and Keith made cake pops with her cake pop maker and it was good. I think sometimes its really hard for me not to think of all the things to do in a day to keep a well oiled machine of a family going but today we just were in each other's presence and we all needed it. It was good.

I think that is all for now. If I try for more it won't get published, so here goes. Merry Christmas everyone!