Why, What Did You Do Today?
Disclaimer: These pictures weren’t actually taken today, but they were taken sometime this month so we really are swimming all “winter” long. There are worse places we could have moved for sure!
Love is in the Air!
For our anniversary (seven long months ago) I wanted to get Ben something unique and that was about us since it was the big 1-0 this year. Yep, I truly thought we would be lying on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean for that week, but we decided to take all that money and move to Phoenix instead . . . in the dead of summer. (Can “dead of summer” be a saying just like “dead of winter”?).
I headed to Etsy to find something unique, and inexpensive and I found just the thing. I think that I like it a little more then he does, but he was touched by the thought (I think).
So it is from an Etsy site that I can no longer find, but there seem to be similar things for sale on there. In case you don’t know, Etsy is a website where individuals can open a “shop” and sell all sorts of homemade items or vintage finds. It is a great place to look for unique and inexpensive gifts. You can also find expensive gifts if you want!
So basically this artist in Paris (yes, Paris, France) takes pages out of very old French magazines, paints the goldfish on them and then adds your names at the top. I love that you can tell how old the paper is, and that it is a really painting. I didn’t want to spend money on a frame, so I took a frame I already owned that was obviously too big, and used some fabric that I also already owned to matte the picture. It makes me smile whenever I see it.
So there you go, maybe that is an idea for a valentine’s day present for you! This one cost $20, but it did take about a week and a half to get here. It had to go across a whole ocean, you know! Plus the guy was on vacation when I posted the order 
The Zoo at Christmas
We don’t have white Christmases here in the desert, but we can go to the zoo the week after Christmas, which we did this past Christmas with my family.
Micah was a little scared in this picture because there is a picture of a rattlesnake on the wall behind us and he thought that meant there might be snakes that could get us.
Working hard at the little exercise stops they have along the path!
They have a little Mexican town along one of the paths. No passport required.
This zoo might have lions, elephants, camels, and baboons at this zoo, but one of Micah and Savannah’s favorite thing is the goats at the farm. Something that I think is pretty unique that they do is that the goat area here is not for feeding goats, it is just for petting them. Because these goats have never gotten food from the visitors, they don’t crowd around you frantically looking for food. They just calmly walk or lie around letting the kids pet them. So fun!
Peek-a-Boo!
Every Christmas we make sure to get a family picture. Next year there will be another family member! No not me. My sister is due to have another girl in June! If that doesn’t deserve a summer trip to the midwest, I don’t know what does. To add to the excitement, it’s possible that a little side trip to MN could be involved in that! No promises.
I Guess I Better Write Something!
Today I was featured in a guest post on the blog Money Saving Mom. I am giddy. Honestly I love that blog, and so having something that I wrote (and Ben heavily edited to get it within the word count parameters) on there is really, really exciting for me! You can check it out by clicking here.
So now that I have people clicking from there over here I figured I better write something so that the most recent post isn’t a month old. I don’t know why, but blogging just hasn’t been something I have wanted to do lately, and so I haven’t.
But now that I am here let’s catch up on the Gores family.
In the last month, LIFE180 Church has started meeting weekly, we have start a twice a month prayer gathering, Micah has shot up and sort of out grown all the 4T pants I just bought him, Savannah started talking in almost complete sentences some of the time, and I started working again.
Whew! No wonder I’ve been tired. Yeah, staying up late watching shows on Hulu has nothing to do with why I’m tired. What?! No I’m not in denial about how I contribute the most to my own exhaustion level while I seek some moments away from the kids instead of going to bed at a decent hour! Look, now I’m so worked up you’ve got me writing in run on sentences!
Just kidding. I work myself up just fine.
I’m not even sure what to address first. How about my job. I just started seeing clients at Living Hope Counseling. It is wonderful and a huge challenge for us as a family at the same time. I am going to be working Mondays and Thursday nights, and while at my job in MN I saw mostly kids, here I will be seeing mostly adults. I am excited and scared to be stretched out of my comfort zone in this way. I am also super fortunate to have a boss who is an amazing counselor and really wants to mentor me while I stretch my therapy muscles into some newish areas. For those of you following my licensure drama here in AZ, where it stands now is that they have granted me a temporary license while they review my application for full licensure. For those of you unfamiliar, I have a license in Marriage and Family Therapy in MN and am working to have it transferred here to AZ, my new home. There is a lot to love about AZ, but how the government and social services are run is not one of them. That is not even a political opinion. It is simply a fact about their inefficiency, and crabbiness. But in spite of all that, I am very thankful to have this temporary license and to be able to start to see clients again.
On to LIFE180 Church. Planting (starting) a new church has its blessings and its challenges (and then some more challenges). Ben is busy, busy, busy and sometimes that feels like all there is. Right now it doesn’t feel like we go to LIFE180, because neither one of us is ever in the service. Instead we tell people that for now we work at LIFE180. Someday we’ll be able to do both. We recently started a twice a month prayer/fellowship gathering called First and Third (it meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month). Ben and I decided to take turns going since it runs smack dab in the middle of bedtime for Micah and Savannah. Tonight I got to go for the first time, and it was so wonderful and so refreshing. It was the first time that I have really felt like part of a community called LIFE180. Honestly it was the first time I have been to a LIFE180 thing that was meant for the whole church when I haven’t been in the nursery. I left encouraged by the love from the people and God there. This Sunday we are having a LIFE180 Superbowl Party, and I am so excited. We left a church family back in MN that we loved dearly, and tonight I got a taste of the church family we will get to experience here for the first time. God is good!
Micah and Savannah are as cute as ever, of course! I don’t know. When I try to think of what to write about them, I kind of draw a blank. There are so many things. They are always doing or saying such funny or sweet (or sometimes disrespectful or naughty) things that it is hard to pick what to say right now. Micah did tell me the other day that he is really excited for when he gets to grow up and be a daddy, so that I can be a grandma (I guess I’m glad he’s excited about that.) Just when I thought he was being so smart for understanding how I will be his child’s grandma, he added, “But that makes me really sad too, because then you won’t be my Mommy anymore.” When I tried to explain that I would be both at the same time, I could tell the idea was blowing his mind. After a minute, he assured me that I was wrong because that couldn’t happen unless I wanted to be half and half. Since my life plan for him doesn’t involve him becoming a daddy for many, many, many, many (etc) years, I don’t think we need to worry about that yet.
Savannah is sweet. She just is. She is spunky too, but she has this really sweet heart. Lately she has been wandering around the house saying, “I wuv you tooooooooooo!” in a sing songy voice. No one has to have said it to her first, but it is always accompanied by a hug.
So that has been our month in a nutshell. It feels like we have been in a time of transition since Savannah was born two years ago. One challenge has seamlessly morphed into another, and sometimes they have even overlapped (yay! – sarcastic yay there for ya). However, we have seen God’s grace abundantly in our lives during this time. Ben and I had the opportunity to hear some great speakers today at a little conference about marriage and ministry. There were so many great things that we heard, but one that stuck out to me is this:
Sometimes we don’t truly understand that Jesus is all we need, until Jesus is all we have.
If you’re going to write a blog post, you need to have a picture! Here are Micah and Savannah with their cousin Aubrey at Christmas. The only one not smiling is the only one looking at the camera. Go figure.
Starting to Catch Up on an Eventful December
I’m back. I love blogging because I love getting to look back on posts over the years and see what was happening with the kids as well as what I was thinking at the time. I hate it because it ends up feeling like one more thing to do, and so I don’t do it. Usually all it takes it breaking the cycle of not posting and I’m back for a while.
December was a wonderful and crazy month for us. I’m sure it was for most people. We had Micah’s 4th Birthday, LIFE180′s first Christmas Eve services, Ben’s parents in town the week before Christmas, and my family in town the week after Christmas. Then we all got sick. Isn’t that how it goes? Once all the busyness is done, the sickness finally sets in. We are getting better though.
So basically I need to post pictures of all those things. I don’t have most of them loaded on the computer yet, but here is a cutie to tie us all over while I get that done.
This was taken by my mom in the goat pen at the zoo the week after Christmas.
She’s Pretty Chill
A couple of weeks ago I couldn’t find Savannah in the apartment. After a little hunting, I found her on our balcony, just hanging out.
Yeah, the girl knows how to chill.
What Happens When
What happens when you get home from the gym right at lunch time to discover that there are two maintenance guys in your kitchen, and all the wall outlets are off with wires exposed? What happens when your kids are really hungry and you don’t have access to your kitchen, and they tell you they don’t know how long they’ll be because they just can’t seem to figure out what the problem is?
What happens is you lunch at Chipotle.
What happens when all this transpires at nap time?
Well, apparently if you’re Savannah, you just don’t let that stop you.
Savannah’s First Haircut
As I mentioned on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, Savannah had her first haircut the week before Thanksgiving. She really didn’t NEED a haircut, but our friend Brianne had already cut my hair and Ben’s, so we just kept going. I wanted to get the straggly ends cut off so that it looked a little cleaner. As you can see in the pictures, she wasn’t a fan. Even giving her a cookie didn’t help. She was so upset she didn’t seem to know what to do with the cookie. However, once I started asking her to share bites with me, she calmed down. I guess it gave her something to focus on. Now if I could just get her bangs to grow faster so that her hair can be down without being in her eyes, I will be a happy mama.
Look at that face! When Micah gets upset he shows it through anger. Savannah makes faces that beg you to rescue her.
The almost finished product.
Thanks, Brianne!!
What To Say, What To Say . . .
It’s been a while. I just haven’t felt like blogging, and so I haven’t. I am not even sure that I feel like it now, but I’m going to do it anyway. Here is what has been going on in our lives.
I got a job! I don’t start until January, and that is even a tentative date because I can’t start until I am granted my temporary license (to practice therapy here), and I can’t apply for that until I apply for my actual license. I can’t send that application in until I get back all the forms that I had to send out to many, many people to verify everything that I did in MN to get my license there. Tomorrow I will go to get finger printed, and after that I am just waiting around for all the signed and sealed envelopes to return from everyone. This job, however, was a gift from God. I gave up a lot moving here, and honestly while I believed at the time fully that God wanted me to sacrifice that to be obedient to Him, I think I believe that it ended there. I believed that the giving up was what God wanted. I believed that it would follow years of working in jobs below my skill level and frankly below my pay grade to get my license here and be able to get a job similar in caliber to the one I had in MN. However, with very little work on my part, this job landed in my lap. With a small prompting from someone that I spoke to once on the phone here I started to look into what I could do to get around some of the licensing hiccups I was encountering here. I think I found a way that is honest and ethical, but will let me get my license with little to no extra effort on my part. Praise God! This job is in private practice with one other therapist who is looking to mentor someone. No kids for now, but I have been itching to expand my abilities and expertise. I am fully confident in my ability to work with kids and their families so when that returns someday, I will be able to pick it up again. The office is 8 minutes from our apartment, and she is looking for someone to work 10-15 hours a week, which is exactly what I did in MN.
I didn’t even blog or facebook about the job at first, because it felt so surreal; like a blessing that I didn’t deserve. But it all still does hinge in the boards favor, and “favor” is exactly the right word for it. While there are written out requirements and statutes here, the board is fickle, and can be arbitrary in their “rulings.” I am trusting though that just as God has provided this job, he will also provide the license that I need to do it.
In other news, we are making friends here, but I am having a hard time keeping up with them. It is the kids and the busyness of maintaining their schedules, but I realized that in MN by the time I had kids almost all my friends had been my friends for long enough that it didn’t take a lot of work to maintain the friendship. Seeing them once a week at church and every other week at MOPS went a long way to maintaining those friendships so that if I could only see them one other time a month, we still felt close. I am finding here though that as I work to BUILD friendships, rarely seeing people doesn’t work. Also many of those friends don’t go to LIFE180, and so I am not seeing them at church either. I am having to make lists of people that I want to see to make it happen, and it is still not going as smoothly as I would like. I think I need a social director. And a nanny. And a maid.
Our tiny apartment is decorated for Christmas, and I am still wearing flip flops to the store. Although I am wearing those flip flops with jeans now so you know that it must be downright frosty here I think I will adjust to Christmases with no snow, but right now it does feel a little weird. Maybe we’ll go swimming on Christmas day.
We went to Seattle for Thanksgiving, and it was great. The first couple of days, I enjoyed the rainy, cloudy weather, but then I was ready for some Phoenix sunshine again. The sun did shine one day, and we went for a family walk to celebrate. It was a short walk, however, because we all got too cold. Amazing how our wardrobes have already become inadequate for temps below 50.
Micah’s forth birthday is in two weeks. FORTH BIRTHDAY!!! Who told him he could get so old?! He is so smart, and so sweet, and so spirited. There are days when he wears me right down to the end of my rope, but even in those days there are such moments of pure joy. We are going to celebrate his birthday by going to Peter Piper Pizza (which seems kind of like a CiCi’s with a small arcade in the back). Whatever, it is what he picked. He also says he wants a birthday cake with garbage trucks in it, and I want to make him one so we’ll see how that turns out. If nothing else I can tell him that it is supposed to be a big pile of garbage if it looks bad.
Savannah is talking up a storm, and using two to three word sentences. It is so cute because you can see her forming them in her little mind sometimes before she says them. She is in love with Fireman Sam (from a kids’ show), but calls him “ams.” She copies EVERYTHING Micah does, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the moment.
That’s it. That is my update in a nut shell. Who knows when I’ll blog again, but if past experience can tell us anything it is that I have officially broken my writer’s block and will probably blog pretty consistently for about a month before I lose all momentum again and drop off the face of the earth.
When my mom was visiting at the end of October we attempted to get a good family picture for the Woodcrest Missions Fair that took place a few weeks ago. She literally took almost a hundred pictures. This is the best one of Ben and me. Actually most of them are pretty good pictures of us. The kids? Well, Savannah is not on board with having her picture taken. I love this picture though, because it so accurately captures Micah’s spirit.
