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Gratituesday: The Girls In My Life

March 24, 2014 by Laura 9 Comments

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gratituesday[2]

“So Laura, don’t you ever wish you had little girls?”

People ask me that question quite often as they observe my boy-filled life. My answer is always “no.” God knew what He was doing when He gave me all sons and no daughters. Plus we snatched up little Gladis, who gets to be our daughter/sister/friend/delight in Honduras.

I didn’t have any sisters when I was growing up either – just one brother. You know what I have now? All kinds of sisters! My brother’s wife, Matt’s sister, Matt’s brothers wife, plus all the Christian sisters God has put in my life. So, do you know what I might have someday? Four daughters, if God sees fit that all of our boys get married.

Guess what else I have? Several nieces. Precious, sweet girls who give me excuses to buy pink, giggle, and talk about fingernail polish. Girls who tell me, “Hey, cute jeans” and “I like your sweater.”

I do sometimes wonder what my daughter might have looked like had I actually had one. I usually look no farther than my brother’s girls. If I had a daughter, I’m pretty sure she would look a lot like this:

niece

This niece of mine looks so much like I did when I was little. 

I got to see two of my Kansas nieces briefly this weekend. My oldest niece, who is 12, and also a lot like I was when I was her age, spent some time in the kitchen with me, helping me and chatting as we worked on lunch.

niece 1

Yep, except for the braces, I bet I could find some
12 year old pictures of me that would look a lot like this.

While we worked, she asked me, “Do you ever wish you had girls, Aunt Laura?” It was a moment I had not planned, but it was the perfect opportunity to stop my work and look right into her eyes. “Not even a little bit, Kailey,” I told her, “because God gave me nieces like you instead.”

You should have seen her smile. She’s old enough and mature enough to hear my heart. I’ve said it to others, but there was something pretty special about sharing it directly with her.

I’m so thankful for all the girls God put in my life to love on. Bring on the shopping trips, hair styling, and shared smiles as we watch the boys race through the room at lightening speed.

Now your turn. Share what you’re thankful for!  Leave a comment on this post letting us know how God is working in your life. If you’ve written a blog post about what you’re thankful for, leave the link in the comments so we can visit your blog to read about it. We love sharing and reading about God’s blessings!

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The Joy of Boys

August 21, 2011 by Laura 79 Comments

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The following is an article I wrote for our local paper a couple of years ago, but never actually posted here. I’m often asked if I regret not having daughters. Though my life is void of pink hair bows, sweet dresses, paper dolls and braids (all things I dreamed of enjoying with my little girls before God gave me this passel of boys), I can answer truthfully that I do not for a minute doubt that God knew exactly what he was doing when he continued to bless us with boys. My life is full of joy – The Joy of Boys…

The Joy of Boys

When our first baby was born a boy, I was very happy knowing that any other children we would have in the future would be under the protection of an older brother. When our second baby was born a boy, I was glad our oldest son now had a brother to play with. When our third baby was born a boy, I decided that God must have something special in mind for our family. THREE boys?

When I was pregnant with our fourth baby, you can just guess what everyone around me was saying. “Finally going to have a sister for all those boys?” or “I bet you’re sure hoping for a girl this time!”

When our fourth baby was born a boy, they laid him on my chest, and all my husband and I could do was laugh for joy that God had given us yet another son!

Boys are so sweet. Boys love their Mamas like crazy. Boys think their Daddys are the best. Boys….ah boys. Boys bring such joy.

The Joy of Boys

I love how boys play (now that I’m used to it!). Our house is usually noisy, rough and fast – there’s not a lot of tip-toeing or sitting down quietly to color pictures at the table.

Generally…I find that the male greeting (between my boys and all of their friends who come over to play) has little to do with words and a lot to do with grabbing onto and pulling one another down to the floor into an immediate wrestling match.

I’ve learned to look the other way, smile, and shake my head about so many things that I used to fear would turn into a trip to the Emergency Room. Boys play rough – they can’t help it. They make noise. It oozes out of their pores. Rolls of wrapping paper become swords or light sabers. Toast and grilled cheese sandwiches are chewed into the shape of little guns. Math books become drums. Little pink erasers become race cars.

Everything (everything) becomes a competition:  who can finish their milk first, who can put their jammies on the fastest, who can get from the kitchen to the living room without touching the floor.

It’s one big, loud, ball game at our house all day long – and I wouldn’t trade it for all tea parties in Boston.

I consider it a huge honor to be the mama of boys. Boys who we pray will grow up and be Godly leaders some day. Boys who we pray will be Godly husbands and daddys some day.

Oh, and some day, when my boys grow up and get married…I’ll have daughters. I’ll take them shopping and we’ll cook and do hair together.

Until then, I’ll just continue to feed mountains of mashed potatoes and huge stacks of pancakes to all these boys while they make all the noises with their armpits that they are so good at making and while they laugh at all the things boys can’t help but think are funny.

They are…boys.

Boys who have completely and totally won my heart.

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Toys for Boys? Are Guns Okay? Podcast #9

March 11, 2011 by Laura 42 Comments

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Ah, one of my favorite subjects. Through the years, we’ve been asked many times what we feel are the best toys for boys. Do we allow our boys to play with guns? As Christians, do we feel like this is okay? What about transformers? Swords? Is all that violence good for them?

These are the questions I address in this latest podcast. 

One thing I forgot to mention (probably because I was all wrapped up in talking about how many light sabers we have):  LEGOS! I was addressing other questions, so Legos just didn’t come up. But of all the favorite toys we have in our house…we just LOVE our Legos. They are well worth the investment and make wonderful gifts for our boys. 

But back to the guns and swords (which of course Legos can easily be built to resemble)…

Heavenly Homemakers Podcast Nine

Share your thoughts! Do you have boys? What do you let them play with?

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Gratituesday: Back to School Shopping

August 9, 2010 by Laura 22 Comments

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gratituesday

If you’ve been hanging around here long, you might already know that the boys and I have a tradition each year a few days before we start school. Each boy gets his very own “school supply list” and off to Walmart we go so that they can pick out new notebooks and folders for the year.

I will admit that I tend to forget each year that while this is an incredibly wonderful experience and I love doing it…there is also a fair amount of chaos involved with four boys, four baskets, four lists and an aisle full of bright and attractive objects. My older guys can be calm and patient while basically picking their supplies without much help. My youngers require more help and also um…they don’t always like to follow their list so much. My youngest doesn’t know how to read the prices on the shelves, which means that I have to quickly redirect him to the 15¢ notebooks instead of the really cool $2.50 notebooks. The paper inside is the same, ya know. ;)

school_shopping_10

Oh yeah, and this year I had a fifth boy with me…because if you’re already taking four, you might as well take five. Five boys, five lists, five baskets. Five hundred questions. All at once. (“Is this the kind of folder I need Mom?” “I don’t know…why don’t you get it out of my face so that I can actually see it?”)

And yet, I do it because the boys love it. And mostly, so do I. It is SO much fun to watch them enjoy getting excited for school to start. It is so much fun to watch them walk out of the store with their very own bags of supplies. 

And…it is so much fun to only pay 20¢ for glue sticks.

school_shopping_2

The best part is watching them come home and pour the contents of their bags out to look at all over again. Then they put it all away to have it ready for the first day of school. (Or, they leave it sprawled out all over the floor so that it can get ruined already before it even has a chance to be written in yet.)

There really is something magical about new school supplies and new books that brings an excitement to the beginning of a new school year. So far we’ve had three days of school and every one of them has been just wonderful. Perfect? No. But wonderful nonetheless. 

Today, I’m grateful for the chance to be my boys’ teacher and thankful that we share traditions that will be lifetime memories. I’m even grateful for that crazy joy in the Walmart school supply section. Having a bunch of boys eager to start a new school year…now that’s something to be grateful for!

What are you thankful for this Gratituesday? Write about it on your blog, then come link up with us here. If you don’t have a blog, be sure to leave a comment letting us know what you’re grateful for!

If you are linking up a blog post for Gratituesday,
please copy and paste the following sentence into your post! Thanks!


Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers!

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In His Hands

June 23, 2010 by Laura 7 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links which won’t change your price but will share some commission.

Please join me in welcoming the final guest poster for this week:  Brandy, The Marathon Mom. You know how I have four boy children? Yeah…Brandy has SEVEN. Boys.  Uh-huh. And I thought my grocery budget looked scary for the future. You’ll love Brandy’s insights and thoughts entitiled, In His Hands.

As a mother of many, I find myself regularly facing the challenge of trusting God with my children. It’s an interesting place, being so close to my due date, trusting God for a wonderful birth and a healthy baby, and at the same time, trusting Him to help me guide my pre-teen son as he grows into a man. And not to mention, the 9, 7, 5, 4, and 2 year old boys in the middle, who I am also responsible for trusting to God.
 
It’s a struggle of the heart, for sure, as I want to pull my babies close, protect them, shelter them from the ways of the world, and for some ages, that is entirely appropriate. But at some point, as my child’s mother, I am confronted by the fact that all of the hard work, love, commitment, sheltering and training must come to fruition as I ultimately release my child from my hands and into the world, and allow him to go and do and be all God has called him to go and do and be. I am not quite there yet, even with our oldest, as it is a process. But God has definitely started the work in my heart and has even begun to illustrate for me quite graphically, what that process will look like as I begin to release my sons, one by one, into their God-given destinies.
 
God reminded me again last night that I could trust Him with my children, when one of our younger sons narrowly escaped a potentially bad crash on a bike. Our four year old, Drew, went ahead of me on his bike, still with training wheels, in the dark last night. Not far behind him, I assumed my normal position behind the stroller and watched as he began to coast. 
 
Downhill. FAST. FASTER…..and FASTER STILL.
 
And suddenly I realized, all within a split second, that there would be no way I could abandon the stroller and sprint with my 9 month pregnant belly in his direction to save him from a terrible fall right into the street. And I began to yell, “Drew, fall in the grass, FALL IN THE GRASS!!!” And the next split second I realized a car could be coming to meet him at the exact time of his crash. The other half of that second, I prayed the fastest and yet most heartfelt prayers a mother could muster up – out loud – “Jesus, protect him!!!” Boys from the neighborhood and some of our older sons saw what was about to happen and took off at lightning speed to catch up with Drew, but the momentum he had built up on his Spiderman bike was too much and they came to his rescue just a second after he was a pile of little boy, half on the curb, half in the street. And there was ….
 
NO
 
SOUND.
 
It was dark, so I couldn’t see him, and still trying to get down the hill, I began to yell again, “is he okay???” And then I heard him cry. The cry that let me know he was not seriously injured. “Thank you, God,”  I mumbled as I made it to my sweet boy who had screamed with blood-curtling shrieks of terror as he had flown down the sidewalk.
 
With only a few scraped toes, he had survived, and it didn’t take long for the lesson to sink in. As I questioned Drew for not listening to my instruction to fall into the grass, which would have perhaps saved us from some of the drama, I realized a few things. His response was, “I couldn’t hear you.” And he couldn’t because he was screaming in terror. His own fear actually prevented him from hearing the instruction that could have saved him from the whole experience. And next, he wasn’t trained. I knew I had never told him to fall into the grass if he couldn’t stop. I wondered why he didn’t use his brakes more, but he’s only been riding since this spring, really, so I knew  he was just inexperienced.
 
Clearly, there is an age when we can know that they know when  to brake so that they don’t go too fast and crash, and it’s obviously NOT at age four. Surely, there is a time when we can trust that we’ve done our jobs and recited with our children the rule that states, “when you’re about to fall, choose the softer landing…” Hopefully, the time comes when, as parents, we can be confident that we have trained them up in the way they should go, and that God is with them, that He will protect them, and that we can trust Him, and that our prayers are effective on behalf of our children.
 
God will show us as mothers, how to guide our children, how to train them. He will show us how and when we can and should begin to trust that they’re ready to fly on their own. Walking alongside, and even behind our children (in observation), God will show us where we need to place special attention to help prepare each of our children as individuals, so that when it’s time, they are fully equipped to go and do His work and His will.
 
Thank You, God, for this reminder. I couldn’t do this on my own.
 
Be sure to visit Brandy at The Marathon Mom!

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