All three of my children are currently asleep.
At the same time.
During daylight hours.
Do you have any idea how rare this is?
I don't think it would have happened at all except for the fact that one of them is ill, another seems like he might be catching it, and the third is only 5 months old, so he sleeps most of the time anyway.
Reading the blogs of others has inspired me to start writing again, but that's tough to do these days with three children ages 4 and under. It's possible to read while trying to keep the eldest child from bullying the middle child, while encouraging the middle child to finish his lunch, all while keeping the nursing infant latched on at the breast. It's possible to read like that, but not to write! So now that they're all sleeping, I'm going to start writing a new post.
Well, that was short-lived. The baby just woke up and is having a little snack as I type, which I am able to do while nursing a baby thanks to the amazing wrap-around nursing pillow that my parents sent me for my birthday.
I feel like I've finally got my act together after the birth of our most recent baby. It always seems to take me about a month to get back into a good rhythm with cooking, housework, parenting, personal hygiene, etc. So now that the apartment is not always a complete wreck, and I'm washing my hair twice a week, and I can find time to read to the boys in addition to their nighttime Bible story, I decided to take on a new project. Last week I hung pictures up in our living room. This might not sound like much, but for me it was a huge step. You see, before moving to our current city about three and a half years ago, we lived in Kyiv for four and a half years.
And we lived in seven different apartments during that time.
Seven apartments in four and a half years averages out to fewer than eight months per apartment. That's a lot of moving, and all of that moving was prefaced by the biggest move of all, my move from the U.S. to Ukraine. By the time we moved to our new city and our current apartment, circumstances had trained me to approach home decoration in light of our next move.
That's why instead of getting cupboards to store our things, we bought plastic bins and stacked them six feet high on shelves in our bedroom.When it's time to move again, I won't even have to pack these things; we'll just load up our storage bins and go. (Several months ago I finally had the brilliant idea of hiding the storage bins behind a fuzzy green blanket that coordinates with our bedroom curtains.)
That's why we don't own a television set; we ditched it before the last move because we found it too big and cumbersome to drag along yet again. (Somehow we felt differently about our hundreds of books, but that's a topic for another post.)
The problem with this approach is that we've been living in the same apartment for three and a half years, and I'm still acting like we're going to move out next month. Over the last two years, I've been given several pieces of original artwork, but since I was always thinking in terms of our next move, I was unwilling to drill holes in our concrete walls to hang them. Instead, they were propped awkwardly on bookshelves and windowsills. The beautiful oil painting that my husband gave me for my birthday was sitting on top of our wardrobe so that the kids couldn't maul it! But last week I finally took the plunge and decorated our living room walls. (Thanks to a care package from a friend in the States, however, I was able to do it with 3M Command picture-hanging strips instead of my husband's heavy-duty drill for concrete.) It looks wonderful–homey and inviting–and the oil painting of the Carpathian Mountains soothes my spirit every time I gaze at it:
Why didn't I do this sooner?
On the other hand, while constantly living in terms of the next move may be an awful way to approach home decorating, I've realized that it's exactly the way I should approach life as a whole. My next move is just around the corner. Am I storing my things in such a way that they will make the move with me? (Matthew 6:19-21) Am I getting rid of everything that is heavy or cumbersome? (Hebrews 12:1-2) Most importantly, am I living with the daily conviction that this life with all its trappings (good and bad) is just a temporary arrangement until Jesus takes me to my true home?
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