Sarah Anne I Am

  I just want to say...   I realize that this season of our life, with a four-year-old and two-and-a-half-year-old, happens to feature lots of cute poses and lovely scenes of us sipping tea. My life, as seen on Instagram, looks pretty smooth.    In real life, it definitely doesn't always look like this. I don't share as much of the nitty-gritty parenting challenges now that my kids are getting older. I was happy to be transparent about the difficult side of being a parent of babies, and about the wild mood swings of toddlers and assorted misadventures. But as they grow, the "hard parts" get more complicated, and more weighty. I'm just not gonna share all my kid's sins with you; I want to protect their privacy in some of these things, out of love for them.    So yeah, I've become the mom who mainly just shares the cute pictures and the sweet adventures.   I know, I don't love it either.   But like I said, that's not how it is all the time, e

At some point in the past few months my phone started notifying me of my Bible app's verse of the day. It was super annoying, because I'm prideful and I don't like to be helped or reminded- I can remember to read the Bible ON MY OWN, thank you very much. And, I don't want to read what cutesy verses you picked out, app, I'll go find something really amazing to read ON MY OWN. Get it? Hear me? I'm fine, on my own. Like I said, I am prideful. I would be more ashamed to admit it, except that I really want to make this clear: I AM SUCH A SINNER. I thought I'd been saying this, but maybe it hasn't been clear. My sin is like, all over the place. I sin every day. It's usually based in pride or selfishness. -BUT-   My sin is not the end of the story. God was merciful towards me, showed me my sin, and saved me. He has caused change in my heart and my life that I never could have accomplished on my own- and I know that with certainty, because I DID try on

  In less than three months we've made seven long road trips- "long" being between four and six hours. I know. It's not THAT long. Six hours is only six hours. We're not THAT far away.   It's just that even if you like traveling, and you LOVE seeing your family, six-ish hours on the road is its own kind of exhausting.    Parenting kids that are buckled in to car seats is a whole 'nother game.    Keeping the calm when no one has slept as much as they should or at the right time in three days borders on a circus act.   Trying to eat healthy- even while compromising my usual standards- out of a bag and a cooler, WITHOUT covering the car in seed butter or hard boiled egg, is work. It's totally doable, it's just a tiny bit sad that my kids know exactly what I'm going to buy every time we stop at a grocery store to pick up "car lunch". And that sometimes dinner is fast food and other times it gets forgotten until we pass them handfu