Sarah Anne I Am

HOW TO USE THIS RESOURCE: Read the whole thing yourself before reading it to your kids. Pray for wisdom and compassion. Be prepared that you and your children may already have untrue or unloving views of others; it takes time to relearn these things, but by the grace of God and with His help, we can! Read it aloud with your children; you don't have to read the whole thing, but try to end on a hopeful note, not in the middle of a sad or troubling aspect. Pause whenever your children have questions. If it will be answered by another point in this doc, feel free to skip ahead to answer them, or to paraphrase it. If they're a bit older and can remember their question, feel free to tell them it will be answered as they keep listening. Plan on reading this- and more importantly, discussing this- somewhat regularly with your kids. More thoughts on discussion are at the bottom of this document.  This document does not cover every facet we can consider in the discussion of racism; it is...

 I told myself that if depression found me again, I would share well from the valley.  I told myself that if after Everly was born I found that the baby blues became deep, all-encompassing depression- the kind I know too well, the kind that has left me locked in the bathroom sitting on the floor in the dark, because the darkness is all I can handle- that I would speak up from that place.  I told myself this because I knew that once I was there I would feel that I had no voice, no words, no strength to muster up and share myself with others. The thought of explaining what I was feeling would seem enormous and exhausting, just like every single other thing did. I knew that instead, I would numbly caption my Instagram photos with something meaningless about chubby-cheeked babies, or pithy remarks about dry shampoo to distract my Facebook friends from the hollowed-out place inside of me.  I was afraid. Depression is not unfamiliar to me. It is not limited to ...

  ...But thanks for asking.   It actually doesn't bother me when people ask if I'm pregnant. I get it- I'm constantly talking about how I want a million children (or, more realistically, 6-8), so it makes sense that people are a little confused. Hasn't it been like, almost three years since I had my last baby? Geez. What is the deal?   This is the deal.   We just haven't been able to. God allowed circumstances in our life that made it clearly unwise to try for a third child. And I hated it. Truthfully, I had a really terrible, self-pitying attitude about it during most of that time. Which was sin, and God has been gracious to forgive me. But aside from my sinful attitude, it was also just really, really hard for me.   I was sad. It was painful to wait. It was hard to smile and casually respond to questions like, "Are you ready for another?" with "Yes, but it's not the right time yet."   Often I got well-meaning responses like, ...

Oh, hey, it's been a while. I know. My bad.   So, I asked friends on my Instagram account recently about topics they'd be interested in seeing me blog about. Almost everyone wanted to hear about how and why we now sleep on floor beds like wierdos. So let's do this thang.   In high school and early adulthood I slept a variety of terrible mattresses (Red Barn, anyone?) and my back hurt, but I didn't really care, so I just moved on with my life. My health was no great concern to me. I was happily living off of Dr. Pepper, cottage cheese, and avocados- clearly, I didn't know what I was doing.   After Arthur and I got married, we got a mattress that we really loved. Two babies later, though, and not only had the mattress seen better days (there was a permanent valley were my huge pregnant body had been sleeping), so had my body. Pregnancies (with big babies), a rollercoaster and weight gain/loss, nursing, co-sleeping (read: sleeping in crazy positions to keep your bab...

  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, ...

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...