I guess I’m a slow learner. It took me lots of babies and births to finally start figuring it out. Our baby #1 (born in a hospital in Virginia) was in the NICU for a week, I had mastitis for a month, and then we packed up our apartment and moved across the country. WHAAAAT??! After baby #2…
Category: Grow as Mom
Q&A: Staying Steady Through Transition
In the recent Reader Survey, this question came through. It’s one I get asked from time to time, given our history of having lived abroad, in 14 different homes in 14 years of marriage, and doing all of that as a young, growing family: Q: You have been in various states of transition over the past…
Is THIS The Reason You’re Spiritually Stuck?
Are you spiritually “stuck?” Feeling like you have questions but no answers? Stagnant in life but unsure how to start growing again? I was 16 years old when it began. I was a coming-out-of-rebellion teen; she was a young mom (in her 20s) with 3 little ones. In free moments of my busy high school life,…
How Embracing “Good Enough” Can Help You Be a Better Mom
Wanna know what my kids have for lunch these days? It’s pretty much the same thing every day: homemade lunchables. Thin deli-sliced ham or turkey, and cheese, with Ritz. Sometimes I have fresh fruit on hand to go with it. Other times, it’s canned fruit, nuts, or packaged cookies. It’s not in cute Bento boxes. It doesn’t…
56 Ways the Bible Describes Women
Ever wondered– What does the Bible say about women? I thought it would be helpful for us to see how women are described in the Bible, positively and negatively, as we strive to be godly women. This is a fairly exhaustive study of the word “woman” in the Bible, with all of its uses and descriptions (from…
The Opposite of the Titus 2 Woman
In 2011, I took my first biblical counseling class, and one session focused on the “Anti-Psalm.” The goal was to better understand what a text is saying by carefully thinking through the exact opposite meaning. It can be insightful to see the “opposite” of a text, and gives an excellent way to clarify the actual meaning. I previously did this with Proverbs 31. Let’s…
Do You Multi-Task on Purpose?
We women tend to be multi-taskers. We try to squeeze as much as we can into a given moment. On any given day, a mom can be seen: carrying the groceries in (loaded down like a donkey), calling instructions to the kids over our shoulder, using the tiniest sliver of our index finger (otherwise weighed…
Do Your Kids Recognize Your Authority?
Elizabeth Krueger, mother of 10, and author of Raising Godly Tomatoes, is also a horse owner. She recently shared some great thoughts about training horses to recognize a rightful authority and how it can be similar with children. I thought Elizabeth’s observations were extremely insightful and she graciously agreed to let me share them here:…
11 Ways Mothers Change the World
If you are one who: loves Christ, desires to see people come to worship and know Him, and longs to find her purpose in the world, Let me commend to you the role of mother. If you are a young woman who: has been told all the horrors and sob stories of colic and tantrums…
What If the Littles Grow Up Different From the Big Kids?
One of the things I was at least mildly concerned about at first, in regard to having a big family, was the common observation that in a large family, the younger children often grow up in a quite different way from how the older children were raised. Accusations sometimes go along these lines: You were…