I did a little painting this morning and ended up with more help than I bargained for…

… I suppose I’ll be saving big projects for kennel time in the future!
There will be looooong-awaited house updates coming soon, but I wanted to say a quick thanks for all the love & prayers from the past few weeks and offer some reading and laughs for your weekend.

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Since there’s been an upswing in talk about pregnancy and babyloss around here, I’ll recommend Why Miscarriage Matters if You’re Pro-Life and Pregnancy After a Miscarriage for further reading on the subject. I appreciate how the first article calls out a lot of hypocrisy in the way most people talk about miscarriage, and the second highlights some of the special challenges for women who are blessed with a pregnancy after losing a baby. Good thoughts in both!
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I discovered the wonderful world of exercise videos on YouTube and it’s been a great way to stave off insanity while indoors for months at a time. My sisters and I have been long-time fans of the 10-Minute Pilates series, so I was excited to find the model (mix-and-match 10 minute segments for your own custom workout that is as long or short as you want) had branched into some pregnancy yoga sessions available for free online. Max was not cooperative during my warm-up attempt this morning. Apparently “namaste” has too many syllables for a puppy to understand.
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Tsh Oxenrider (can I just say for a minute how cool her last name is? So Oregon Trail hip!) has a great blog called The Art of Simple, and she wrote a post about our new theme-word, Risk, which I found very encouraging. “Living a good story means risk.”
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Tsh also had a great post about saying “no” to yourself, which is exactly what we do during Lent. Ann Voskamp has a great one about hearing “no” and how we respond — good stuff all around.
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Though we don’t have a dishwasher right now –the internet does not have the space to deal with my first-world whining on this topic– and I don’t feel bad about how hard it is for this lady to load and unload her dishes, I really needed the main idea she talks about: adjusting everything to make your dreaded chore easier to improve performance. As silly as it seems…. switching the side of the sink where I set the drying dishes makes it seem a lot easier to get the job done! Baby steps, people.
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Finally, speaking of baby steps, I’m a little bit in love with this adorable video…

Cute!
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Happy weekend!