In Which a Very Good Graphic Novel is Created, and I Meet Pooh Again
Knowing when you meet a new family favorite book is a special kind of joy.
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A Feast for the Whole Family: A Review of The Storyteller’s Bible
Our kiddos are no strangers to children’s Bibles. I received The Jesus Storybook Bible as a gift for my first baby shower, and it has long been a frequent read-aloud for all five of our children when they were little. We’ve also enjoyed Catherine Vos’ The Child’s Story Bible as they’ve gotten older, and we…
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The Corner of Sanity
Around the dawn of our first daughter, a friend shared a brilliantly shining jewel of wisdom with me, a concept that has been a loving lifeline and a joy ever since: the Corner of Sanity. To explain, let me take you back to a hot Phoenix afternoon in 2012. The details of the afternoon are…
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Gollum and Long Division
If you have a train going 40 miles per hour, traveling from New York to Chicago, and another train going 45 miles per hour traveling from Chicago to New York, at what exact geographical point on the journey will those trains pass each other? Did anyone else just experience a brief, but real rage response?…
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The Scariest Story and the Greatest Hero
This summer, we dove into Roald Dahl. He accompanied our family across the state of Washington, up mountainsides and deep into green pastures, baking in the smoke-hazed sun. Charlie and Danny and Willy and Mr. Fox were our clever, British-accented companions as our long days danced past on beaches and baseball fields, under fireworks and…
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For the Love of the Wild Child
We have a wild child. A full-fledged Lost Boy. His name is Lachlan. When he was 2 he was permanently uninvited from being in the church nursery because he figured out how to escape all the child locks and was making weekly Sabbatical pilgrimages to the church parking lot, unnoticed. When he was three he…
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Sowing Season
So I finally made my sowing schedule. 150 seeds; some indoor, some outdoor. The dates are staggered, dependent on soil temperature, or rainfall. I have the indoor peat pots on the way, and 8 lbs of organic dirt is nestled next to my backdoor, much to my husband’s befuddlement (why are we paying for dirt,…
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Pilgrim’s Trip Through Green Gables
Our Glory-girl is a few weeks shy of ten. Raised by Gospel-loving lifelong book devotees, her deep immersion into the world of narrative and literary apologetics was inevitable and, thankfully, easy. She began listening to Anne of Green Gables at night when she was seven, and has now heard the series more times than any…
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A Right Big Mess Was Made By All, or, The Transformative Powers of Mud
This past January, my husband needed to observe a class somewhere in the middle of Parts Unknown, Washington, and so, desperate for a change of scenery, into our car we all piled merrily one Thursday morning. I packed five lunchboxes in preparation, picked out a couple of audiobooks, positioned the sun on the left side…
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Our Worshipful Lament
A weighty prologue: Our baby died in July, when I was only about ten weeks pregnant with him. My husband and I earnestly sought God’s help in figuring out how to explain this loss to our four young children, and we discovered that once again God ministered to our hearts through our attempts to minister…
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Reaching for Light
Our first child began sometime during her third month of life waking up every day at 5 am. We tried putting her back down, we tried letting her fuss for loooong minutes, we tried bribery, prayer, pleading… but there she was, red-faced and shaky-smiling at us, reaching out for that connection with us, no matter…
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Target Trip
So I had that day, and I was that woman. Our eldest child, a girl, was 2, and our son was less than a month old. It was Christmastime in Arizona, and I hadn’t left the house, aside from going to church (I’m not trying to sound like holy Hannah here, we had only one…
