A Busy Week

It feels like it has been really busy around our household for the last week and a half! 

September 30th – purchased the iPhone 4 to help me stay on top of things at work and at home!  I’ve never owned an Apple product and haven’t had a cell phone for several years, so this has been a fun experience for me!  Joe teases me that I touch it more than I touch him, which is sadly probably true – lol – but I am already very pleased with how it has helped me be more organized and productive.  Yay! 

October 1st – my first official day back at work!  Thankfully it was a very low-key day of getting myself organized and refamiliarized with things in the office.  Overall it was a good & successful day.

October 3rd – at Sanctuary House of Prayer, I had the privilege of sharing about God’s heart for the orphan and His invitation to us to partner with Him in caring for and defending the orphan.  I still have only a tiny amount of revelation on this topic, but the Lord is impacting my heart more and more for the fatherless.  At the same time, I got the opportunity to highlight an organization that I love – Compassion Canada – and share about how we can care for the orphan and the child living in poverty through child sponsorship.  From the small group at our house of prayer, I was super pumped that 3 children got sponsored that day!!  If you want, you can listen to my message or read my notes – then consider how you can respond to His invitation to us to care for the orphan, whether through sponsoring a child, adoption, foster care, building an orphanage, becoming an advocate for orphans, giving financially to others who are adopting, etc!  And if you are considering sponsoring a Compassion child, there are still 2 children that I have packets for, so feel free to give me a shout if you’d like to sponsor Stayer from Indonesia or Elvis from Bolivia!

  

October 5th-8th – I survived my first full week back at work, working 4 hours a day at home, while also being a mom!  There were definitely challenges, including a teething daughter, a cold making its rounds in our household, and mommy getting an unwelcome visit from Aunt Flo. But we made it without too many tears and no complete mental or emotional breakdowns on my part, so that’s awesome!  Even the actual work of writing code all came back to me (for the most part) and my mom surprised me by dropping in to help with the kids for a couple hours one day, which was so great!

October 10th – my sister and her husband dedicated their adorable twins to God at their church, so Joe and I and our kids joined them to support and pray for them as they committed themselves as parents to raise their children to love Jesus – woohoo!  This same Sunday, our house of prayer moved to a new location (again), after spending 4 weeks in another church.  It looks like we will be at this current location for a while now, so it feels good to be settling in and seeing how our times of worship and prayer will look like here.  The building is a great fit for us and we are super thankful for the Lord’s provision for us in the season of transition! 

October 11th – We hosted a Thanksgiving meal at our house with my parents, my brother & his wife,  and my sister & her husband with their twins.  It was my first time baking a turkey and I was totally stressed out about it!  I had been having nightmares all week and just wanted it to turn out okay.  I had had it defrosting in my fridge for 3 days, but when I pulled it out, parts of it were still very frozen – ahhh!!  So I thawed it out a bit more in some cold water in the sink and then just prayed like crazy over it – ha!  After looking at several sites online with their tips and recipes, I tried a mixture of things and it ended up turning out fantastic!  As my sweet sister-in-law said, “You nailed it!”   Rayah also got to enjoy an early birthday cake celebration, which she enjoyed to the max!

Going Back to Work

Well, after a wonderful year off for my maternity leave, I am set to return to work this Friday, October 1st. I am so grateful that my job allows me the privilege of working from home so that I can still stay home with my kids, but this also comes with challenges of its own! I remember it being difficult when I worked at home when Justice was a year old and I was pregnant with Rayah and it definitely wasn’t easy! This time around, we considered the option of getting a live-in nanny, but we’ve had difficulty finding someone and in some ways, the cost seems to defeat the purpose of working! Thankfully my job is only part-time, requiring 4 hours per day, but I’ve made an arrangement with my workplace that I will be available for a 6-hour period from 7:30am – 1:30pm, realizing that the kids will probably require at least 2 hours of my attention during that time. I am hoping to purchase a Blackberry to help me be more organized and so that I can be aware of emails coming in, no matter where I happen to be in the house at the moment. I’m also trying to get myself set up with some other organizational tools like a planning sheet for meals, the kids’ snacks and activities, and lists of ideas to help me keep them occupied while I’m working. I’m guessing that this is going to be one of the most challenging things I’ve had to do and that it will require all of the creativity and wisdom and strength and mental/emotional/spiritual resources that I have to draw upon (thank the Lord that He has endless amounts of all of those to give to me)!!  So, if you think of me, please keep me in your prayers as I enter this new season, that God would give me much grace and everything else I’ll need to be a work-at-home-mom.