Coffee With Elly

The problem with marriage - or the modern understanding of marriage - is that a union which claims to help two independent people find "self-actualization" or to "fulfill all their dreams" is impossible. What happens when one person's self-actualization is one hundred percent in the way of the other person's dream? Well, maybe divorce. Maybe just a fight. Possibly one partner yields all rights to his own "self-actualization" and bends to the other's will - not happily, but out of necessity - perhaps there are children involved. Sometimes the idea of "compromise" is introduced - I give this, you give that. Maybe neither is happy, but hey, any reasonable person can see that you can't have your own way all the time. I just read Dr. Leithart's article " When Marriage is Dying ." He made the case that any marriage involves death - the death of two single people to produce a couple, and that every marriage requires daily

My kids are so rich to have two grandmas who read to them. Here is Grandma Valerie reading one of her fav orites (Babar) to a large audience. 

I love what a baby does for a family. The first baby turns a couple into a family, but each successive baby binds the family tighter together as the older siblings dote on and care for "the baby," learning to put other people's needs ahead of their own - and loving it! Not quite sure how that works out for the final baby, but I guess we'll find out. Our baby, Elena, is 17 months old. Hard to believe! She's definitely "the baby" and the darling of the family. Though Monica and Ezra were talking a lot by this time, Elena doesn't speak much. She CAN say several words when she wants to, but she doesn't like to perform. She can say, "Judah," clear as a bell, but seldom deigns to. Recently she has become quite the little song-bird, regaling us with babbling songs in the car or halfway up the stairs while she waits to be rescued. Now that she can nod and shake her head at the appropriate times, we have some real communication!! She walks a

Dressed for their first day back at school.

I never used to understand why parents were so eager for their kids to go back to school after the holidays. When I was homeschooling my boys, starting back to school just meant more work for me. Yes, the return to routine was nice, but it was balanced out by all the extra work. Personally I find it easier to keep kids occupied at non-school activities than to home school them. Now that my kids are actually IN a school, I begin to understand. Because while keeping kids occupied on break is easier than home schooling then, it is not easier than taking them somewhere else and having other people keep them productively occupied for part of the day! At least, that is what I was thinking last week. Now that I'm getting up earlier to get the boys to school and spending a couple of hours in the afternoon supervising their homework while trying to keep the littler kids happy and occupied and maybe even start dinner - the more I realize that whole "it will be easier when the kids are

Looking at my "recent" posts, I discovered that I've been posting approximately once a month. That seems a bit lean to me, so for 2014, I'll try to post at least once a week, just to keep things exciting! ;-) It will come as a surprise to no one that our last month has been very busy - whose hasn't?!! We had two parties at our house: a community group Christmas party and a birthday party for Judah. In spite of the rampant flu going through our church community, neither party was cancelled due to illness this year! Hooray! In addition to throwing parties, we also attended them: Michael's company work party, and our church's Christmas party. In between parties we also had time to mail out Christmas letters, do Christmas shopping and get the flu. Yep, we were not unscathed by the local plague - we went down like flies, within a 12 hour period, and spent the next day sitting around like zombies and thinking, tentatively, of eating something, someday. F