Holiday Vignettes

:: 1. Lazy mornings before the twins get up ha! 2. We tried stringing popcorn and cranberries. The cranberries were successful, but the popcorn was not… it just kept crumbling. I realized that if I leave the popcorn out for a day it would probably work a lot better so I’m going to try again. 3. putting the star on the tree 4. pulling out all of the Christmas ornaments. These organic wool slippers were sent to me from a company called Tumar. They are handmade by a women-run cooperative collaborating with farmers and artisans in  Central Asia. The company helps support an entire village that subsists on wool farming in Kyrgyzstan… they are currently en exclusive to Amazon handmade and can be found here. 5. Celebrating Kit’s 4th birthday. My hat is from Brixton (it’s the Heather Gray color) 6. I’m slowly getting this corner of the room decorated. I found this beautiful, vintage nightgown on eBay and I love it so much! 7. I pretty much have all of my Christmas presents wrapped! I’m attempting to go the eco friendly route this year with upcycled or recyclable brown paper with a touch of greenery. I kind of love how it turned out actually. 8. The girls LOVED getting all of the decorations out. 🙂 ::

You guys know I’ve been laying low on the interwebs lately…

I went into this month knowing that I needed rest, knowing that I was stretched too thin.

David and I have been doing a lot of house projects lately, we had a bout of stomach flu, we cut Kit off from her pacifier cold turkey, and honestly?

The girls have just been really hard lately.

Not in any unusual sort of way, but parenting can be exhausting yeah?

We’ve just had a lot of intense emotions and pushing boundaries. And I’ve been pressing in… I’ve been doing the work of being consistent and requiring obedience, of helping them work through their emotions…

but it’s hard work. No.

Exhausting work.

I think I knew going into parenting that I’d be raising children into adults, but the actual work of it is much harder than I ever thought.

Some days it feels like I’m barely holding things together, some days all three girls are screaming from the living room while I try to make lunch, some days it’s all I can do to make it to nap time.

This is honestly why you haven’t seen many “photo shoot” type of photos lately.

It’s more than I can handle honestly…

But yes. I need some rest.

Sometimes I wish I could do more with my blog, to make it more “professional”… it’s hard not to compare to other bloggers.

And so I sometimes fall into the trap of busyness because I assume that more is better.

There’s this false teaching that happens in Christian circles, and it’s this idea that if you do x,y,z then God will “bless” you… and blessing is measured in material ways.

But God doesn’t work that way.

His purposes are so much higher and greater than a limited view of material “blessing.”

And it’s really such a harmful message: “we’ve been working super hard to build this business and God is blessing us by making it super successful”

The message there is that hard work = reward.

And that a successful business = blessing.

But God cannot be boiled down into a blessing formula.

Sometimes hard work does not end in success. And sometimes what seems successful is actually the one thing that will bring your downfall.

I think so much is said and done without bringing God into the conversation… or in other words, a lot is assumed about God.

This success MUST be because God is blessing me. But have you asked God what He thinks of your success?

All I’m trying to say is that I often assume that God wants me to do more (because the only measure of His blessing is “success”), instead of asking Him what He actually wants from me.

I’m going to be honest with you: when I do remember to ask God, He almost always tells me to slow down…

And to trust that His blessings aren’t always visible right away.

So all of that to say:

You might be seeing more posts like this around here…

musings, vignettes…

simple.

And I’ll continue to ask instead of assume.

I pray you find peace this holiday season,

Karin