All The Things I Hope You Know

It's officially garden and canning season in our neck of the woods. We have already harvested beets, carrots, and our lettuce is done. We are getting ready to dry out our onions to store, this is our first year getting enough to dry and store for any amount of time, so I am learning as I go on that one. This is also the first year that we have had enough blueberries to speak of, and they are delicious. We haven't had enough to really work up but we have had lots of fresh ones to eat.   We found squash bugs on our zucchini and yellow squash a couple of weeks ago and I have been waging war on those pesky pests. I have been going out at least once a day and checking the plants for eggs and bugs. We peel the eggs off the plants with duct tape and squish any bugs we find. Y'all it is exhausting. And I am not really sure how much longer I can fight the good fight here. And did you know that these little boogers will move from your squash to your cucumbers?!?! Well I sure didn...

Want to practice hospitality this summer? Can I just encourage you to embrace the awkward and invite someone over! Invite them into your home and into your life. Maybe you're thinking, Ok Jenn, that sounds great but I don't have time to practice hospitality. Let me just stop you right there. I am not talking about this: Photo by  Mariah Hewines  on  Unsplash  I do not have the time or energy to set the bar that high. C'mon over here with me where I keep the bar a little lower, a little more attainable. Because that first picture is beautiful and amazing but this momma ain't got time for that.  I mean this: Right now, hospitality looks like popsicles. Lots and LOTS of popsicles. My kids and their friends know where they are, they know what drawer the scissors are in. I want them all to know that they are loved and safe here and I want them to know they can go get a popsicle and grab the scissors out of the drawer.  If it ends up costing me a million popsicle...

Have you ever believed a lie for so long, that it felt more reliable than the truth ever did? I know I have. I feel this way about what I thought love was.  Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash I have been thinking a lot lately about how well my husband loves me and my kiddos. Probably because of Father's Day this past weekend because he is such an amazing dad! We have joked for a long time that he is an amazing dad and an ok husband, but he is pretty great at both. He has always loved me well. Why are we so enthralled with this idea that romantic love has to be big and showy? Like the peacocks at the zoo trying to attract a mate? I think that as young people we aren't taught how to identify it properly. We sit in theaters, and we watch the lust of physical attraction unfold and we label it love. We see big gestures with fields full of flowers, and dates with plane rides to exotic locations, which seem so romantic, but are they? Or are they more like that peacock strutting arou...

 Well, summer is finally here, even if unofficially. The kids are out of school, the weather has warmed up and the mosquitoes have arrived in full force. Summer is my absolute most favorite time of year! I love the sun, the tank tops and the flip flops! I do not love the first 10 days of summer break though, it takes this long for my kids to adjust to a new routine and to figure out who's in charge (spoiler alert, its ME!). We have the chore charts, we have discussed summer expectations, and we have talked about some fun things we would all like to accomplish. We have started with the best of intentions and we will see if we can make it all the way through before Netflix becomes the babysitter. Being a mom is HARD, we are all aware of that, but it is also amazing! It is the best most amazing and most hard thing I have ever tried to do. I love my kids! They are not perfect but they are mine and I love them all!  One of our goals this summer is to give them more responsibility. ...

 Memorial. "Something, especially a structure, established to remind people of a person or event."  Somehow we managed to find a few quiet moments this past week, between all of the fun activities that come from a 3 day weekend and the kids finally getting out of school for the summer. My mind and heart kept settling on John 15:13 "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." Isn't that why we celebrate Memorial Day? Because of the brave men and women that laid down their lives for our freedoms, we get to have the freedom of an extra day of rest. My son asked me, "why do we celebrate Memorial Day?" and I responded, "It is a day that we set aside to honor those who have died protecting our country and our freedoms, its a strange day in a way, because that seems like a hard thing to do sometimes. So we set aside time to remember them, and what they paid for our freedoms."   Remembering. We all want to be...

When you were little, what did you dream of becoming when you grew up? Did you want to be a police officer, an artist, drive racecars, or become a doctor? As children, we are taught to dream about what we want to be, and we envision careers.                                                  We begin from an early age believing that what we do defines us. Don't get me wrong here, there is definitely some truth in that. What we do says a lot about the kind of person that we are. But we are not simply a police officer or a doctor, those things are not our identity or at least not the entirety of it. There are good and bad police officers, good and bad doctors, good and bad teachers. I think the idea that our career defines who we are is one of those ideas that we should develop over time with our kids, and even with ourselves. We need to conti...