Remember me?  The gal who writes on this blog? Did you think I’d dropped off the face of the earth?

No, I’m still here. Every day I would think about writing and then there were just too many other things to do.

We celebrated Caroline’s sixth birthday with a couple of events. Birthday celebration with grandparents and then the big Fancy Nancy birthday party with nine (!) little girls. I’m planning on writing about the party in another post so I’ll just say that it all came together well and Caroline was very happy with her birthday in every way. (Update: Fancy Nancy Birthday Party post)

Can you believe that Caroline is six? Some of you have been reading here since before I was pregnant so that’s how long we’ve “known” each other online. Caroline’s a bright, happy six year old. She’s creative and imaginative. She’s curious. She’s funny. We laugh that one of her mottoes is “Why walk when you can skip?”

It is interesting to hear how other people describe her. Like most parents, we can find it hard to be objective regarding our child. But to hear people talk about her joy of life, intelligence, creativity, helpfulness, etc. is really rewarding. We think she’s great, but we’re her parents. 😀

I realize we still have a long way to go before we will launch her as an adult. Many things can change. But it is so rewarding to see our hard work as parents pay off. The first few years were so hard and bewildering as we tried to make sense of who she was and how to best parent her. We felt so alone as so much of the advice we read and were given simply did not work with her. I’m so glad we prayed hard, listened to our gut, and ignored a lot of what is out there in Christian parenting literature. She’s a delightful girl. I shudder to think what she would be like if we had tried to dominate her, prove our authority, break her will, etc. as so many Christian parents promote.

Remember my fireplace semi-obsession when we were moving and looking for a new home? Right now we are in mourning because our gas fireplace died. We had a service call to get something fixed and then something still was not right so they came out again. Long story short, it isn’t safe to use. Since $1k isn’t in our budget for a new system, we don’t have a fireplace right now. We’re thinking about having the gas part taken out and trying to go with logs for a bit and see how we like it. I’m not sure with my asthma how it will go, but it is worth a try since we won’t be replacing the gas insert any time soon.  But to say we are bummed wouldn’t begin to describe it.  We looked forward all summer to the cooler weather so we could use our fireplace again.  We are in a little bit of mourning. 🙁

So many posts I want to write both on this site and my theology site!  I hope to be back to writing regularly now. We’ll see what happens in the days ahead. 🙂