A couple shots of life

Auden is insistent about learning chess these days

A family walk

Finn and his delicious peanut butter bread

Our amazing snowman creation after church

The Auden Conundrum

Well my little 4-year-old is almost all grown up...well not really but he is approaching school age which I'm slowly realizing is a completely new world of parenting where the influence I hold over Auden suddenly shifts to his teachers and peers. What's really scary is that I have no control, or at least very little control, over who these individuals will be. The protective mother hen has suddenly emerged and I'm slightly freaking out trying to decide what to do.

The first major decision is whether Auden will enter kindergarten next year. Here are the factors we're trying to weigh:

In Favor of Kindergarten Next Year:
-Auden a smart little guy. I know I'm biased but he is. He's not brilliant or a genius (thank God), but is certainly smart enough for kindergarten. He's starting to read and is at least border-line brilliant when it comes to puzzles and spatial reasoning. He's a little sponge and loves learning.
-Auden loves school. Right now Auden attends a head start a couple blocks from his house. We wanted to find a preschool for him we thought he'd go only 2 or 3 days a week. But head start turned out to be the most convenient and certainly most affordable (i.e. free) so off our little baby went five mornings a week. We were worried it would be too much for him, but when we presented the options to him he assured us he did in fact want to go to school "everyday". He's done fine and loves his school (at least most days)
-I want him to likes school and so I don't want him to be bored if we hold him back a year. I'm starting to think that really liking school may be an unrealistic expectation but I at least want to set him up so its possible.
-What else are we going to do with him to keep him busy and growing and happy?

In Favor of Holding Back a Year:
-Auden would be one of the youngest kids in his class (July birthday) and he is by nature a little bit of a follower. He also inherited from me the desire to be friends with the "bad" kids. He's a bit impulsive and doesn't have great control over his emotions. I'm worried he won't have enough confidence with all those older kids to be "good".
-Auden also inherited from us problems with speech which is certainly not his fault seeing as both mom and dad were horrible talkers at his age. His dad was held back one year before starting kindergarten by his speech pathologist mother because he was simply incomprehensible.
-I would miss him and be a little jealous
-I don't think I've finished teaching him all the things I wanted to. Especially if he gets stuck in all day kindergarten, my time with him would be so short!
-Its super convenient. Finn is still a little guy and won't be heading off to childcare or preschool anytime soon. I am free and available to stay home with them both.

I think we're leading towards waiting a year. I feel like I'm preparing to send him out into the jungle...which might be a little crazy. Anyways, all this anxiety has led me to check a multitude of books on homeschooling out from the library which may be the route we go if only for a year. I'm also looking into the fancy Waldorf/Montessori/Environmental private elementary schools and wondering just how big of a scholarship they might shell out. I feel like this is one of the biggest decisions we've had to make so far as parents and I don't want to screw it up....

Hospice Nursing

When we moved to Amherst I thought I would start working as a nurse in a hospital as I had in Washington DC, but because of lots of pretty uninteresting reasons, I found myself searching to "help wanted" ads a few months into our time here. Surprisingly, I ended up finding the perfect job for me and my family. If any of you know Anders, you know he's a fundamentalist when it comes to his hate of cars, so to find a nursing job within walking distance of our apartment was essential. I had given up hope, but it turns out, tucked away about 2 blocks from our house is an amazing little house that serves as an in-patient hospice center.

And it turns out I love hospice nursing...and it doesn't make me too sad or depressed even! I don't know if I'm a super Hospice nurse yet, but I'm getting more and more comfortable and, I think, doing a better and better job. And it challenges me...not so much academically, but certainly emotionally and spiritually. Well, this was a pretty general posting, but I hope I can process my experiences more in the future.

An Interesting Community

Well I was looking around today for a new book for our book club we have organized of moms/almost moms who are my neighbors. I'd never been in a book club before, but its actually been lots of fun because of the books but also because it gives us an excuse to escape our houses! Our first book was "The Ragamuffin Gospel" by Brennan Manning per my suggestion. Our second book was "Redeeming Love", a romance novel by Francine Rivers which I surprisingly enjoyed. We are now onto the task of picking our third book. Two of the books I ended up suggesting today were by a man named Shane Claiborne who is part of a community much along the line of the Catholic Worker House movement of living in solidarity with the poor. His two books are called "Jesus for President: Politics for an Ordinary Radical" and "Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical" in which he explores the radical call of Christ to a life of radical love. Sounds intriguing and great and potentially life-changing if one were in the mood for a life change. Here a link to his community The Simple Way.

Love these lyrics..

I was listening to Pandora today and heard a Sara Groves song I'd never heard before called When it Was Over. Such sweet lyrics of redeeming love:

There is a love that never fails
There is a healing that always prevails
There is a hope that whispers a vow
A promise to stay while we're working it out
So come with your love and wash over us

Oh love wash over a multitude of things
Make us whole

First Post

Well...I started this a couple times before, but always with much hesitiation....the "FIRST POST" that will set precedent for all other posts...yikes. But I decided that today there will be a first post, no matter what.

I've always kind of had an attraction to the idea of blogs and read others with gusto. I think its my nosey nature that loves the window, however edited and forced it can be at times, that a blog allows.

So now I set forth on my own and hope I can provide a window for others, if anyone would be interested, but mostly for myself. A forced reflection...