Bunny Portrait by Livia. All others by her mama.

My friends Joie and Jake went north for the L’Abri conference in Rochester and came home with a rabbit. One of Honeysuckle’s offspring, to be more specific. Honeysuckle is well known in the Tredway household. Ever since I began reading of Honeysuckle’s adventures on Margie Haack’s blog—and then met the rabbit in person last spring—we have awaited any news of the bunny and hoped with bated breath that she’d get pregnant. After some time she did conceive and birthed the cutest baby Angoras you could possible imagine. And now those babies are small no longer! Apparently rabbits grow fast.

Livia began asking me daily to visit Joie’s apartment to see Jack. Or Zach. Or sometimes Honeysuckle, which we both called Jack when we weren’t thinking straight. Livia even volunteered to spin Jack’s wool when the time came for shearing. This is how dedicated we are to Angoras now: we watch YouTube videos on spinning. I’m saving up all these thoughts and hopes and dreams for Livia’s future. I have visions of her marrying a Nebraska farmer and then running a menagerie of animals on their farm. Liv will come and go as a rural veterinarian and she’ll take every lost and broken thing under her wing until they are mended. In the meantime, she is learning to add and subtract and read and write. Back to the present. We finally made it over to visit Jack in person and Liv lovingly fed him carrot bits and brussel sprouts. Joie believes Jack is an introvert, so we’ll give him some time to get used to the rapt attentions of a seven-year-old vet-in-training.

Dear Livia,

You sit beside me at the dining room this Sunday morning. Adele is blaring on the stereo and you want to know what rumor it is she sings of. I manage to evade this question as I’m not prepared to explain the intricacies of love lost and found to my first grader quite yet. You are pouring acrylic paints onto plastic lids, mixing colors to paint onto t-shirts. The dining room table is littered with paint bottles, colored pencils and, alarmingly, electronics. Perhaps this isn’t a wise configuration of projects, but it serves its purpose in keeping us close to one another as we express ourselves creatively. The dog is perched nearby in his bed, sending indignant small barks at the people who dare walk by a nearby sidewalk. I stop between nearly every sentence I type to prevent you from painting the dining room table, your wrists, the floor and your jammies. Your enthusiasm for crafts is matched only by your remarkable knack for knocking things over. Yes, you are now painting with your fingers. I tell people that you’d roll your entire body in paint if I let you and I’m not always sure they believe me. I want to encourage this need to physically create, your desire to touch and smear, to feel the paint between your fingers. It requires deep breathing for me to let you get messy and you probably haven’t noticed, but a lot of our projects wrap up quickly when the deep breathing no longer helps. Then again, you are now a big kid and can clean up fairly well on your own. How much fun this growing older thing is. I delight in you, growing girl of mine.

Love,
Mom

DFW Airport, January 2012

As it turns out, I don’t feel any better about avoiding sweets on Day 4 than I did on Day 1. Bummer. The sensation of denying myself sugary treats has become more familiar, however. I am less likely to reach for a Swedish fish or Dove chocolate to pop into my mouth. My mind is beginning to grasp that those things are off limits—don’t even think about it, missy. But I want want want to eat sweets almost all day long. The very idea of self-denial is clearly not something I am accustomed to. (Interestingly enough, we’re not avoiding sweets for Lent, the timing is merely coincidental.) This challenge began in the interest of breaking an addiction to something that is obviously not healthy in my life. You can imagine how it’s not helpful to munch on sweets all day long when you have diabetes. :)

What I am enjoying is the knowledge that I can pick and choose what goes in my mouth. I can pick and choose healthy, life-giving items over the ones that are temporarily rewarding, yet life-draining in the long run. I know I will return to eating all those blessed, amazing, spectacular tasting desserts. I simply hope to show a little more self-control when that time comes.

Right now life seems to be moving by too quickly. I want to slow it down, figure out one thing at a time, make peace with a few issues and then move forward with joy.

But I don’t feel like I can figure even one thing out. It’s more like I’m grasping at straws, trying to make sense of too many things in one brief moment. And then, by the end of the day, I feel like I’ve done nothing with excellence.

Must. get. unstuck.

My friend Bethany indulged me by modeling for a little photo shoot on what had to be the most humid day ever last summer. The payoff was the brilliant light and the time alone with a good friend. We both have little girls now, so it was fun to escape daily life to play with our cameras and the light near the Wesleyan campus one evening.

Now Bethany and her family are in Germany and we miss them greatly. Fortunately, we get updates on little Adeline’s cuteness through Facebook. How in the world did people survive before Facebook? ;)

There’s a sense of formality that comes with posting family portraits online. I want to do it right. And yet it took everything in my power not to title this post “My Big Brudder’s Family.” Yeah, so that would’ve been baby talk, but I truthfully think of Adam as my big brudder—and I love him for always being the guy I can look up to.

Shooting Adam, Kristin, Madeleine and Noah last fall was a particularly fun thing for me to do. It felt like I was pushing the pause button to take stock of their lives. Setting it up as a true photo shoot allowed me to tell them where to stand and how to move, etc.—all the photographer commands I hold back when shooting in an informal setting over birthday cake or Thanksgiving dinner. When I step back from the images and take it all in, I’m struck by how awesome it is that Adam has such a cool family. I love my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew. We really live a full and rich existence.

I like Valentine’s Day. I like the sentiment behind it, the gifts and special occasions it gives rise to, and the unabashedly cheesy nature of it. You don’t have to use the finest ingredients or finest materials in order to express your affection. And that suits me just fine.

That being said, I received a phenomenal bouquet of roses last Friday. They are amazing and I’ve enjoyed them every day. My Valentine further melted my heart by sending our daughter a bouquet, too. (Note to Livia’s future husband: you have your work cut out for you!)

Livia’s class will exchange Valentine cards at the end of the school day. Around 90% of our elementary school comes from impoverished families, so I admire how teachers handle V-Day celebrations. They send out a class list and encourage all children to make their own valentines with teacher-provided construction paper if needed. The kids will exchange cards and then take them home to open them. It’s a win-win and fun for everyone regardless of family income.

I really enjoy making cards with Livia each year. I like including a non-sugary treat, which then allows me to feel a bit better when I send along sweets like the cupcakes below. It’s fun to see Livia grow in ability from year-to-year. This year she was super-focused on writing the recipients’ names and checking off the class list. I even left the house for a Walgreens run and returned to my child studiously working! Those of you who know Liv know what a feat that was for her.

Our special Valentine cupcakes were simple to prepare: box mix with sprinkles, Wilton’s easy buttercream frosting, and a strawberry heart marshmallow for the top. The time that Livia and I spent together, making memories right alongside cupcakes, was extra sweet.

We are not guaranteed easy lives, friends. In fact, the older we get, the tougher life is going to be. We will see friends and family become ill, get divorced, deal with death and suffer through all kinds of other trials. But God in his grace lavishes us with great love—the joys I see and hear and taste and smell today are from him. I can open my eyes to see this beauty and I can be thankful for it.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Liv and her bear Ornament who regularly gets dressed up as a giraffe.

I’m having a moment of This is My Life. This life of mothering a funny, passionate and observant seven year old. This life of attempting to know where a million different stuffed animals are so a classroom of 1st graders can have the appropriate visuals for their presentations next week. (Apparently Livia volunteered to bring the animals other kids didn’t own. Because yes, we own them all. Or we did at one moment in time.) This life of checking the school lunch menu each morning to see if their offerings beat out a turkey sandwich and Clementine. This life of spraying a little girl’s hair with smoothing spray to keep the frizzies at bay, then using just the right elastic so that her hair stays put all day. This life of putting little tennis shoes in the pink Hello Kitty backpack in case her snow boots—and socks as the case may be—get too wet while she’s playing at recess. This life of Special Breakfasts and rewarding Good Learning days and finding drawing after drawing of Mommy and Livia holding hands with hearts above their stick-figure heads. This is My Life. Praise be to God.

I prayed for this child and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him. – 1 Samuel 1:27

I began hunting through my files tonight for a new header for Needs More Butter. Dressing up that space brings me a little bit of pleasure, so I indulge from time to time. Hunting for food pics made me realize that it’s been awhile since I’ve taken shots of the foods I make. Okay, kind of interesting tidbit. However I found a photo of Jeremy’s lunch at the Cliff House when we were in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Oh my goodness, that meal was delicious and the company was awesome (my Aunt Carol and Uncle John) and the view was spectacular.

And then I realized that I’ve posted two—just two!—shots of our time in San Francisco. Ridiculous. Obscene really. Here we visited this amazing city, which gave me a much-needed break from life at home, and I haven’t blogged about it hardly at all. Tragedy of all tragedies.

And then I realized, as I set thoughts of San Francisco out of my mind and continued to hunt for food pics, that I haven’t blogged more images and thoughts about Maralee’s birth. San Francisco no longer seems to be the only glaring tragedy, rather there’s a string of blog failings.

And then I realized there was more. I scrolled backwards through my files, noticed many extra gems from the December Photo Project, and then recalled a shoot from last fall that I still haven’t posted about in depth: my brother Adam and his family. What in the world? Who am I? Who have I become? Weeping and gnashing of teeth! Woe is me!

Or not.

But I have a lot of catching up to do.

Now, can someone pay me to blog? And while they’re at it, pay me to post links on Facebook as well? Because today, I would’ve made some money doing that. I am good at doing that.

**The image above was captured last Sunday, the day after a snowstorm dropped about a foot of wet, heavy white goodness on our lawns. The trees have never been prettier. Somehow we managed to escape any downed limbs in our yards, thank goodness.

Friends. Coffee. Brunch. Encouragement. It’s kind of like MOPS on a smaller scale. If you’d like to hear what we heard last week, check out Kerri’s blog. She did a fabulous job speaking.

**Table decor courtesy the creative and talented Tara Mackrill! I love her eye, and it blesses us moms month after month.