Wanda's Guide to March Madness

My hubby makes me pick a bracket.  Every year.  I have a special way of picking.  Some wives pick by team colours.  Other wives pick by which mascot is tougher.  Not me.

I pick by coolness of team name.

Anything with a High-Point Value Scrabble Letter (HPVSL) is going to take precedence in my bracket.  The more HPVSL, the better.  Beyond that, if there aren't very many interesting HPVSLs, I will pick the cool name.  If there is no cool name, I go for my favourite (movie, place to visit, word.)

Now bear in mind that I will always pick 1-3 seeds in the first round.  A 4-seed could get booted if the 13-seed has an especially awesome name.  Anything beyond that is entirely up to "awesomeness of name."

Given those parameters, this is who I have chosen this year.  

I can't tell you how excited I was to discover that Gonzaga was a #1 seed and that Marquette was a #3 seed!  And Georgetown against Gonzaga...  That's four Gs and a Z in the final game.  It can't get much better than that.

(Let it be noted that while Bucknell has a cooler name than Butler, Butler has been my friend for years, coming through for me on strength of name when it was a lowly double-digit seed.)

(Let it also be noted that I will always pick against Duke when I can.  All rules of picking get thrown out when Duke is in the mix.)

Disappointments this year:
1.  I love picking Wake Forest.  Every time someone says "Wake Forest" I either think "Run Forrest, run" or "Someone get that Forest an alarm clock so we don't have to tell people to wake it."
2:  The first time my hubby mentioned the University of Connecticut, I heard "Yukon."  I love picking U-Conn, simply because of the Canadian Territory connection.
3.  We have enough connections to Cornell that we enjoyed rooting for them last year.  I'm disappointed to not be able to pick them.
4.  Xavier and Villanova are perennial picks for me.  Disappointment.

And that's that.

How do you choose your bracket?


*This is a No-Fail way to really have fun and totally randomize your bracket.  This is not a No-Fail way to win.  But I did come in second two years ago.

For Use With the Sheerest of Fabric

I imagine this sewing machine and the air loom would be used to make the Emporer's New Clothes...

The Status Quo Sucks

I have so many things that I want to share with you, my reader, a reader who may actually care about me and my family.  I'm staring at a blank page today and I'm trying to figure out what I should share...  What details to give, what topics to discuss.

I've decided I can't.  I don't think I'm ready to share yet.  At least not most of it.

But I'd love to encourage you to look at things differently.  Don't be content to always do things the same way just because that's how we've always done things.  As George Carlin said, "The status quo sucks."

Let me jump around a bit.

We sang these words this morning and I never paid as much attention to them as I did today.  There is so much depth to them.  I got stuck dreaming about the first verse for a while and then got lost in the last verse.

Come Thou fount of ev'ry blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above
Praise the mount I'm fixed upon it
Mount of Thy redeeming love

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be
Let Thy grace Lord like a fetter
Bind my wand'ring heart to Thee
Prone to wander Lord I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart Lord take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above

I really don't want to care what men think of me.  I really want only to care what God thinks of me.

There is nothing new under the sun.  We can repackage ideas, but there really is nothing new. So I want to find and chase what God wants for me.  I want to challenge the status quo.  I want to fill this earthen vessel with whatever was meant to fill it.

I'll leave you with this, from Robert Browning:
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

A Sick Day Movie

My youngest is home sick today.  I gave him a mild breakfast and told him he could watch a movie if he wanted.  After looking through our selection of movies, mostly cartoons, he selected "Soul Surfer."  If you're unfamiliar with this live-action movie, let me sum up:  It tells the true story of Bethany Hamilton, the surfer who lost her arm to a shark attack when she was a young teenager.  With her faith in God, she overcame this injury to be highly competitive in the surfing world, winning titles with one arm.

As I was setting it up I saw the PG rating, noting that the subject matter may not be suitable for some children.  I asked my boy what he liked about this movie.    "Is it because of the competition in surfing, the story about her overcoming a huge obstacle?"

He thought for a moment and said, "Kind of both.  And that part where they call her a miracle kind of reminds me of Joseph [in the Bible]."  *insert mother's melting heart emoticon*

There's hope for this boy yet.

Best Foot Forward

When I wrote the title for this blog, I misspelled "Forward."  My fingers started moving too quickly and the "r" got in front of the "o."  Since I've been typing this, I have made about 12 mistakes and had to go back and correct spelling, punctuation and grammar.  Five more mistakes were made typing that last sentence.

I am nowhere near perfect.  (I had to google "nowhere" to see if it was one word or two.)

I am realizing, through a book that I am reading, that when I always put my best foot forward, I can actually be quite a discouragement to others.  We live in a Pinterest world now, a world where we imagine that every other mother/father/employee/family is doing amazing things. 

I might post one recipe about the bread that I made by hand...  But right now we're eating store-bought bread because my kids got tired of homemade bread and my bread-maker paddle broke and I don't want to knead bread every day.

I might share a cool craft/snack that I did to teach my kids about music theory...  But more often than not we're not doing music theory!  I'm just happy that my kids are tracing Super Mario characters from the Wii game case.

I might talk about how I get my kids cleaning around the house...  but right now there is urine dehydrating itself on the downstairs toilet seat and I am not planning to do anything about it.

I might plan fancy meals to serve my friends...  But I'm lucky if I can figure out what to make for dinner each day, let alone have a balanced meal.

I might have a Bible verse to share about a certain subject...  But I probably googled it because I couldn't remember where it was or exactly what it said.

And I may have a Bachelor's degree in Egnlsih  but this is what this post would have looked liked with a out any editing or red lines to tell me whern I misspelled something.

Let's be real with each other.  It's okay to share some awesomeness that just happened, but it's also good to be real about our struggles and imperfections.  I propose that being real is more likely to build someone up than putting our best foot forward all the time.


I made these pictures extra big so you could see how amazing we are...

These smiles on my children were only given when I threatened to not give them Christmas presents if they didn't smile with Grandma and Grandpa.  They may have thought I was joking.

Most pictures of me look this awesome.

My boy and his most natural behaviour. (See any resemblance?)

 

Why do I try to photograph these children?  It looked so cute when those other kids did it on Pinterest.

Be renewed in the spirit of your mind

I've been doing a lot of reading lately.  Usually I read fiction and my Bible...  more fiction than Bible, if I'm being honest.  But lately, I've been choosing some materials that challenge the way I think about things.  I like learning and I like a good healthy debate, so it makes sense that I am enjoying these books.  I don't necessarily agree with everything I'm reading, but I'm enjoying understanding where the writers are coming from.

Book #1 I've been reading for a little over a month as part of an online discussion group.  The book is about modern churches compared to New Testament churches.  It has challenged me to see what our churches are doing that is holding us back from what God really wants from us, as a church family.  I am very encouraged, as I process what I read, to see that my Freedom In Christ church family is doing a lot of what the author (and the Bible) contends that churches should be doing.  I do not agree with everything the author says, but I appreciate the prod to look at Scripture with a fresh eye.

Book #2 I started reading at a friend's house (six hours from my own house) and had to order it for myself so I could finish.  It's a book that challenges me to do hard things.  Hard things are different for each person so I have been challenged to step outside of my comfort zone and investigate doing things that I hadn't considered before.  I'm sure I will have more to share about that later.  But in the meantime, I am very excited to be investigating the "hard things" that I hope to do.  Which leads me to...

Books #3 and #4.  These books have encouraged me as a mother.  I am realizing that I don't have to be perfect, that every home and family is different, and that I was created by God to be (among other things) the only mother guiding my children through their youth.  I am having fun discovering new ways that I can do this and have wonderful friends who are helping me along the way.

Have you had anything that has challenged your thinking lately?  What are you mulling over that you didn't pay much heed to in the past?

My favourite daughter

Today is a very special day for me.  It's the anniversary of the day that I met my daughter, face to face, for the first time.  Nine years ago, around 10:00 in the morning, she arrived in a rush in our bedroom, and has been warming our hearts since then.

As a baby, she already showed an affinity for fashion, demanding that we change her outfits multiple times a day by puking all over everything.  She quickly gained the nickname of "The Puker."  I would nurse her and gently hold her upright to burp her, and she would errupt all over the bed/couch/chair.  Aaron got used to jumping up on the spot and rushing for a towel and some clean sheets and cloths.  She kept us on our toes right from the start.

We named her Riley, but her brother (less than two years her senior) called her Ya-Ya.  He loved her (still does) and enjoyed this new plaything in his domain.

The three of us (Dad, Mom and brother) sang songs to her and read her stories and before we knew it she was talking.  And talking.  And talking!

And singing...  She loves music, much like both her parents.

She loves to play songs on the piano (well, she loves to play when she's not practicing) and she can often be found singing the oddest lyrics in the oddest places at the oddest times.  When she was sick a couple years ago, I knew she was finally starting to feel better when I overheard her singing in the shower, at the top of her lungs, "Frosty the snowman, la la la la la la la..."  Of course we gave her an mp3 player this year so she could listen to all her favourites and sing along.  Jamie-Grace, you'd better release a new CD soon.  Riley's getting antsy for more music.

And her heart...  She has such a sweet, sensitive heart.  She wants to understand how people can be so mean, but it just doesn't make sense to her.  In Riley's mind, people should be kind-hearted and put others first.  It's just the way we're supposed to be.  When she encounters situations where others are being unkind to her or to someone else, she will think about it and process it for hours, trying to figure out a way to make the situation better.

She loves to be silly with her brothers, girl-cousins and her across-the-street best friend. She'll make up a word if there isn't a good one to describe something, but she'd rather just make a scrambled mess out of words she already knows.

She'll often ask us to play "Francesca Bassiltelli" (it's supposed to be Battistelli) and then grin, knowing she got it wrong on purpose.

I think what I love most about Riley is that she takes in and tries to understand everything.  In Sunday School, she is the one who has been listening and can answer any question the teacher might have from the discussion for the day.  This past Sunday, as we were talking about questions we would ask God if we got the chance, Riley put her hand up and said, "I would ask 'How can I know that my name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life?'"

She is such a dear to us.  She adds such joy to our family.  We thank God for giving us our Riley and we wish her a very happy birthday today!

Riley would love to read birthday greetings from the friends and family that she knows and loves...  If she knows you, could you please leave her a birthday greeting in the Comment section?  She is looking forward to reading this post later today and would be very excited to read birthday messages from those she holds dear.