life notes

dont' worry, this won't be one of those posts where i brag about how great, cute or perfect my kids or my life are, maybe even the opposite... or something inbetween :)
it is, however, pictureless since the main photographer of our family (matthew) aquired a iphone in february we have yet to establish regularity in transferring those to the computer.
so

1. i sometimes like being abby's sunday school teacher. sunday was a case in point. the kids were doing a thankful prayer time and i specifically asked abby since she had been quiet.
me:  abby, are you thankful for anything?
abby: myself. i'm thankful for me.  

how do i even begin to interpret this?

2. matthias is much like abby was at this point of her baby life. angry! he can't crawl or walk but desperately wants to do either. he just screams anytime he's on his belly or sometimes refuses to even sit. sigh. we are also in a period of seperation anxiety and finally sleeping through the night.

3. we have no idea about anything in our future and it seems a bit challenging to communicate this with all the loving people that frequently ask us what we're doing next. sunday's are particulary hard as almost everyone asks us almost every week.  it must be really hard for people to grasp that we have absolutely no control over our life. it's quite hard for us to grasp too. on good days it's a great faith motivator (trust in God, hooray!) on bad days i am deeply depressed, tired and impatient.

4. last weekend we went on a retreat to the YMCA of the Rockies with our church. it was awesome! more adult interaction than i've had in a month put together i'm sure! a speaker came and talked about a new aspect of the enneagram-- instincts. We are animals and have instincts. There are 3 groups. Self preservation (resources/food/health/home/etc.), sexual (intense experiences/senses/beauty), and social (networking, parenting, conversing). The speaker shared that we usually have a very dominant instinct that we over emphasize, one we are pretty natural about and one that we really ignore.

It was very insightful for matthew and i who realized that my dominant self preservation is his very bottom and his top social instinct is my very bottom. This has made our marriage hard. But also very very good. We have always known we balance each other out somehow... but now we have a new tool to appreciate each other's gifts as well as our own.

oh, okay. i found a picture. you deserve it for reading all that!
abby had her last day of "school."  we've gone a few times a month all year, but i'm not sure she'll miss it too much now that summer, pool, garden and water are here.
p.s. she was not posing