This year, we have four kids playing flag football. Because the family that plays football together...stays together. Or something like that.

On Halloween this year, I saw an unforgettable photograph of a young girl trick-or-treating on streets clogged with Michael's wreckage. She walked towards the sunset, her bag over her shoulder, with broken shingles and chunks of brick on either side of the street and a row of blue tarped houses in front of her.

I had coffee with a friend this week who told me about moving into her new rental after her old rental had a tree dropped through the middle of it, effectively destroying 80% of their household goods.

It's that time of year where most of us are making some kind of resolution to exercise more, eat more healthily, pursue our personal goals instead of just talking about them, etc.

I wake up every morning and I think about all the stuff I can get done during the day if I just work smarter, time manage more effectively, and don't waste any time. Then by the end of the day, I can see just how little I've accomplished and just how exhausted I am, and I realize why I don't finish more of the items on my list.

In May, the Man accidentally scraped a chair over my toenail, leaving a blackish purple bruise that slowly crept closer and closer to the tip of my toe for weeks. Just a week earlier, Oswald had bitten a hole straight through the thumb nail of my right hand while trying to avoid getting his vaccinations updated.

I was recently thinking back on my husband's decade in the military (our family's decade as a military family). Ten years, two deployments, five kids, five moves, more short term separations than I can count... Looking back, I see things so differently now than I did then

I had big plans to post a blog Thursday night, but then the boys' bookshelves got in and I spent the evening obsessively assembling them and unboxing books. Part of this was that I was sick of the boys' books taking over the floor of our guest room (which has been the dump room for the last month) but most of it was that in my mind I was playing out the part in The Little Princess when Ram Dass transforms Sara Crewe's room while she sleeps.

The Man is at the house hanging out with the packers as they box everything up, and I'm at temporary lodging listen to the kids play a very loud game of pretend that involves a set of rolling ottomans and probably imminent death. This is moving.

In children's church this week, we talked about some of the miracles Jesus performed in the book of Matthew, and then the kids worked to memorize Matt 9:36, which says that when Jesus looked at the crowd "He had compassion on them." My initial reaction was to remember the many times my heart hadn't been filled with compassion towards the suffering, the many times my heart hadn't even been filled with compassion for my own children.

I took the kids to a museum this week to see dinosaur bones. I've been promising to take them to this museum since last summer, so...it was about time. We did have great fun. Especially Twinkle who discovered that if she yelled loud enough, I'd take her out of the ergo and let her run around like a big kid.

A few weeks ago, I plowed through Psalm 119. It took a few days, and by the end, my snarky self was convinced that the psalmist had an alternate identity as a broken record. Seriously: 176 verses of the same thing over and over again. Evidently the psalmist didn't consider conciseness to be a virtue worth having.

Dear New Mom…