Compassion Week at Heidi's @ Home

Even if you just started reading my blog this week you know my family and I are huge supporters of Compassion International since I have written several posts about our experience, the way my life is being changed and how I'm going on a going on a (virtual) trip this week with the Compassion bloggers.

Because of this week's trip to Nicaragua I'm considering this "Compassion Week" here at Heidi's @ Home :)  I'll resume my "regular" posts next week, but figure this is a good time to bring attention to one of my favorite groups.

I'm anxiously awaiting updates from the team and am extremely jealous of Kelly from Faithful Provisions who gets to meet her sponsored child, Marcos today!  Kelly tweeted a picture this morning as she was getting ready to meet him and all I could think of is how I'd love to visit Marcos (our oldest Compassion child, who is getting ready to graduate) in Peru, Naidelin  in the Dominican Republic, Sharon in Kenya or Alexis in Peru.   Alexis and Marco only live about 100 miles away from each other.

While I can't visit our kids this week I'm excited to follow the activities of the Compassion bloggers on Twitter.

Until the team starts posting their updates I'm enjoying getting to know the team by reading their blogs, including Giving the internet malaria by Shaun Groves who is helping to lead this trip.

Will you join me in following this team as they get to love on some beautiful children and witness first hand the amazing work Compassion is doing in Nicaragua?

Yuck!

For the 3rd time since October a friend from my freshman year of college has had a parent pass away.  All 3 friends are my age---way too young to have to say "good-bye".  Thankfully each of these know their parents are in heaven because of their relationship with Jesus, but I know it's still extremely difficult.

Yesterday was Father's Day.  For one of my friends it's marked the first Father's Day without her dad, who passed away several weeks ago.  Another one spent yesterday at the hospital with her dad in ICU (he passed this morning).   Last month my friend whose mom passed away in October had to spend his first Mother's Day without his mom, just a few days before his first birthday without her.

I've written before about the hardest part of getting older and, at that point, I didn't know anyone well who had lost a parent.  That has changed since then.  Mr. M in the original post is physically doing fine, but in 2011 he had to say good-bye to his wife of over 50 years, which meant one of my husband's closest friends lost his mom.

Now these three college friends have all lost their parents in recent months and I'm once again left thinking that sometimes adulthood really stinks.  I don't mind saying I'm 37. My 20 year reunion next year doesn't bother me. I could care less about turning 40 in 2016. Those things don't bother me---it's this reality of adulthood that I'm not happy about.

Going on a (virtual) trip!

All weekend I have been thinking about the lesson in perspective and the object lesson we tried to teach our kids Saturday.  My husband and I had an interesting talk Saturday night about the struggle of wanting to live the life God wants while also being heavily influenced by our American culture of "stuff".

We currently have 4 Compassion children, including one who is getting to graduate his program.  This young man is someone that has been part of my husband's life since before we met and started dating over 10 years ago so he's seen our family change from my husband as a single man to where we are today: a family with 2 kids who will be 7 and 5 this summer.  Until recently we'd never had more than 2 Compassion children at a time, but had had 4 total over the years.   In recent months we added a little boy born the same day as our daughter and a little girl born the same day as our son so we can watch these children grow up along with ours, which brought our total to 4 that we currently sponsor.  We've had two we sponsor leave the program: one due to graduation and one due to other circumstances.

Though we've sponsored Compassion children the entire time we've been married (as I mentioned, my husband started before we were married, so I "inherited" these kids on our wedding day) it's been in recent months that my heart has seriously been changed by the sponsorship experience.  We pray for our Compassion children regularly as they each have their own "sticks" and have their pictures hanging in the hallway where we get to see their faces often.  Our kids know their names and they are part of normal conversation in our home.  Our kids love that they each have a friend in a different country who was born the same day as them (though my 4 year old was confused for awhile as to why she and her friend in Peru weren't twins even though they were born the same day).

This week, Edie at life{in}grace has the amazing experience of travelling to Nicaragua with Compassion International and she, along with her fellow travelers, are blogging about their experiences.

I'm not going to lie---I'm extremely jealous of these bloggers this week who get to meet and love on children that Compassion is helping to release from poverty in the name of Jesus Christ!  In my dreams we get to travel to Peru (Our oldest and youngest Compassion children live approximately 100mi from each other) or the Dominican Republic or Kenya to visit one of these members or our extended family.   Since I can't visit our own Compassion kids this week I'm going to live vicariously through those who can!

Will you join me in following Edie, Shaun, Traci, Kelly, and Christy this week as they get to be Jesus' hands and feet in Nicaragua and love on some amazing kids?

Perspective and an Impromptu Object Lesson

This week we received our first letter from our newest Compassion Child, a little girl from Kenya who was born the same day as our son.   This morning my husband was reading the newest Compassion Magazine, which we received yesterday and I asked him, "Did you read Sharon's letter? Did you see one of her chores is fetching water?"  Both of our kids were playing in the kitchen while we talked so when my 6 year old heard us he asked what "fetching water" meant. 

Since we were standing in the kitchen I turned on our faucet and told the kids how lucky we are to have running water.   I explained about how many people around the world aren't lucky enough to have water in their house and they have to go get it.  I explained that some people get their water from a well and others have to go get theirs from a body of water that they share with animals who drink and go to the bathroom there.  I asked the kids how they'd like to drink water that came from where animals pooped.   Needless to say there was a chorus of "EEEWWWWW".

I asked my son, "Sharon is your age.  Do you think you could carry water back to our house without spilling it?"  In typical 6 year old bravado he said, "Of course! That's easy!".   Immediately an idea started forming in my head and within minutes we had an impromptu object lesson this morning.

I filled 3 buckets with water: a small one they received as a gift, a 2.5 gallon bucket and a 5 gallon bucket. Our side of the street doesn't have a sidewalk, so I carried the buckets across the street and instructed them to carry the buckets down a few houses to a neighbor's house.

My 4 year old went first with the small bucket:

Next up was my 6 year old:

After both kids successfully carried the small bucket past 4 houses in our suburban neighborhood I had them attempt the 2.5 gallon bucket:

As you can see, my daughter couldn't even lift the 2.5 gallon bucket and by the time my son walked to our neighbor's house that we'd designated as our end point his bucket was basically empty.

The water ended up primarily on him, which he didn't mind since we're in the midst of a Phoenix summer and it was already about 95 when we were doing this at 11am.

After watching what happened when my son picked up the 2.5 gallon bucket I was quite interested to see what would happen once the kids attempted the next challenge:

I don't know if the kids fully got the object lesson I was trying to teach because they were more into how fun it was to get wet on this hot morning, but hopefully it'll stick.

Once we got in the house I was getting a little pushback when I asked them to mop the floor and unload the dishwasher.  We talked about how Sharon would probably LOVE a machine that did the dishes for her and I told them that where she lives they have dirt floors so she would think our tile floors were extremely fancy.

Our activities this morning were also a good dose of perspective for this mom.  For the past few weeks I've been seeing pictures on Facebook of vacations my friends are taking and I've been getting discouraged that we haven't been able to fit anything like that into our budget.  (Ironically when my kids dressed themselves this morning they both put on shirts given to them by a family member who went to Disney World last year and one of the things I've been really struggling with is not being able to afford to take our kids to Disneyland, despite it only being 6 hours away so I had that "god" in my face the whole time the kids were doing this).

Mom needed this dose of perspective at least as much as the kids.

Honest Feelings

I admit many of the things I'm going to post here aren't "right", but they're how I'm feeling.

My 4yo was diagnosed with astigmatism this week and we're currently waiting on her first pair of glasses to arrive.   I'm the only one on either side of our families that has decent vision (I wear glasses for night driving, but that's about it) so we knew it was a matter of time until our kids wore glasses, but we weren't expecting it this young (we were thinking around 9-13ish) and we weren't expecting astigmatism since it's not real common in our families.

**Learning that she's probably never truly seen clearly saddens me.

**I'm thankful she will be able to wear glasses to see clearly.

**I'm excited for her reaction when she gets her glasses and sees clearly for the first time.

**Finding out she's probably never seen clearly makes me wonder if I should've caught it sooner.

**I'm a little sad that her precious face is going to be behind glasses, until she is ready to wear contacts (we assume she'll want to eventually).

**She's already told me she's sad she's going to be the only kid in her class who wears glasses.

**I'm scared about her "fitting in".

**I have friends with daughters who started wearing glasses in preschool and I know the mean things that have been said to them.  I'm borrowing trouble by worrying about my girl having to hear the same things.

**I'm worried about quality of life with being as active as she wants (running around and worrying about her glasses falling off).

In the grand scheme of things I know this is MINOR.  I also am thankful that this is her only vision issue.  Except for the astigmatism her eyesight is fine right now (she is equally nearsighted and farsighted) so once that's corrected she'll be fine.

Here's how we found out that she needs glasses at 4:

A few months ago my son was studying the 5 senses in Kindergarten.  One day he brought home an eye chart his teacher had printed out.  My son wanted us to hang it up at home and do it.  To him it was a game so I measured 20 feet down the hallway and he showed us "how well he can see". Because my daughter didn't want to be left out she tried it.  We noticed she was struggling with some of the bottom lines.  I called the optometrist office where my husband and I go (and where our son went when he was 5) and asked if they'd see her.  I was told that for kids her age they recommend a pediatric optometrist and gave me a number.   I never got around to scheduling anything for her (Mommy fail).   Last month she hurt her eye, causing it to be red and watering constantly.   I called the optometrist that the rest of the family sees and said, "I know she's younger than you usually see, but can you get her in?".  I got a same day appointment and they did a quick assessment of her vision to get a baseline.  I noticed she was struggling around the 20/40 part of the chart, but seemed to be doing pretty well around 20/60.  Red flag, but I was (hoping) it was just because of the injury.   A few days later we went for a follow up and I noticed she was struggling in the exact same spot.  I asked the optometrist, "When do I bring her in for her first exam?" and was told any time.  I scheduled the appointment and we went Monday where we got the diagnosis.

The interesting thing is she's already reading and hasn't had any trouble at preschool with reading or writing so we really hadn't had cause to be concerned.   My husband and I were talking last night and we'd both separately remembered during the day yesterday that she used to stand close to the TV and we'd shoo her away telling her to back up.  Now we're wondering if she was doing it to see better . . .

Since she's younger than we were told to do the kids' first exam (just before starting school) I'm thankful for catching it as early as we did, but I'm also a bit sad that she's having to deal with this already (and knowing she most likely was born with this eye shape and has never seen correctly) makes me a bit sad.

Finding glasses small enough for her face (41mm) was extremely challenging, but we finally found ONE pair yesterday so we ordered them  (At previous places we could only find 43mm, which were too big.  The optometrist special ordered 42mms for her to try on because they didn't have any in stock).  My daughter was sad that all the "pretty" ones were too big for her, but I told her "You're going to wear glasses for a long time [rest of her life] so when you get bigger you'll have lots of choices and can get pretty ones".

My husband had LASIK at some point before we met (we've been together 10 years) and my sister recently had it.  After doing some research we found out she could possibly be a candidate when she gets older, if she chooses to do it so my husband and I found that encouraging (Besides, who knows what kind of technology will be available to her when she's an adult!).

All in all I know there are a million and one things to be thankful for and not upset about, but I've still struggled with feelings of sadness for her over the past few days.  Today I'm finding myself counting down the days until she gets them because I want her to be able to see everything without anything being "fuzzy".

Yesterday my daughter and I scrolled through Little Four Eyes as pictures of other kids her age (and younger) rocking their glasses :)

Happy! Happy! Happy!

Like Lisa at Marble and Mud I have a hard time being happy when it's nearly 110 outside.  Yuck.  Instead of focusing on what I don't like about this season I'm choosing to focus on what's making my happy right now:

**The only nice thing I have to say about the hot weather is . . . at least the pool is warming up :)

Since school is out for the summer, here are the things I'm enjoying about our break in no particular order:

**We're all still in our pj's at 8:45am and don't have anywhere to be until this afternoon

**No more playground sand EVERYWHERE (the floor, my son's shoes, his socks, the dryer's lint trap, etc.

**Not having to pack school lunches

**Wearing less clothes (and more swimsuits) makes laundry easier

**The kids are able to wear flip flops every day and I don't have to help anyone tie their shoes

**Time with the kids

**Not really being on a schedule

**There are empty spaces on the calendar this month

**Lots of time in the pool makes for tired kids and less of a bedtime battle

**Arranging get-togethers with friends is much easier now that we don't have to worry about school schedules.


What is making you happy right now?

Harder than it looks

For the past few months I've been working on being healthier.  As a family we've already pretty much eliminated packaged and processed foods from our diet, though I do confess I still enjoy my Coke and probably won't be giving it up soon, despite knowing how bad it is for me.

I've also started working out more than I used to (ANY working out is more than I used to).   Between eating better and exercising I was starting to notice a difference in my shape.   I took measurements of different places (arms, hips, waist, etc.) in March and then again in April.  I was pleasantly surprised to see I'd lost inches throughout my body in that time frame.  And then May came.  My birthday and Mother's Day are within a week of each other.  During that time there were also end of the year parties at preschool, Kindergarten, and Little League.   Needless to say I fell off the wagon for a few weeks.   I haven't dared take any measurements since the end of April, but I can tell by the mirror and my clothes that I took several steps back after having made some progress earlier in the year

I'm getting back in the routine now.  I don't belong to a gym but I have free weights, a medicine ball and resistance band.   I have a Pinterest board of workouts that I have been attempting. (Yes, I finally broke down and joined Pinterest as a way to keep track of workout ideas and to aid in my meal planning).  I've noticed many of these *look* easy, but in reality I can't make it through half of it when the instructions say 3 reps.   I picked one today that I've been struggling with and my goal is to be able to complete an entire rep by the end of June.

This is one of the workouts that has been kicking my tail.  I am going to attempt it most days and WILL be able to get through it at least once without stopping!