making space for creativity
Merry Christmas Friends! We are writing from the middle of a week filled with Christmas concerts at school, pageants at church, and caroling at the nursing home. We’re also in the middle of an early cold snap in Wisconsin as we remember our big 3 1/2 week road trip out to California last summer and…
We hosted exactly two birthday parties in our 728 square-foot home before saying we’d never do that again. The first one was fine, it had 2 two-year-old toddlers and 7 adults. That was a good ratio. But buoyed by that success, we got overly ambitious. The second party had 6 toddlers and 3 babies and…
This month I wrote a devotional reflection for our church’s Neighborhood Community Newsletter, and I thought I’d share it here on the blog as well for anyone looking for a little encouragement to rest this Fall. When I was 18, I went on a backpacking trip in Northern Wisconsin the weeks before I started college….
The 2024 Newbery winner is The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers and Shawn Harris. Told from the perspective of a stray dog, Johannes, living in a west coast urban park, this lively, quick, and powerful story has a great narrative voice, warm friendships, and a lot of nature. Johannes loves running, he loves…
I read some excellent books this year! I seem to continuedly learn over and over that I am happiest and feel most like myself when I am in the middle of a great book. My top five books from the year were The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” (Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality) by Kathleen Norris, Which…
Merry Christmas Friends! As I write this, we are happily a few days away from Christmas break, eating leftover Santa Lucia Day buns, and loading the harp up for a bunch of dress rehearsals and children’s Christmas performances at school and church and our local nursing home. We are happy to report that this school…
Merry (almost) Christmas, Friends! Here is an arrangement of passages from Isaiah, Luke, and Matthew interspersed with Christmas carols for a simple home Christmas pageant. (Click Here for a Printable Version) Who doesn’t love babies in bathrobes with wrapping paper roll staffs? But if your family is not up for using dictionary stands as…
Neither Evan nor I grew up celebrating Saint Nicholas Day on December 6th, but we wanted to start with our kids. Over the years we’ve figured out that what works for our family to celebrate St. Nicholas Day are three things: A new pair of boots (or shoes) A tiny orange (inside the new boots)…
This is my fourth year of putting together a list of books that Lily loved over the last year (and her older brother Jackson loved when he was four). Many four year olds really start to have longer and longer attention spans for books, and it makes finding read aloud books easier in many ways….
I love children’s Bibles! And we have quite a few around here. A good children’s Bible helps children enter into the big story of God making and redeeming the world. From board book Bibles that you can read in five minutes to full text bibles that would take you 75 hours to read straight through,…
Happy Epiphany friends! For a long time, I wasn’t exactly sure what Epiphany was because it seemed sometimes to be a specific day, other times a whole season, and sometimes was more of a concept. It turns out it really is all three! The word means “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential…
My favorite books from this year were heavy on theology and Christian formation. I loved The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ by Rowan Williams, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God by Dallas Willard, and The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory by Abigail Favale….
2021 Newbery winner, When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller. Little sister Lily is moving back to help her sick Halmoni, her Korean Grandmother, with her mother and older sister Sam. Halmoni has always told stories that seem magical, so when a tiger that seems directly out of her stories begins appearing to Lily,…
Dear Friends and Family, We hope you are having a blessed season of Advent and are eagerly awaiting Christmas like Lily and Jackson are. It is amazing to see how their anticipation and love for candles and carols, special Christmas books and home-made ornaments grows each year. They love to rearrange our nativity sets, have…
2009 Newbery winner, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is the tale of a boy called Nobody (Bod for short) who was rescued and raised by the ghosts of a graveyard when he was a baby. Part fairytale, part retelling of The Jungle Book, this book takes its place among the great works of children’s…