More than three decades ago a family of six moved into a home around the corner from our tiny house on Trevor Drive in San Jose.  They were just back from the mission field with four teenagers, each of whom quickly rose to leadership in our church’s youth group simply because they were so compelling and cheerful and genuinely godly.

I was pregnant with our first son, reading books and studying methods and just generally terrified that neither of us had any idea how to do this whole parenting/raising children/ life of faith task. This family waltzed into our lives at just the right time to give me courage and hope that maybe we could someday have what they had so beautifully built in their family— an honest-to-goodness Jesus centered home filled with passionate-about-Jesus people.

Bill and Laurie Keyes showed us the way ahead. They inspired us and taught us and encouraged and trained us. They met with us and answered questions, allowed us to poke into their lives, opened up their hearts to us to show us that they were real.

And they poured wisdom into us.

Our four kids grew up on “the Keyes say…” Their words became cornerstones for the way we arranged our lives. Validation for why we did what we did and why we didn’t do things a different way.

Their wisdom made sense to us.

So you can imagine my deep-down delight when they agreed to come and share some of that wisdom with you!

On Saturday morning, September 29^th, Bill and Laurie Keyes will speak at Generations… what every woman ought to know.

If you are like I was all those years ago, a woman seeking wisdom, hope, encouragement, courage. If you long to build a house on the Rock and need the keys to know how— you will not want to miss this!

The Details

When? September 29^th

What time? 9-11 am

Who? Women of any and every age

Childcare? No

What? A lovely light bit of food and drink

Where? Solid Rock Westside

Why? Because there is just so much we women need to know… and Bill and Laurie Keyes have so much wisdom to bring into our questions.

Come! Bring your mom, your sister, your best friend. Bring any woman you know who needs real life wisdom. Because that is exactly what Bill and Laurie do best. They show how to do life wisely.

Really, girls, this is one you absolutely do not want to miss!

From my heart,

Diane

(source)

Dearest son,

It seems so strange, not having you here. Just a few days ago you left for college, and though it is not far and you’ve been commuting for the last few years, you’re not here. I miss the here-ness already.

When Jude came running up the stairs looking for Uncle Matt, he was stunned that you would leave. For just a moment his world stopped. Matt not here? Living away? Why?

And yet you’ve been leaving for a long time. Like any healthy, happy, God-trusting male, you’ve made all sorts of steps into your own story— a story where you are the warrior assigned by the King to conquer and explore and make your claim for the kingdom.

It seems like yesterday when you set out on your first foray into adventure…

Today my little boy went off to school.

He was afraid. I was afraid.

He was excited. So was I.

He was brave. I cried.

We chattered cheerfully in the van on the way to school.  He looked so fresh and grown-up in his new haircut, plaid shirt tucked neatly in, appropriately cool baggy pants and black suede tennis shoes.  I took pictures in front of the flagpole.

He smiled.

Walking into the classroom, he gripped my hand in sweaty palm and sat oh-so-quietly at his pint-sized desk.

“Don’t leave yet Mom.  Wait ‘til all the other parents go…”

I rubbed his back and labeled his supplies.  Crayons, scissors, lots of glue, a binder covered in G. I. Joe stickers.  I took a picture of my little boy at his desk.

No smile.

Time for Mom to leave.  One last squeeze of his shoulder.  One last kiss on his cheek, and out the door.

That’s when the tears betrayed me.  Unbidden, they pushed against my eyes, threatening to embarrass me completely.  Gulping them back, I waved with false cheer at a neighbor and drove in my empty van to my empty house.

So quiet.

No chaos, no arguments, no laughter, no messes.

I have looked forward to this day.  I have plans.  For years I have said, “When my children all go to school…”

Yet today I can do nothing.I grieve an end of an era.  An era I have loved, filled with memories I cherish.

I did my share of complaining to be sure. “Can’t I even go to the bathroom alone?!” But I loved the unrushed mornings cuddling with blankie and bear and my squirmy little boy.

I loved the Lego creations and the storybooks and Wee Sing tapes. I loved sidewalk chalk and popsicles dribbling down dimpled chins.  Rainy days spent building forts in the family room with blankets anchored with encyclopedias.

Most of all, I have loved the absolute trust in his eyes.  He knows I am here for him to protect him, to be proud, to understand.

For I am Mom.  Matthew’s mom.  The Best-Mom-in-the-Whole-World.

That is who I was yesterday when I held him as a babe in my arms.  It is who I am today as I leave him at his desk at school.  And tomorrow, when he is a man, I will still be…

Mom.

From my heart,

Diane

Some weeks I know exactly what new recipe I want to share with you.

Other weeks, I stand in my kitchen the day before a new post is due and wonder what in the world I should make for dinner… not to mention what I should share with all of you!

This past week was the latter. I gazed into my fridge and saw an odd mixture of items and my need to go grocery shopping.

I began to pull out the ingredients that needed to be used up, said a prayer (literally) and got to creating.

Sometimes this process works wonders…

Other times it fails miserably.

This dish was deemed “blog worthy”  by my husband (our way of rating food these days) and thoroughly enjoyed with dinner.

A few details about this cauliflower concoction:

• This dish tastes a lot like mashed potatoes
• You can omit the cilantro and lime and add any other herbs or spices
• Cauliflower is an excellent source of vitamin C, fiber and folate (one of the B vitamins that helps prevent birth defects)

ENJOY!

Elizabeth

What great meals have you come up with the last few items in your fridge? Sometimes those are the best ones!

Cilantro + Lime Whipped Cauliflower

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 heads of cauliflower
• Juice from 1 lime
• 2 T nutritional yeast
• 2 T coconut oil
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• ¼ t salt
• pepper
• a few dashes of cayenne pepper (optional)
• ¼ C chopped cilantro

TO MAKE:

Chop cauliflower into pieces and place in a large pot. Fill about half way with water and add a few pinches of salt. Bring water to a boil and boil for about 10 min or until all the cauliflower is very soft.

While the cauliflower is boiling, add coconut oil, nutritional yeast, salt, garlic powder, cayenne pepper and limejuice to a food processor or blender.

Strain cauliflower and give it a good shake to get rid of any excess liquid.

Add cauliflower to the blender and blend until smooth. Give it a taste and add more salt and pepper if necessary. Then add cilantro and blend for just a few seconds until combined.

TO SERVE:

It can be served right after blending.

Or it can be placed in a casserole pan and baked at 375 for about 20 min or until the top gets golden brown.

It can easily be made ahead of time and baked when you are ready to serve it.

ENJOY!

Dear Son,

Your room is crammed with boxes, overflowing with piles of towels and sheets and supplies. Teetering towers of t-shirts and extra socks take up every square foot of space in what has been your man-cave for many years.

In just a few days you will sweep all that messiness into the back of your car and drive off to make a home of your own.

When you leave I will take all my mama-grief and scrub every corner of that square of space. I’ll patch holes where you poked pins into the wall to hang your posters. Cob-webs will come down, memories will be loosened, all our long talks will echo as I dust and shine and try to find a way to place all those memories somewhere safe.

And every moment I’ll be wishing I could have stopped the years, that I could go back again and tuck you into bed at night, run my fingers through that bristly shaved head you insisted on every summer when being a boy meant sweating and swimming and certainly not messing with such a silly thing as hair.

I’ll breath deeply of the scent of manhood and remember the boy you were. The nights of worrying that diabetes would rob you of the freedom you craved. The mornings of waking you for school and answering that question that came bubbling to the surface the moment you opened your eyes: Where is everyone?

How I loved your love for all of us! Your determination to keep connected, to know where your brother was and what your sisters were up to. Your full-fledged involvement in each member of this crazy crew we call a family.

I will miss you Matthew. And the tears rim my eyes even as I push hard to put them back.

This growing up is good, so why does my heart grieve?

And I know the answer, dare I say it?

I grieve because the full birthing of love always brings loss.

To birth you into the man you are called to be I must lose the boy you were. And I know because I’ve done this before. I know things will never be the same. That the closeness that comes from living and laughing and making you meals and waking you early and worrying when you’re late… will change.

You see, dear son of mine, I have loved being your mom. And I’m a mama still, I know, but it’s the every day I have loved best.

The serving and the soothing and the listening and the hoping and the teaching and the reading and the cleaning up of little boy messes and the wiping away of big-boy tears.

I have loved how you bound up the stairs , and how your bring your friends home and crowd into your tiny room to talk about who-knows-what and pretend I don’t know that you’re talking about girls.  And maybe they like you and maybe they don’t and oh how you and all your friends who are men now wish they would and someday… someday someone will.

Matthew, I have been writing these letters about that someone. That someone who will like you and love you and hope for you forever.

May she relish who you are as I have.

I love you Matt,

Mom

Now in a large house there are not only gold and silver vessels,

but also vessels of wood and of earthenware,

and some to honor and some to dishonor. 

Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things,

he will be a vessel for honor,

sanctified,

useful to the Master,

prepared for every good work.

2 Timothy 20,21

NASB

Many years ago my grandmother cleaned out her dining room hutch and passed a box full of silver on to me. My mother didn’t want it for the same reason Great (her nickname once the great grandkids were born) was giving it away: too much trouble.

I’ve always loved anything shiny and glittery and in any way nostalgic, so I took that box into my hands with glee. Shined up and beautiful, I put each item on a shelf and pulled them out to use over and over again.

That was 20 years ago at least. I’ve gotten tired of all that shining, let the pretty things tarnish and turn dull. Gotten used to less beauty, comfortable with the grey.

And then this morning it bothered me. I have no idea why, but that teapot just seemed pathetic sitting there. It looked old, but not in a good way. Just old.

And so I ambitiously got out the polish, dirtied my hands, and gently wiped the grim away. It took all of about 10 minutes to get it clean, even after I threw in every silver thing I could find sitting out.

Ten minutes.

And while I was smearing the pink polish and rinsing all that ugliness away I wondered just a little about me.

My soul. That part of me that gets grimy and dull. Put on a shelf and ignored because its just not pretty.

Who wants to have a tea party with an ugly teapot?

And it takes so little time to shine my soul up. Really. Just a little pink polish: a mixture of confession and repentance and humbling myself enough to submit to the gentle cleansing of my Master.

I put myself in front of Him and say, I want to be clean again. I want to be pretty. Shiny, lovely. Do what You must. Please.

And then I just sit at His feet and listen as He tells me what to let go of. Things like perfectionism, self-pity, worry, resentment… and He washes those dulling things all away. So softly. So kind.

And I like how I feel when He’s done. Not scrubbed and rubbed wrong, but loved and embraced and relieved of the scum so I can be me.

The real me. The me He made me to be in the first place. That me.

I feel useful once again; bright and shiny and waiting to be filled and to pour and to delight.

In ten minutes.

From my heart,

Diane

At Christmas time I was gifted the money to buy something I had been wanting to purchase for a long time but just didn’t have the chunk of change to make the splurge. What, you might ask? A Vitamix blender. I know, I know, who would dream of buying a blender?! Well, it is much more then just a blender. It can pulverize anything and everything you put inside of it and will literally last you the rest of your life. Our whole family is kind of obsessed with it and we use it a minimum of 3-4 times a day.

I’ve been wanting to shout it from the roof tops and tell everyone I know to go buy one… however a commercial grade blender is not exactly in everyone’s monthly budget.

When I heard how my dear friend, Michele, saved up to by a Vitamix for her family I begged her to share it on the blog.

ENJOY!

Elizabeth

VITAMIX: by michele fordice

On most days I have about 5 new ideas.

To be honest, very few of my genius ideas actually come to fruition.  Some just weren’t good to begin with.  But most of the time, I just don’t follow through and implement.  I am a constant visionary.  I currently have two entrepreneurial ideas circling my prayer life right now.  And who knows where they’ll go.  My biggest problem — when I start one project, 5 others seem to appear in the process.  It goes a little something like this:

“Hey, babe!  Let’s paint our room!” (That’s code for, “Jay, will YOU please paint our room?”).

That quickly leads to:

“Honey, should we paint the study too?”

Which, of course, leads to:

“Gee, let’s sell our couch and get a new one. Oh, and we need some new pillows here….”

And so it begins.  Sound familiar?

That’s why I shouldn’t have been surprised when our entire house was thrown in upheaval the second Elizabeth made a small, extremely generous offer.  Preparing for a family trip, Elizabeth offered to let me borrow her Vitamix.  I was beyond thrilled…and a bit surprised.  I mean, really?  Not only is Elizabeth gorgeous and sweet hearted, but she’s kind.  Who lets a neighbor borrow a crazy expensive kitchen appliance?

I had heard a ton of things about this little miracle machine.  But, I needed to see first-hand what all the ridiculous chatter was about. (And my own mediocre blender had just gone belly up.)  A week passed and the only problem I was facing was the fact that the Mossers were on their way home and my kale in my garden wasn’t keeping up with the demands of our smoothie obsession…

…Oh, and that meant my new favorite toy was going to have to be returned.  Visions of us living without the most amazing smoothies and homemade peanut butter and pesto and anything else I could think to blend turned to nightmares.  How was I going to make my post workout green drink or hide kale in the boy’s afternoon smoothies (and not have chunks floating around)?  There was no way we had money budgeted to splurge on an expensive kitchen appliance.

(Elliot finishing my smoothie after drinking his)

And so, my visionary brain kicked in.  And this time I had the nightmares of life without a Vitamix to motivate me.

So, with my husband’s encouragement, I started a “FUN fund.”  I took a long look at our house and began a list of all the things we really didn’t need.  I purged my kitchen, bedrooms, garage and anything that wasn’t functional in our house and decided it was time they needed to find a new home to dwell.  Two months later, thanks to Craigslist, I had sold $800 worth items.

From our “FUN fund,” we were able to buy our beloved Vitamix and put an end to my nightmares of life without kale smoothies.  And, in true Michele fashion, we added a new couch and several new pillows to the mix.  Oh yeah, and a little paint for the bedroom and a bedspread.  (I told you, my ideas always multiply.)  It was like Christmas in July. 

If you are anything like me, the decision to buy something expensive, like a Vitamix, isn’t easy.  Money is tight.  I want to stick to my budget.  I want to honor the Lord with my resources.  But, like you, my heart is also to feed my boys GOOD tasting, GOOD for you foods on a budget.  Foods that we call “GO” foods, not “slow” foods that are going to bring us down.  I saw a Vitamix as a way to help me accomplish that, whipping up smoothies, sauces, peanut butter, jams…and I can’t wait to try some winter squash soup this fall!  And my summer purge helped me make it happen.

(homemade peach and strawberry jam)

Eating healthy and providing a diverse cuisine doesn’t ALWAYS have to be spendy.  It just might take some creativity.  Bringing value to our home and marriage is a personal priority to me.  To show my husband respect and that I appreciate his hard work.  To not spend money flippantly on items that don’t provide a function or purpose in our home.

How do you bring value to your kitchen or create space for a “FUN fund”?  Buying in bulk with a friend and splitting the goods.  Use coupons.  Have a side business.  Do meal swaps with groups of like minded foodies.  Make homemade baby food.  Purchase portions of cows, pigs, etc.  Buy into a co op.  Preserve summer’s fruits and veggies.

The ideas are endless.

Will you please share your creative ideas?  We can learn so much from one another to be more industrious, creative and frugal!

Michele

A FEW NOTES ON WHERE TO PURCHASE A VITAMIX:

• Costco carries them for a discounted price whenever they are having a live demo. Click here to see demo schedules.
• Bed Bath and Beyond also carries them and often has 20% coupons.
• They can also be found on Craigslist!