Will Dig Life

The kids having a go at my jigsaw These reflection prompts are from Rachel Macy Stafford's Soul Shift Lift Course , which I'm using to work at becoming more present, more intentional, and softer in my relationship with my children and husband. Highly recommend it. How often do you nourish yourself with necessities like plenty of water, rest, exercise, nutritious food, or by engaging in a hobby? Is this enough or not? How do you know?   Having given it a bit of thought, I think my tendency can be to go overboard one way or the other. I mean, my food is taken care of and is in its place, thank you God for Greysheet , so nutritionally I lack nothing and I'm not using food as a reward. It's just food. But I wouldn't need the Greysheet if my tendency wasn't naturally towards gluttony. It may not look like it from the outside, but I am deeply lazy. I don't exercise. If I can avoid doing a chore, I will. If I can do something at less effort, I will. I got through s

Only a little bit late, seeing as it's the 9th of March, but here are a few of our highlights in February. We are still in lockdown, the kids are missing the grandparents, and we can't wait for Spring to warm us up again soon! Fun and creativity at home When new furniture arrives, it comes with lots of cardboard... we had some fun with it Baking, jigsaws, cutting hair: N(6) cut her own fringe when I wasn't looking!!! so her dream of long hair has been set back a bit... and I decided to bring out the hairdressing heads. The kids both had great fun with those. Painting is always a winner... Her own guitar! Outdoors We finally got to go out a few times, the sun is showing itself now and the daffodils are out. We still couldn't meet up with anybody, but at least getting a change of scenery (all local!) and a bit of fresh air is beautiful. Daddy built a brand new sand box! Valentine's Day I felt very loved. We kept it low-key of course.

Something beautiful happened this week. I want to share about it in the hope that it will encourage those of you with little ones. I remember the insecurity and constant questioning about my choices, so perhaps this will encourage someone to just go with your instincts and ignore the "experts" 😉 We have never made our children sleep alone. As parents around us talked about crying it out (telling me that sooner or later we'd HAVE to do it and the older they got the harder it would be!), some parents we know even locked the toddler's door or blocked it with a broomstick to stop them getting out (!!) ... yet for my part, I just savoured the closeness. Over the years we've had various arrangements; when my D was born 19 months after N, I had to night wean N fairly abruptly and so she slept with her daddy in one bed for a year or so, while I slept with the baby in another room. Later, we had a king size floor bed where I would sleep in between the two kids. Mr enjoy

These journalling prompts come from Rachel Macy Stafford's Soul Shift Lift course, which I'm finding really valuable right now as I'm looking to use this Lent to deepen all my relationships: with God, but also with my children in particular. Do you find yourself obsessing over doing things perfectly?  I'm not sure perfection is the right word for the problem, although I struggle to come up with another. I really don't think of myself as a perfectionist - one look at my house will assure you I'm not, and my husband is much better at putting things away, making things orderly and so on: I think of myself as the sloppy one. But for the first time, after listening to Rachel's talk, I connected perfectionism to something I do. She described being so anxious, worried and annoyed at leaving home for a holiday because she had so many things in her mind - inconsequential things like the dishwasher wasn't empty, they were a bit late on the road... and I definitel