Juneau!

Last week I had a meeting for work in Juneau, so the boys came along and we made a mini vacation out of it.  Juneau is a beautiful city that feels much more quaint than most capital cities.  The first thing we noticed: trees, green, and mountains!  It still amazes us that one state has such different geography.  We live in flat open tundra with a massive river, and Juneau has something very different.  

Our first day there was Saturday, and was typically rainy.  So we shopped.  No disappointment for these Bethelites with that.  People in Juneau still feel somewhat isolated because its still off the road system and does not have everything.  For us, though, Fred Meyer, Walmart, and Costco are more than enough.

On Sunday the adventure really began.  Our Father's Day opened with the Mendenhall Glacier

Later in the day we went to the Shrine of St. Therese.  It's a cathedral on a beautiful peninsula that was clearly built with God's handiwork in mind.

 

At the end of the day we went to a restaurant downtown on the water called The Twisted Fish.  Crab and salmon tacos.

 

Afterward we went to an awesome park we had seen while driving.  Zeke didn't even need the equipment.  Just give him some green grass and a hill to run up and down, and he's a happy camper.

On Monday, our big splurge was to go whale watching.  It was well worth it, and we got a half price discount for being locals so it was hard to pass up.  We saw three different sea animals while out on the boat, and we had another unusually nice day with no rain.

 Hump back whales

 Stellar sea lions

 Orcas

 Needless to say, it was a busy trip that tuckered us out everyday, but such a memorable last trip as a family of 3!

A Parenting Devotional

I am reading a weekly pregnancy devotional just like I did with the first pregnancy.  This time around, different things are sticking out to me.  This is a piece of one devotional that I have really been pondering and trying to focus on during the past few weeks.

Mothering

It is normal to feel some bit of nervousness when you are being faced with a new challenge, and mothering is no exception.  Many women find themselves concerned with how they will handle the stress and demands of mothering.  How are they going to feed the baby, change the diapers, get the baby to sleep and all the other things that must be done.  In many ways, we let how efficient we are at completing these tasks be the gauge of our success at mothering.

It's not that these physical needs are unimportant, they are important to your baby's health.  However these things are eternally insignificant.  There is no test in heaven for how easily you can get a baby to fall asleep, how long your baby can go without eating or how quickly you are able to change a diaper. 

Instead, as you think about the challenges awaiting you as a new mother focus your energy on the eternally significant mothering skills.  How effective are you at modeling love and serving God?  How good is your ability to love unselfishly?  What example do you give your child for forgiving and seeking forgiveness?  These are the important skills of mothering.  These are the skills that are going to make a difference in your child's life.

It is so easy to get caught up in the physical demands of parenting, especially when your child is a baby and has so many physical needs and is helpless to fulfill any of them on their own.  To also have a toddler that still has many needs only amplifies these demands.  Both Aaron and I have wondered how we are going to do it all.  We have no doubt that we can and will do it well; however, we are already putting pressure on ourselves to figure out how it is all going to work.  

This passage is comforting because it reminds me in such a simple way that there are other important things in parenting that will have far more impact on our kids' lives than eating, sleeping, bathing, and the like.  Even as a toddler, Zeke is already picking up on how Aaron and I react to certain situations.  He mimics us and responds to the things we do.  To think that our impact on his spiritual life will come down the road when we can communicate by means of a two-way conversation is wrong.  We are already impacting how he sees the world, the people in it, and ultimately the importance of faith and God in our lives.

This is why it's important that Zeke sees us praying and reading the Bible, even though he doesn't understand everything about it.  It's why it's important that we don't yell or react harshly when responding to conflict with others, with him, or within ourselves.  It's all important because he sees it and processes it even as a 17-month-old child.  It will be the same with our second from the start of his or her life.

And so this is on my mind as we embark on a new journey with another child to look after.  In the midst of the sleepless nights, constant feedings, double diaper duty, and tears and probable tantrums from a newborn and toddler, I want to keep our children's spiritual lives in the forefront of our minds.