My family downloaded this app for the first time last week. My four and six year old sons were home with me at the time. We read through the story with them enraptured the entire time (not something that usually happens with these boys!). When we were finished, they asked to read it again. Then again.

Later that night, my eight year old son began having night terrors. I told him about the app and asked if he would like to try reading through it with me. As we read through the story, he began to calm down. By the end of the story, he was calm enough to utter a few sounds, but still could not even speak. I began reading the Bible verses to him from the last screen. I asked him if he wanted to read them with me, but he was still too scared to talk. As I read the verses over and over, he began mumbling the words along with me until he was finally calm enough to read them aloud.

He picked his favorite of the four verses and repeated it to himself over and over until he was able to go to sleep. I am so grateful for this app, and for God leading me to find it on the exact night we would need it.

Whether you are looking for a great bedtime story, an app that your pre-readers can interact with, or something to help your children with their fears, this is a great choice.

But then I think back over the past year, and I recall the journey. Selah‘s “The Broken Road” leaps into my mind. How has time changed so much from last year to this? How has everything changed? Nothing that was then seems to be now. Our odyssey has continued, but my words disappeared.

For a wordy Southern girl who was dubbed as being able to “talk the horns off a billy-goat” at the mere age of two by her babysitter Mrs. Dalrymple, this girl was completely silenced by the hand of God. I had planned to talk about it on my professional blog, but the words would never come. I have been brought to the place where I have learned that there is a sacred space between work and home, private and public. And I have learned that they overlap in ways that I had tried to separate. Perhaps some issues with my children are more public than I want them to be, and some issues with myself should really be more private.

In the space of eighteen months, I have traveled the road of Psalm 46:10. I have learned to be still. But even more, I have learned to know God. Not just that He is, but truly who He is. Yes, some of us take a little longer than others for things to sink in. I fully admit that I have always been a late bloomer, but I also know that a late bloomer is better than a vine with no blooms at all.

During this time, I had not been commanded to be quiet, yet I had not been able to find any words to speak. My well had gone completely dry. I sat. I listened. I felt a bit like Elijah during the drought after his creek went dry. There was simply nothing there. I knew that He had told me to write, but He gave me no topics, no words. I knew He had appeared, but the words had vanished. Fear surrounded me. Doubt plagued me. How could I be a writer when there were no words, no message, no audience.

I learned that I had an audience of One. He was the One I needed to talk to. He was the One I needed to fall in love with. His voice was the One I needed to hear. Not the voice of strangers who clicked a “like” button on my page, but only Him.

As recently as five days ago, I had nothing to say. I sat with a friend talking about God’s calling on my life, and we both questioned what He wanted me to say. I still felt I had nothing to offer. It was all about me and what I understood. I sat down daily and tried to write. I searched for words. I found emptiness. I felt God tell me that I would begin writing today, and I was terrified. How would I suddenly be able to write when the well had been dry for months.

But this past weekend, I was refueled. God led me to a mountaintop and put my feet on holy ground. He surrounded me with His presence, and then He sent me home.

And He sent me with words.

The words that had eluded me for months consumed me. The thoughts I needed to communicate flew through my fingers more quickly than my eyes could keep up. I soon found myself typing with my eyes closed, reflecting back to when my mother had taught me to type more than 25 years ago. Not looking for hints, not reviewing my errors. Just finding my rhythm and going. Not worrying about mistakes, errors or word counts. Just going with the flow, hearing the click of the keys and sending words out faster than my mind imagined possible.

Today the words have not stopped. I have written for hours, and still the words flow. I have saved many of my thoughts for other days, but still the words continue from my heart.

How can I share all that God has blessed me with?

How I can I be the woman who He created me to be?

Can I be an example to others who have experienced what I have, and can I safeguard others from going where I have gone?

I do not have the answers, but He does. As He leads, I will write. As He stops, I will stop. I do not have a platform, a genre, a following. But I have an audience, an audience of One, and I have the life that He has given to me. I will let my Captain pilot this journey, and I will sit in the copilot’s chair. Learning from Him, putting my hands on the controls as He leads me to, but knowing that I cannot take the controls away from Him. As long as I do this, my odyssey will be one of a lifetime and I will be filled beyond measure.

Like A Warm Cup of Coffee » Blog Archive » Flirty Aprons GIVEAWAY! So feminine!.

Lately, I’ve felt called to be more open about myself and my world. I’ve struggled with it greatly. I find that the people I admire the most are the ones who are willing to just put it all out there, admit that they are a mess, and be real about it. But I cannot seem to let myself do that. Today I’m going to try to take some baby steps toward being a little more open.

Step #1: Talk about what is going on with my boys.

And herein lies the reason why I haven’t posted. Late in the summer, we got confirmation of what I have suspected for some time. All three boys have some significant learning and developmental concerns. Last spring, a friend of mine recommended that I take the boys to see a doctor that she had been using with her son with great results. Since mid-summer, we have been going through a battery of tests on each one of the boys. In a way, it was more overwhelming for me than it was for them. I’ve seen the big picture of what these delays can mean; but to them, it’s just a chance to get more one-on-one playtime with an adult. I’ve worked hard to make sure that they feel this way about it. I don’t want them to feel as if they are any different from anyone else, or that they have issues that might give them an excuse not to try things that are difficult.

But when I face the difficulty of posting about it, I suddenly shut down. The mother in me wants to protect them for as long as I can. I don’t want to talk about the problems that they are facing and have anyone else judge them. But I realize that this is not going to make this issues go away, and it definitely is not going to get me any support in facing it. Still I find myself at a loss for words when I try to sit down and actually discuss it. I read blogs by my friends Trista at All About Austin or Ladonna at Brain Trains, and I wonder how they get through. Our issues are so much smaller, but yet I just can’t put myself out there.

So today, I took a moment to read their latest posts again, and it gave me a little strength to go on. Gio has been struggling with severe (way off the charts!) ADHD for some time now. Over the past three years, we have tried diet modifications with some success, but it was still not enough. Since mid-summer, he has been on four different drugs for ADHD. This was something that I said I would never do, but when he finally came up to me and asked if he could please have some medicine like his friend (son of the mom who referred us), I couldn’t tell him no. Each time, we think we have some success, then after a couple of months, we cannot see much difference. He is also really struggling with ODD (oppositional defiance disorder) and SPD (Sensory Perception Dysfunction).

Even as I write these terms, my heart breaks. I have always been so adamant that I did not want labels to define my children. They are the special beings that God created and He knew exactly what they would be. At the same time, I cannot ignore or dismiss that for some special beings, more attention and care is needed.

It is a little like plants, isn’t it. There are some things that grow with very little care or attention like the daffodils that I love. They are common and average. You put them in the ground and they just do their thing. They are there for a while, and then they come back the next year, never needing much attention and always doing exactly what you expect of them. Then there are plants like roses. Yes, you put them in the ground, and they grow, but they need a lot of attention to become the beautiful plants that they need to be. They are constantly needing pruning so that they do not go out of line, and you must wear gloves to protect from the thorns that they protect themselves with. So, I guess that perhaps my little darlings are a rose garden in it’s early stages.

Anyways, I digress. Gio is finally settling into his medication for ADHD and will be starting to see a play therapist at the end of the month. We are praying that together, we will be able to help him work through his frustrations and manage to keep a few of his “thorns” at bay.

At the same time that Gio was going through this testing, we had started to get help for Jacob. I had been concerned about his speech for a while. At 2 1/2, he still only had about 10 words, and most of them were unintelligible. Last spring, we started a new phonics program with Gio. This was when I really saw Jake bloom. The phonics program required use of a mirror to see how words were formed. As Jake saw us doing this, he suddenly started trying it too. In a matter of weeks, his vocabulary jumped to almost 50 words. When we had him tested, we found out that he had some significant patterning issues, but even more surprising was that he was over 13 months delayed developmentally. I had not even realized that there was anything else going on with him. He has been through several months of both speech and occupational therapy now. His speech is significantly more understandable, even by people outside of our immediate family. Since he turned three last month, his therapy has temporarily stopped. Services were rolled over to the school system who does not believe that his delays will cause him problems in school any longer, so we are having to transition to a different path for him. I still do not know what that path is going to be.

And then there is darling DJ, my little enigma. His testing has definitely come last and with the biggest surprises. He is so friendly and outgoing that no one besides me even considered that he had any issues. I’ve struggled since he was less than a year old to get doctors to see that something was wrong. It started with his Celiac disease. After the third doctor, they finally agreed to test him, only to find out that his sensitivity was so severe that he should never touch gluten again. Not that this goes over well in a family of Italian descent. We stilll struggle on a daily basis to find something that he will eat. But this fall gave us some of the answers as to why. Along wth the celiac disease, DJ also has severe SPD. It reflected itself so differently from Gio’s that I didn’t recogniz it as the same disorder. They are on completely opposite sides of the spectrum, yet treatment is amazingly similar. Whereas Gio has no sensory input and is constantly seeking it, DJ has so much that it overwhelms him. Even something as simple as an egg cooked incorrectly sends him into complete overload. After two months of evaluations, we finally have a plan in place to help him at least a little bit. Yesterday, he finished his first therapy session. We are also having to do intense at home therapy which I struggle with. I know the therapy will be great for him, but I just keep forgetting to work it into the schedule. Each day gets a little better.

Step #2: Know when to take a break

This is a huge step for me. I don’t slow down for anything until I crash. I’m discovering that while I knew this was a bad thing while driving, that perhaps it’s not such a great thing in life either. We’re slowing down and taking it a little easier this next year. We are going to focus on simplicity and just doing one thing at a time. And so with that, I am going to take a break as well.

What I have avoided mentioning to this point, is that we finally had all three boys evaluated this summer. I’ve really struggled with this for a long time. I have gotten so many conflicting opinions from different people who interact with the boys that I just wasn’t sure what to do. Finally, Greg & I decided that it would not do any harm to have them evaluated. If there was no problem, then we were just being cautious, but if there was truly an issue, then it was time to address it.

That decision was one of the best ones that we have made as parents. Gio’s evaluation was first. He was immediately diagnosed with off-the-charts ADHD with some other underlying issues possible as well. Dr. B started him on a very low dose (low enough that the pharmacy didn’t even carry it) of Vyvanse, and we could see a marked difference. From day one, he no longer jumped all over the furniture, bounding from one piece to another, or had a need to be at full speed all the time. He could finally enjoy activities that required sitting, and could concentrate when other people are in the room. We are still having some incredible issues with defiance that we are having to work on, but this is one step in the right direction.

DJ also came back with a potential diagnosis of ADHD with other learning issues involved. We have been struggling to get an appointment for him with the right people at the moment because so many of them are focusing on incoming kindergarteners in public schools. Jacob’s evaluators have given us additional resources to check into for DJ. A lot of terms are being thrown around at the moment, but I’m hesitant to even write them or speak them out loud even though I’ve heard them in reference to him most of his life. We will continue to see what happens with this.

Jacob was the biggest surprise for me. I knew that he had some speech issues, but everything else seemed perfectly normal to me. He is very social, loves to take care of things, and is incredibly independent. After the first evaluators came in, we had a second group of evaluators come in to look at him again. The first reports came back that he was borderline to delayed in almost every area of development except for speech. This was shocking on so many levels, especially that they thought his speech was fine, but I pressed them a little more and they agreed to go ahead and have a speech therapist evaluate him anyway.

The consensus so far is that he is delayed both physically and verbally by a little over a year. The second evaluator told me that based on just reading the reports, she was prepared to give a diagnosis of autism, but after interacting with him, she believes that his social skills are too good for that diagnosis.  He does have several significant issues that are not only delays, but atypical brain development which we are now working on.

He has started receiving an hour each of speech and occupational therapy every week. We will continue on this path at least until November when he turns three. At that point, he will transition into the preschool development program. He will still be able to have all of his therapy at home and not attend a school setting at this point, but his care will be taken over by the school system instead of the state.

A part of me is relieved that finally someone else is recognizing what I have been seeing all along, but there are parts of me that still feel like I did not advocate for them as much as I could have earlier on. The one continuing encouragement has been that each of the evaluators has been very pleased with our decision to homeschool. They have told me that this one-on-one attention will be one of the best things that I can do for their increased development. Please be praying with us as we continue pursuing their care paths.

Each day that I would walk into my pantry and see my apron hanging there, it would taunt me. The dark black with pretty green writing. It’s even a fun, whimsical apron from my 36th birthday cooking party (did I really just put it out there for the world to see that I’m really ever so much older than 30?) from my dear friend Whitney when she was running “Cooking in Heels” long before her precious little ones came along. No, it looks nothing like the one that I found on the right, but they are much more along the lines of what I imagine a housewife would wear.

Finally, I gave in to the pressure and put it on, just for a trial run. Maybe at least I could save one shirt from the laundry. As soon as I put it on, Monkey was in my face telling me how beautiful I looked. Now, where did he get the idea that a woman in an apron was beautiful? Perhaps from the same place that when he saw my wedding dress he proudly proclaimed that he had found this great cow costume! Anyway, I digress.

On that first day, I accomplished more than I had in a while. Certainly, it wasn’t the apron. But, perhaps…. Just to be certain, I put it on again today. Sure enough, I believe there is some kind of magic fairy dust in aprons. As soon as I put it on, I become more domestic. Now, don’t think that I’m telling every woman out there who isn’t domestic that an apron will magically solve the problem, but you might give it a try. Here’s how it worked for me.

Typical day without an apron: get ready, eat microwave breakfast,  pick up a couple of toys, check e-mail, get distracted, play on Facebook, remember that I was supposed to do laundry, head upstairs to start the laundry and get distracted by a toy on the floor that needs to be put away, go to put it away, see that the kids have been snacking, start to clean up the mess, remember that I need to check something on my calendar, go downstairs to check e-mail, repeat cycle throughout the day.

Today: get ready, make bed, start to make breakfast and decide to put apron on first. Decide that while I have apron on, I could make a better breakfast. Preheat oven and make French toast. While the oven is heating, clean up the rest of dishes that magically appeared since dinner cleanup last night along with all dishes from making breakfast. Think that some homemade bread sounds nice. Pull out ingredients for bread while toast is baking. Start prepping bread. Sit down for a hot breakfast with the boys. Clean up dishes together, then send them to clean up their playroom. Start a load of laundry. Return to breadmaking. Whip out the first loaf and set it up to proof while I make the second loaf. Clean up all the mess from both loaves while bread is proofing. Put bread in oven. Make lunch. Put baby down for nap. Cool bread and make a snack for older boys. Clean up kitchen. Take off apron. Sit down in front of computer, forget to do anything else for the rest of the afternoon.

So, is it the apron or the mind? I’m not convinced, but I’m thinking I might have to whip up one more apron just to be sure. Perhaps if I could just get one like this that I found on Flickr.

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.

He maketh me to live on less sleep:
He leadeth me through the noise of many voices.

He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me to teach
The right lessons each day, for His name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of undone
Laundry and kitchen messes, I will fear no evil:
For thou art with me, my teacher’s guides and
Answer keys, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence
Of threatening school officials and critical family members:
Thou anointest my head with heavenly wisdom, my cup runneth over.

Surely educated and godly children shall follow after me
All the days of my life: and I will dwell again one day
In a clean house with the Lord forevermore.

Homeschool Blog: Daily Focus – The Homeschooler’s 23rd Psalm – Alpha Omega Publications.

25 Things Mother TAUGHT me…

1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE .
‘If you’re going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning.’

2. My mother taught me RELIGION .
‘You better pray that this will come out of the carpet.’

3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL .
‘If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!’

4. My mother taught me LOGIC .
‘ Because I said so, that’s why.’

5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC .
‘If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you’re not going to the store with me.’

6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT .
‘Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you’re in an accident.’

7. My mother taught me IRONY
‘Keep crying, and I’ll give you something to cry about.’

8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS .
‘Shut your mouth and eat your supper.’

9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM .
‘Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!’

10. My mother taught me about STAMINA .
‘You’ll sit there until all that spinach is gone.’

11. My mother taught me about WEATHER .
‘This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.’

12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY .
‘If I told you once, I’ve told you a million times. Don’t exaggerate!’

13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE .
‘I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.’

14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION .
‘Stop acting like your father!’

15. My mother taught me about ENVY .
‘There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don’t have wonderful parents like you do.’

16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION .
‘Just wait until we get home.’

17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING .
‘You are going to get it when you get home!’

18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE .
‘If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way.’

19. My mother taught me ESP .
‘Put your sweater on; don’t you think I know when you are cold?’

20. My mother taught me HUMOR .
‘When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.’

21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT .
‘If you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up…’

22. My mother taught me GENETICS.
‘You’re just like your father.’

23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS .
‘Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?’

24. My mother taught me WISDOM .
‘When you get to be my age, you’ll understand.’

25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE
‘One day you’ll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you.