Attempting more Activities

The death trap is now opened. People are entitled to believe as they may, and my belief is that pools are not worth the stress and anxiety they create with young children. The constant worry of having a child drown...seeing it in my dreams...is not worth it. Another summer of constant anxiety is now here. Especially with an almost 2 year old with an uncanny knack for escaping. Pray for us...seriously.

With that said...I've been struggling with feeling like a looser mother lately. I've always had a hard time with the fact that mothering hasn't come naturally to me, like I think it should. It's hard for me. A lot of prayer and fasting has helped me become a better mother, but it's still hard. I am a firm believer that we don't start out being the people we need to be, but that the Lord makes us the people we need to be if we let him. That's why I don't believe we shouldn't do something because we think it's beyond our abilities. If it's the Lord's will, he will help us become capable. If it's not his will, great.

Anyways, I'm not creative and I'm not a decorator, so it's really hard for me to think of fun ideas for the girls and I to do together. Especially since they are getting older and I won't be putting M in pre-school while we live in NJ. Long story.... Last week we attempted to make pine cone bird feeders. It was fun. We went to the lake to collect pine cones and then took them home to smear them with peanut butter and all kinds of gross stuff (apparently birds like bacon fat! Yuck. And I literally ate all but 4 slices of that bacon I cooked. It was so good...but I felt so disgusting afterwords. I don't even want to count how many pieces I ate. The flesh definitely won in that battle.... After our bird feeders were made we hung them in the trees. The birds didn't like them...at least that's what I assume because they didn't touch them. After a few days I took them down and gave them to the dogs. They thought they were great. They were totally captivated with trying to lick all the peanut butter out of the pine cone. Whatever works!

Yesterday we took some beads from a necklace M got from her Aunt K (which she broke in about 30 seconds) and restrung them into 2 different necklaces. We didn't have enough to fully make 2 necklaces so we had to use the only beads I had to fill the rest of the necklace...neon yellow. Needless to say they didn't "go", but the girls had fun. I was amazed at how well they were both able to string beads.

This is the action sequence of me trying to get a picture of L's necklace. She wasn't interested...if you can't tell. She kept taking the necklace off and throwing it. I have to remain constantly upbeat and cheerful with L, otherwise she really crumbles and goes to peaces. That's a hard thing for me to do because I'm not naturally a perpetually happy person (not that I'm not happy...). Maybe that will change now!

Finally, I got the shot!