January Days

January felt extra long this year, as it was once again divided between the two worlds of Alabama and France.  I don't mind a month that seems extra long now and again, though.  They all fly by so quickly.

January 1 - A Cici's Birthday

January 2 - a frozen peppermint chai with two lovely ladies

January 3 - meeting the author of her favorite series

January 4 - a fortune cookie and lunch with a good friend

January 5 - dinner with these fun friends...and a droid

January 6 - Puzzle Day

January 7 - A Delicious Farewell Dinner

January 8 - Boston from the Air

January 9 - Unpacking the Christmas Presents

January 11 - Game Day

January 12 - After Church Hangout

January 13 - Robin in the Hedge

January 14 - Winter Walking

January 15 - Copper Pots and Red Awnings

January 16 - A Local Florist

January 17 - Cheerful Yellow House in the Sunshine

January 18 - Walking Home with a Still-Warm Baguette

January 19 - A Frozen Morning

January 20 - Got a Stomach Bug:  Not Pictured

January 21 - Foggy Dawn

January 22 - A Frozen, Clear Morning

January 23 - Tolkien affirming my love for time travel stories

January 24 - I love the skyline of our little town in the distance.

January 25 - Winter Walk in the Park

January 26 - Last week was very foggy.

January 27 - Noreen passed on some roses to us.

January 28 - Vegetables are delivered each morning and left outside this restaurant, and it's one of my favorite things.

January 29 - Stunning Saint-Sulpice

January 30 - Sunset after the Rain

January 31 - Farewell, January!

New Year's Goals, an End of January Reflection

At the beginning of a new year it's always fun to make new goals, and I feel like I came into 2020 being a little bit smarter about making goals for myself I could actually keep.  

Last year I set a goal for a number of books I'd like to read (slightly higher than my goal in 2018 to keep things interesting), and I picked a yearly Bible reading plan that would have me read the entire Bible in 2019.  For all the other things I thought I'd like to accomplish I had a long list. Two of these categories worked out well for me.

I met my reading goal because I love to read, and I made it a priority to read for the first 30 minutes I was awake every day.  Regardless of how much reading time happened during the rest of the day I could count on that morning time.  

I read through the Bible last year, and I'm so glad I stuck to the plan!  I didn't read through the New Testament twice as this plan suggested, though, because once I'd done it once, I liked only having two chapters to read each day instead of four.  It made it so much easier to make up previous day's reading when I inevitably missed a day.  

As for the long list of things I'd like to do?  I did 1 1/2 to 2 of them?  I basically made a list and looked at it in June and December and forgot about it the rest of the time. 

I decided to make 2020 the year of the Deep Dive.  For my Bible reading and study I plan to pick a book each month to really focus in on, 20/20 vision and all that (my daughter informs me this joke is overdone).  For the month of January I followed this plan for reading the book of Luke that included videos from The Bible Project.  It's my first time watching these videos, and they are good summaries and super-engaging to watch.  

I set a numerical book goal again, but continuing the theme of the Deep Dive, I decided to pick a theme for my reading each month.  January's theme has been books in the Fantasy genre.  I've loved having a reading theme!  It gives me focus, but there's a lot of variety within that focus.  I've been able to read a poem dating from the late 1300s, the writing of George MacDonald in the 1800s, all the way up to 21st century novels written by an author we met last month.  Right now I think February's theme is going to be France, which can include novels, history, and biographies.  I'm excited.

As far as other goals go, I'm trying to take Laura Vanderkam's advice and make quarterly goals.  Picking just a few things for three months at a time will hopefully give me a lot more success.  I'm also making more measurable goals.  For example, instead of a vague 2020 goal of "lose extra weight," I made a first quarter goal of completing the Couch to 5K running plan.  I've also been working through a Calligraphy workbook and in the spirit of taking advantage of living in France, walking to la boulangerie for evening baguettes more often.

So far, the year of the Deep Dive is really working for me.  To me, so many things sound interesting and worth pursuing, so it's really helping me to have a sharper focus and actually do the things I want to do.

What about you?  Did you make any New Year's Resolutions/plans/goals for 2020?  How are they going?  

A Sunday Walk in Luxembourg Gardens

All of our work and school is very much intertwined with home life, so there's not always a differentiation between the two.  I love this about our life.  It gives me what I call in my head "the Little House on the Prairie" feeling.  From my youngest days the Ingalls' family home life resonated with me as something so wholesome and good.  They worked hard together, the played together, they rested together; they had a life that really was very whole, wholly centered in one place.  And though they often shared heartache, too, they were in it together.  

As much as I love our intertwined life it doesn't always give me the feeling of the weekend.  Weekends didn't exist back in the good old days (as the Dowager Duchess of Grantham could tell us), but as much as I love the old days I'm also a child of the modern age, and I've been trying to plan at least one thing that makes the weekend feel invigorating and refreshing, a taste of the freedom of being off work and school.  

via GIPHY

So far this year that has looked like meals with friends.  This weekend K.J. had Saturday meetings, so I was hoping to go into the city a little while before church on Sunday and do something not too difficult or time consuming. 

The perfect idea appeared in my mind Sunday morning, and while the idea was a good one, Sunday morning is not the ideal time to present a new plan for the day to my preacher husband whose plans always mature over time, while mine come to me as a sudden spark of inspiration I need to act on immediately:  Let's take a walk in Luxembourg Gardens!  It's a part of the city we don't visit often, it's free, it's exercise, it's perfect!  And as an aside, isn't it where Jean Valjean walked every Sunday morning with Cosette?  A literary reference makes any outing better.

la fontaine de Médicis

Parking in Paris is easier on Sundays because it is free, though it's still not easy to find a spot.  I thought this would be K.J.'s biggest hurdle to get over, but instead it was the memories of the last time he took the kids to le jardin du Luxembourg on a hot April day after a crowded, sweaty bus ride.  The complaints of the children still lingered in his ears, but we made it work, and after we'd enjoyed a nice walk, Ella remarked, "That was a lot better in January."  Win.

It's unusual to see fountains running in the winter, but I noticed several flowing yesterday.  It is still one of our favorite things to hear K.J. tell us what the statues are saying or thinking as we pass by them.  

We walked through the park and up to the Panthéon because the ceiling of the porch is so beautiful and intricate, and you can see the tip of the Eiffel Tower as you look down the street.  I knew we wouldn't be able to see much yesterday because it was so foggy, but Ella and I like when the tops of the buildings are concealed in fog; it gives a great air of mystery.

I like how people aren't in a hurry to take down the

Christmas decorations here.

Can you spot the middle of the Eiffel Tower between the Christmas trees?

I'm really glad we made this weekend outing work.

Fountains Abbey Snow Day

Five years ago today my family experienced one of our favorite days in England.  We'd only lived there 2 1/2 months, it was a homeschool day, and it snowed.

I love the snowy Black Bull.

The snow fell fast and furious for a while, but then it stopped, and there didn't seem to be enough on the ground for a satisfactory play in our garden.  I'm sure it was at my husband's suggestion that we got in the car and drove the 10 1/2 miles to Fountain's Abbey.  It was the right choice, because at a slightly higher elevation, the snow was still falling, there was more snow on the ground, and it was so beautiful.

St. Mary's Church, Studley Royal

The good folks of the National Trust had buckets of snowman-building supplies inside the shop.  We grabbed a scarf and hat, a carrot, and bits of coal and started off down the path.  Our walk to the abbey was soon distracted by a field full of sheep, though.

James cannot resist running through a flock of pigeons or seagulls, and we learned on this day that he also cannot resist running through a flock of sheep.

But let's carry on, shall we?

For a little while, we were the only people around, wrapped in the hush of newly-fallen snow.  K.J. and the kids built a snow lady while I took pictures of the River Skell.

Violet, the Snow Lady

While the kids put finishing touches on Violet, we heard a woman begin to sing in the abbey, taking advantage of the acoustics and the quiet.  The snow began falling fast again.

I had moved my camera to shelter inside the abbey, and the kids were playing on the stone walls when we all heard the happy chatter and laughter of a group of young women coming our way.  We thought they were speaking Chinese.  They spotted Violet and headed straight for her, cameras at the ready.

They wrapped their arms around our snow creation and took selfies that ended in screeches of laughter as all the close contact brought Violet's head tumbling to the ground.  Thus her life was short-lived but brought great joy.  And thus ended a happy outing indeed.

A Tale of Two Mothers

My daughter Ella finished reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time last week, so Sunday night we decided this milestone called for a celebration:  we would show her the first episode of the BBC mini series starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.  

I didn't read P and P until I was 22.  I was so delighted with it that I read it aloud to K.J. on the seven hour road trip between Kentucky and Alabama our first married Thanksgiving.  I was so pleased to be married to him because he laughed in all the right places.  He bought me the DVDs for Christmas, and we spent many years quoting it, but we hadn't watched it together in over five years, so it was so fun to re-visit it and to do it with our newly teenage-d daughter.  

The opening scenes of the Bennet home are filled with the high-pitched voices of Kitty and Lydia arguing over who should wear Kitty's bonnet to church.  Lydia argues that Kitty "is too plain to look well in it."  Mrs. Bennet's strident tones join the chorus as she frequently bemoans, "What is to become of us all?"  Mr. Bennet declares his daughters to be "some of the silliest in all of England."  

When we finished the episode we decided I'd read the beginning of Little Women aloud to E before bed.  She wanted to read it before seeing the new movie, and we've found that sometimes it helps the kids to get into a classic if I start them off with it.  It helps them get the rhythm of older language.  It's also been years since I read Little Women, and after reading the first two chapters aloud I was so struck by the differences between the March and Bennet households.  Both have a household of girls on a journey to find their place in the world, but what a difference between the peace of a household run by Marmee compared to that of Longbourn.  I don't want to judge Mrs. Bennet too harshly, but in one household the only exhortation is to marry someone with money, and in another the emphasis is on becoming women who learn to put to death their selfish desires to become their best selves, to love and serve the people around them. 

Though the time periods and countries are different, there's not a huge difference in what these two groups of sisters can do in life.  They can marry or become a governess.  There's not a lot of choice for their outward life circumstances, but there's all the choice in the world for their minds and hearts, and I love that Marmee focuses on that.

E has been having an inspired week of drawing, and can't you just immediately tell this is Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy?

My 2019 Stand-Out Books

I thought I'd share one more post of books that stand out from my 2019 reading.

A Gentleman in Moscow is such a perfectly well-done book.  I love Towles' writing, and I loved the story.  It was a purely pleasant reading experience and made me want to read more stories set in Russia.

I, Claudius required a lot of concentration from me and wasn't an "I can't wait to pick this up and read it" experience, but I learned SO much about the Roman emperors from it, and I found myself missing the characters when I finished.

Belonging was unique reading because the book is designed as a scrapbook of sorts as a German woman looks back through her family history and deals with the past of her own family and how they interacted with Nazi Germany.  I really appreciated her sharing her story because I've often wondered about how those things are processed and talked about in Germany.

The Awakening of Miss Prim is a modern book written by a Spanish journalist, originally published in Spanish.  It took me by surprise with its fresh perspective and counter-cultural arguments about motherhood and homeschooling in particular.  

The Thirteenth Tale was a deeply immersive page-turner for me.  I was completely caught up in the story and read a lot of it on a bus ride across Paris on Mother's Day.  Do I remember a lot of the details now?  No.  But it's a family history/mystery that involves an old English house.

The Martian was also captivating to me.  It was the first book I've ever read that made me want to be better at math besides The Swiss Family Robinson.   You never know when it could save your life!  I also loved reading at the end of the book about the man who wrote it, just a super-smart space enthusiast and fellow lover of Doctor Who.

One of Our Thursdays is Missing is in the middle of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series.  This series combines time travel, travel into books, literary word play, and alternate universes and is all wackily perfect for me because I love all those things.

Rebecca is a haunting modern English classic I'm glad I finally read.  Mrs. Danvers actually shows up in the Thursday Next novels.

May your 2020 be filled with the kind of books you miss your train stop reading.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year to all, and happy birthday to K.J.  I'm so glad he's my partner in life.

We had a great afternoon and night out on the last day of the year going to our first escape room, eating dinner at Chick-fil-A, and seeing Star Wars.  2019 was a really wonderful year for us.  I used the One Second Everyday app most days of the year, and it was so fun to put all the months together this morning and watch our year go by in little blips of extraordinary and ordinary moments.

We had snow days in January.

In February, I attended a Thrive Retreat in Italy for women working overseas with friends.

In March we visited Normandy and Brittany, and I photographed a wedding in the Netherlands.

There were cherry blossoms in April as well as a visit from my parents.

I had an amazing Mother's Day outing in May and hosted our literary society on V-E Day at our house.

In June we had cherries and a fox that visited several times to eat the ones that fell to the ground.  

The kids had so much fun with cousins in July, and we spent our first 4th of July in the U.S. in five years.  We watched the jets fly over Paris on Bastille Day, K.J. biked through Switzerland, and we all survived a record-breaking heatwave.

August brought new friends to Paris to serve alongside us at EIC Ternes.  The kids started back to school, and we enjoyed the quieter days of summer in Paris.  We ate a lot of dinners in the garden with Noreen.

In September our firstborn became a teenager, and we took a family vacation across the channel when all the rates went down, a big advantage to homeschooling.  I got the flu, and we started a regular Sunday School for the kids at church.

October began with celebrating a decade of James, and we attended the International Baptist Convention in Naples, which we were able to combine with visiting fellow church-planters in Rome.  We made it back in time to enjoy beautiful autumn colors around Paris.

November was often gray, but there were beautifully-colored leaves, Remembrance Day celebrations that took us to the British Embassy, and Thanksgiving meals with church family and friends.

And of course December has been a month for time with family and celebrating the birth of Christ.  A friend asked me last night what the highlights of time in Alabama have been, and the answers were surprisingly simple:  family, Target, Chick-fil-A, speaking English.  

I love looking back, but I'm also excited about the year ahead.