Pilgrim Journeys: February 2008

Sometimes it seems hard for me to read the book of Job and know what to think of the different characters and what they say. But some things we learn for certain:

God is the sovereign controller of all things. He does as He pleases in Heaven and earth. We as creatures have no right to demand of God an explanation for His actions, and He might never disclose to us why He has put us through deep waters.

Circumstances cannot tell us if God loves us; we cannot read God's mind toward us by our circumstances. Job's friends read his circumstances to mean that Job had brought on his trials by sin (which was untrue); Job read his circumstances to mean that God was unjust (which was also untrue).

But we can always know who God is: that God is always wise, always just, always loving, no matter what the circumstances seem to say otherwise. We may not understand God's ways in this life. But He will always in the end be proven to be the unchanging, faithful God, who does all things well.

It's been awhile since a Kids Update. Discretionary time with both kids in bed and me not too tired seems in short supply. Where to start...

Katherine is now 3 years, 8 months old. She continues to be her fun personality. One day a couple months ago she saw a squirrel flicking its tail nervously, and David told her it was worrying about something, like a cat or dog nearby. So for awhile, she would "worry" - bounce up and down as if she were flicking her tail like a squirrel, and find something silly to "worry" about. It became another game with her and Daddy - "I'm worrying about... the birds! What are you worrying about, Daddy?"

She had been looking forward to Christmas time and having the tree up and lights on it (she loves Christmas lights!) since probably last Christmas. I had told her we wouldn't put up the tree until December. We were doing stuff with a calendar, so she ended up learning the months of the year, and we would say all the names of the months till December. Once it got close, she was almost counting down the days, so I made sure we got the tree up on Dec.1. Well, it's an artificial tree, so we at least got it out of the attic and assembled. Dec.1 being Saturday, the lights didn't go on till Monday the 3rd, and the ornaments the next day. But after the tree was up (before anything else was on the tree), Katherine took some decorating into her own hands:

Duplos make good ornaments, apparently

For probably 2 weeks after that, one of her favorite things to do was to rearrange the ornaments on the tree, which she called "shaping up ornaments." She has liked Christmas lights from the time she was old enough to notice them (2 Christmases ago, around 18 months old). She has always liked colors, and knew the names of her colors by that time, and would point out the "blu" lights and "yelo" and whatever other colors she saw.

It's amazing how quickly you forget things though. If I hadn't made notes to myself about the above, I would have forgotten about her "worrying" game. Anyway...

She is learning to read using a "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book, which I finally bought my own copy of. And we are slowly working our way through a math book. She loves to do both of those (whether for the sake of learning, or just having Mommy's somewhat undivided attention, or both, I'm not sure). But Mommy doesn't always get to those. We're doing well to get to it 2-3 times / week. But for now, doing anything is a good thing.

Bouncing with Daddy

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Emily. She's now 18 months old. She seems to be able to do physical things easily or intuitively (in contrast to her Mommy and her sister, who both find it not very intuitive). At 14 months old she could climb up on Katherine's single bed, and climb into her booster chair at the table. At 15 months she was stepping up steps (while holding onto something) rather than crawling up them, and at 16 months she was learning to step down as well.

She can feed herself with a spoon quite well now.

She has her stuffed puppy and her blanket which she wants to have when she sleeps, and other times as well. For awhile, though not recently, she wanted to always be wearing a jacket and shoes. Shoes would be one of the first things she asked for in the morning.

She is more interested in computer things than Katherine is - as in, the parts and the plugs and the buttons. Katherine liked those too, but Emily looks like one that might follow Daddy around in his computer work and put parts together.

She's also more of a "dolly" girl than Katherine is. She likes having a dolly to play with. She tries to make the dollhouse dollies sit in their chairs, so that the whole family is sitting on something. But she gets frustrated that she often can't make them sit in something without falling out (doesn't quite get the hang of bending the legs properly, etc. yet).

Playing peek-a-boo with her dolly, which she has covered with a blanket and then would peek under the blanket and say "peek-a-boo". Actually, she has been saying "peek-boo" for awhile, and just today it was coming out as "pee-bo-koo" which was cute.

Both of the girls enjoy Legos. Katherine can build things now. Emily tried to build occasionally, but can't quite line up the bumps right to make pieces stick together. Her favorite thing to do is to find Lego people and take them apart, and occasionally put them back together. Interestingly, like Katherine at that age, she doesn't want them to have hats or hair on their heads, or anything unusual on their bodies either (e.g. life jackets). So she comes for help to get things off of her Lego men's heads, or to get me to help her put one in a Lego horse for her. Maybe it's a dolly equivalent of Legos - instead of dressing and undressing dollies, she's rearranging Lego man body parts to have different shirts and pants together. Katherine still likes to do that too sometimes, though she mostly will build things instead.

Emily can communicate well now. I don't think she's quite as verbal as Katherine at that age, but not far behind. But she can say many words and make herself understood, or take you to what she wants.

She also seems to have a good short-term memory of where something is (in contrast to Katherine at that age). So if you ask her, "where's your dolly?" she will generally know exactly where she left it and go look for it.

Katherine, on the other hand, doesn't remember as well where she put (or dropped) something, but she has an extremely good memory for anything she hears, sees, or experiences. She loves music, and has learned bunches of songs. We've gotten a lot of "educational" (and Scripture) songs, and most of them have a good beat and tune. She likes to bounce on the Vitalizer to her music.

Bouncing vigorously to one of her songs

Katherine also has extremely good vision. I wouldn't be surprised if it's 20/20 or thereabouts. She can see clearly without glasses (with either eye, as best I can tell) what I can only see clearly with my glasses on. We haven't had her eyes checked yet, but I don't think she'll need glasses any time soon. Emily appears to have good vision too, though I'm not sure yet how good. Probably better than mine.