Spring??

Y'all probably think I passed out and have yet to recover after my weekend alone ended in the return of my family. Nope, I live to tell the tales of domestic life but we travelled this past weekend for Easter (Happy Easter, He is Risen!) and I was pretty intensely busy getting ready for that. We're home from visiting my parents and it feels good to be back after enjoying a weekend with my family. It is so cold here though that it feels like spring is a long way off.

I'm not sure when it happened but this place, this life, has definitely become what I call home. In my early years of college and university, even the first few years we were married, I delighted in going back to my childhood home. The smells, the familiarity of the house I grew up in, the taste of my mother's cooking. Gradually it all changed and the familiar grew to be where WE live, where I cook, where my children are growing. In some ways that makes me sad as I realize that I just don't belong in my childhood anymore and that the responsibility for those memories now rests with me. I struggle "going home" now and there is a tension of how they do things vs. how our house now runs. It's all part of that "leave and cleave" stuff of marriage but it makes me feel just...so adult or something. At any rate, going away convinces me that I am a homebody and that this, for better or for worse, is most definitely where I belong.

In thinking of all of this, I want to share a layout that I finished up during my weekend "retreat" while my dh and children were away. This lovely couple is my grandparents. They live far away, in Illinois, and I don't see them very often now. My grandfather is such a strong personality and I'm more like him than I'd like to admit at times. Interaction with him has shaped me, mostly for good. He has a passion for the Word of God that he's passed on to me. He feels intensely and gives the most amazing hugs. He also experiences some lows that are lower than what some experience. I share all of these things.

More later.