Do you ever make pretend comments? My husband and I have a shorthand saying for when we feel that the other person isn’t truly listening to us. One person will be telling a story — maybe something that happened with the kids or at work — and the other person has their mind elsewhere and […]
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It was fun, at first. Hundreds of pictures are stacked in piles and lined up in chronological order: the highlights of 2018 spread before me. My gold striped picture album lay open, and the coordinating scrapbook paper is standing at the ready. I’d missed papercrafting and so I dove right in, arranging pictures, writing a […]
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It’s the fresh start of a new school year. Last week, we caught a whiff of new beginnings as we milled about the school for Meet the Teacher night. It smelled of fresh paint, rubber blacktop, and dry erase markers. The nervous excitement among the Kindergarten parents was mirrored back to us by the Kindergarten […]
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After two months in Michigan, we are back in San Diego. When a friend asked me if I was excited to come home, I told her that I was looking forward to being settled in. Settled means feeling comfortable and established. It’s what I want to feel immediately after coming home from a trip. But […]
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Before I became a mother, if someone would have told me that having a baby changes the way you relate to God, I would have scoffed. I’ve always been a creature of habit, and I still envisioned that my quiet time would stay unchanged after my baby was born. I could not foresee the sleepless […]
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I left my beloved boarding school in Germany and my parents’ home on the field in France when I turned eighteen. I was headed to college in a new state in my passport country: Michigan. I was a little excited, but mostly terrified. I grieved my high school graduation like it was a death: never […]
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Many years ago, I had a summer job as a night nanny for newborn triplets. The parents hired me to help with night feedings so one of them could sleep! Two girls and a boy… these were this couple’s only children. I remember one morning, in the moments just as the sun was beginning to […]
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Now that summer is here, I have to do my grocery shopping with both of my boys instead of just one. Besides the obvious fact that it’s much easier to run errands the fewer children you have, I’ve learned something else from observing my kids. When I push the cart through the aisles and Henry, […]
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Living in southern California, I never thought I’d speak French again until one Sunday morning when our church pews were especially crowded and I found myself dusting off my second language like an old pair of boots. My parents moved our family from California to France for full time mission work when I was seven. […]
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I sit down in the early morning hours to get some work done, but I am interrupted by this nagging thought: our dog Barney doesn’t like to poop in the rain. I watch the sprinkles come down and worry that he didn’t do his business while he was outside. I write a sentence, then leave […]
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Sarah K. Butterfield 