just a few things floating around in my head

At church today our pastor talked about a "faith at home" initiative {as a sidenote to the sermon, and a sort of way to kick off the new year at home}. Basically it's the importance of being a spiritual leader at home with your children and how statistics show that parents are overwhelmingly the most influential agent in a child's spiritual life. After church we went to Chilis for lunch and Patrick and I were talking about one of the ideas printed in the bulletin, "fishbowl prayers". You fill a bowl with prayer requests and have each child pick one each night. The idea is that you can pray for many different people or ministries without having a prayer time that is too long winded for younger children. Ok, so we're at Chilis and I ask Henry what he thinks would be some good prayer requests to put into our fishbowl. He answered something like our country and the American flag. {Sometime in the past week we had a discussion about freedom being spurred on by his asking me about our flag.} I said I thought that would be a great idea, that we could pray for our President, too. He said, "Yeah, Barack Obama". Right away we asked William what the name of our President was to which he replied, "Barack O-Mommy". Everytime we ask him the name of the President he answers this now. He definitely heard "Barack Omama" or something like that when Henry said it. hahaha; all silliness and misunderstanding aside, I think the fishbowl prayer requests are a great idea and we're going to try that in 2010. We're also going to do fishbowl Bible verses. I don't know whether this will actually happen in a fishbowl, but the idea will be the same.

Another thing I cannot get out of my head is this:


Both glorious pictures are from Bakerella's blog.
I read her "Candyland" post last night just before I went to bed and I could barely sleep, the pictures just kept me up. So amazing, so seriously amazing! You have got to see it. This stuff is in someone's house! Follow the link and once you see those pictures please tell me, can you even imagine? Seriously, can you even imagine that house? Unreal. I thought I was happy with our Christmas decor this year. ha! It's simply amazing and divine and inspiring and also makes me feel completely inadequate for decorating or throwing a party ever again. A quick confession: I once thought of throwing Henry a Candyland themed birthday party. It was going to be for his 3rd birthday. Then I changed my mind and we did circus instead. If it had been Candyland and then I saw this lady's house I would have been terribly embarrassed. His party would have looked nothing like it. Now, even though I still like the theme, I can never, ever possibly think of doing that theme again. And how could I?

One last thing and then it's off to wake the boys, so that they will sleep tonight. I just finished watching Julie&Julia and I love it! I absolutely loved learning about Julia Child and having a small glimpse into her life. What a sweet woman. And her relationship with her husband was just too sweet. I also love Julie's quest to cook through Julia's cookbook and her determination to do it. I feel inspired now. But I don't know what my quest could be. I don't think I could "de-bone" a duck. I'm leery of raw chickens and that's just throwing them on a pan. I don't know what my quest would be, but I think it would be fun to have one. Oh well, bon appetite!