Easter

I am relieved that Lent and Holy Week and Easter are over.  I hope that over time the grief I feel throughout the season will ease.  This year felt different from last year but just as hard.  I didn't cry as much. but I also distracted myself more, and, having moved across the country, there were not as many direct reminders of our last season with Oliver.  I was so very thankful for everyone who prayed for us and checked in on me throughout the last weeks.  Even if I didn't reply to you, thank you for remembering us and Oliver.

Like happened last year, on the day before Easter, I came across an idea in my reading that helped me through the day.  In Kierkegaard's Works of Love, he posits that "Christian consolation... is the consolation of the eternal, it is older than all temporal joy.  As soon as consolation comes, it comes with the head-start of the eternal and swallows up, as it were, pain, for pain and the loss of joy are momentary-- even if the moment were a year- and the momentary is drowned in the eternal.  Neither is Christian consolation a substitute compensation for lost joy, since it is joy itself."

It gave me the feeling and image of a great gush of joy flowing over a hard cliff of pain.  The image is comforting to me- the pain is not ignored, but both validated and put it its place by its juxtaposition against the powerful ever-flowing rush of God's promise of eternity.  Comfort in eternal joy continuously covers, drowns, and erodes the pain.  As eternal joy comes from God, it is older than any temporal joy or pain and will outlast any temporal joy or pain.  It is of such a different character that, unlike other temporal joys we may seek to replace joys that we have lost, it actually has the power to console.  Beatrice is a delightful source of joy for us (except when she keeps us up at night or bites me while nursing), but she does not replace my longing for my son, nor would another son fulfill that longing either.  She is a very sweet child and has brought us comfort and many smiles when we needed it, but the consolation she offers is limited and the bite of Oliver's death is still sharp.  But to think of God's love and joy pursuing us from before and after from the depths of eternity gives direction to my longing.  Not just for my son, but for my son whole and healed, for my son in eternal joy and perfection, for eternal joy itself, from which my desire for perfection and peace originate.  

And there is joy in this too: that this longing is not in vain, because the eternal has been given to us, in spite of our unworthiness.  Not only given to us, but given to us with a desire that we might accept it, like a banquet invitation from our dearest friend, because we are loved.   

My Easters will be always filled with mixed emotion and painful memories, but hopefully too a that deep consolation that only eternal joy can provide.  

Easter Party

We were invited to an Easter Party on Sunday afternoon in the neighborhood across the street from us.  Joel and I were wiped out after church, but we decided to go and I'm so glad we did.  It was at a very nice, big home up a hill, and the party was right out of Better Homes and Gardens or Southern Living.  They hid 1000 eggs, all with candy inside, and had crafts, live chicks (thankfully not purchased just for the event - they raise and keep chickens for eggs), color coordinated treats and decorations, games, etc. etc.  It was such a blessing for us to get to do something fun, silly, and happy for Easter since the morning was hard for us.

Unfortunately, my camera is breaking!  Arrgh!  It randomly gives me an error message when I'm shooting, or won't focus, so I'm missing a handful of shots I would have liked, but here's what I got, including some great action shots from the gunnysack-bunny race.

Elsa actually WON!!!  (She got a glow in the dark LED ring as a prize.)

Baby chicks!

And they also happened to have kittens too!  It was a perfect party for our big girls.

Tulips and spring rain

I think I like tulips best when they are starting to fade.

I like how their bright colors deepen and turn to jewel tones and how their petals curl.

Clover Yard

Visitor on our back door

Spring in my little yard

Our apartment actually looks quite pretty right now - the trees are in full bloom and the bulbs I planted in the fall all came up!  They are just a few pockets of color, but it's something, and it helps me feel like this place is my own for this time.

The irises are from Medford, and one little grape hyacinth hitched a ride along with them!  

There hardly any grass in our little yard, but the clover is happily growing in

Tabitha was kind enough to pose for me, but was quickly distracted...

by Beatrice, who had discovered the tear in the screen door!

Chemistry Class

Science is one of our favorite subjects.  I am so incredibly glad that Elsa and Nora are finding it as interesting as I do!  We've focused this semester on chemistry, to follow along with our Classical Conversations (CC) memory work for this term.  We do a lot of experiments on our own, and get together every few weeks with another family to do some together.  I was honored to get to help teach the weekly science lesson and experiment at our CC group too, and it became a huge blessing to me to get to do something outside our house and to share something I love with the rest of our group.  

Here are a few of our favorites that we've done at home:

We studied surface tension with food coloring and dish soap,

and made our cardboard "boat" zoom across the pan of water when the dish soap "broke" the surface tension and the water molecules "snapped" apart:

We used household liquids to make a density column (the girls loved dropping a variety of objects in it to see where they settled in the column, e.g. a little plastic toy floated between the water and the oil, but a bit of crayon was more dense than even the honey and sunk to the bottom)

We've used weak acids to clean pennies (essentially stripping off layers of copper),

and then watched as a steel nail (originally silver looking. on top) attracted the copper atoms and ended up plated with copper (bottom).  I felt like an alchemist, trying to turn things into gold!

Also, thanks to our Medford neighbor, Connie (Thank You!!!) we've been growing crystals and talking about how atoms are arranged in different types of matter.

With our friends we talked about reactions,

and experimented with covering a candle with a jar and counted to see how long it would take it to go out.  If we removed the oxygen from the jar first (using it up with another flame), then the candle went out right away!

Or most exciting experiment so far combined nucleation (bubbles forming, Mentos + diet Coke) with density (Mentos sink to the bottom of the bottle, seeding bubbles the whole way down), and surface tension (it is hypothesized that since diet Coke has a lower surface tension than other sodas, due to the aspartame, it foams more easily) - 6 Mentos on a diet Coke = a bubble geyser!  (I love the little girls' expressions, and Joel's :)

Finally, I don't want to leave out the baby.  Beatrice is becoming quite the little exploring scientist herself (don't worry, the beaker and flask are perfectly clean :)