We have a winner for the Spilt Milk by Linda Vujnov giveaway I hosted on Monday.

Housing By David says:

“This sounds like a great book for Krissy, one that she would really enjoy. Even if I don’t win, I will get her a copy for those days she needs a pick me up.”

Thank you David. Thank you everyone who commented. Thank you Random Integer Generator.

[I played around with random ways to choose a winner - I didn't choose the BEST comment or anything. I wanted it to be truly random. I thought: have the kids pick a number out of a bag... let them throw darts at my computer and see which comment it landed on... instead I went with random.org. It worked and chose #6.]

If you didn’t win, go on over and pick up a copy for yourself, for your mom, for your girlfriends. You won’t be disappointed, I promise!

According to my three-year-old, bats and butterflies cannot occupy the same space in a human heart.

Boys like bats.
Girls like butterflies.

Simple as that.

I’m not sure if it has something to do with sugar and spice and puppy dogs tails or something, but she associates girls with the fluttery beauty of a butterfly, and boys with the flapping, scary, webbed wings of a bat.

I’ll be honest. I don’t like bats. And she doesn’t like bats (apparently). Maybe she’s on to something.

Or maybe its something else. The only real “boys” in her life (aside from her male preschool playmates at church) are her father and her two Papas. Each one of them is a strong man, both in physique and in personality, definitely strong enough to overpower a bat.

Maybe she’s just cluing in early to the differences between men and women. That its alright to like feminine things. That its alright to allow a boy to be strong and be a “man”. That there are distinctions between the genders.

Boys and girls are different. And I think its alright to allow her this, to explain this, to help her understand how a husband should treat a wife, how a wife should love her husband. My daughters won’t have to fight the battles of equal rights for women. Those have already been won. The battle they will fight is that to keep their femininity sacred and separate and beautiful. They will have to fight to just be girls.

I’m sticking with butterflies and I’ll let her daddy take care of the bats.

Two weeks ago Our Creative Community published a three part series I wrote on the Mount Hermon writers conference. Here’s part 2.

PART 2 – STORY

My genre is memoir. So at Mount Hermon this year, I decided to take the non-fiction morning workshop track.

I ended up getting stuck in room full of writers working on eschatology books, how-to’s teaching high school from a Christian worldview, and guides to working through the aftermath of divorce. Not what I had in mind.

I just barely fit into the category of non-fiction because even though memoir is technically non-fiction, it should be written more with fiction elements in mind. Story arc, climax, resolution, character development – all of these are almost as important as anything else.

Story. On the first day of class, our instructor, Kay Marshall Strom, author of over 20 books, told us that my story is not the story. My story is only an illustration of a universal truth.

Whatever story I am going to tell is not only a part of the monumental story of humanity, but it is just a vehicle for truths that God wants to tell through me.

Among other things, Kay writes about international issues in the Sudan, India and Indonesia. She inspired me. She makes me want to be a part of the community who is saying something.

My truths? Hope. Redemption. Restoration. My story? You’ll have to wait for the book.

Sometimes I feel like I’m missing her seven-ness. As if her seven-ness is somehow walking right by without noticing me like an acquaintance: someone I desperately want to get to know but have trouble knowing what to say.

My friend, Linda, wrote a book.

Russ Hutto posted my after-Mount Hermon debriefing on the Our Creative Community website last week as a three part series.

Here it is for you all! I will post the other two next week.

PART 1: BLOGGING TO WRITING

Last spring I was a virgin writer’s conference attendee.

In 2008, I came green and nervous with only one friend. When someone asked me what I wrote (as everyone does at a writer’s conference) I stared back and said something like, “Uhhh, I blog.” I was unfocused and worried and tried to defend myself. I just needed to relax and admit I just wanted to learn.

Most grey-haired, legal pad-toting, old-school writers just stared back at me and either asked me what a blog was or asked me how it having one would help launch their historical fiction romance book. The idea of a blog having relevance or value in itself was foreign to them.
So much has changed since last spring.

I still blog. It’s the 300-word-a-day discipline that Anne Lamott asks writers to do. Sometimes my blog posts are much shorter or longer than 300 words, but since last year’s conference, I’ve learned so much about writing and about friendship.

The blogging has become less of my PRIMARY writing and more of my PRACTICE writing.

In the year between I’ve entered some writing contests, submitted several article for publication, and gotten paid to write some website copy for a friend. I took what I learned last year, swirled it in with the chaos and busyness of my life as a mother and tried to do as much as I could. Aside from the website copy, I have yet to get a byline, but I am convinced I am a better writer today because of the discipline of blogging.

I’m not a virgin anymore.

I found myself at Mount Hermon this year with a collection of friends from last year and in between, with a new confidence and new answers for the “What do you write” questions at every meal.

I write. I love to write. And I know why I’m here: to hone the gift God has given me.

Two weeks ago I was introduced to the British style of driving.

On the left side of the road.

There had been a mix up with my brother- and sister-in-law and their British driver’s licenses so in order to cart the large group of us around all week, I drove Tiffany’s van.

And I drove all week. Every day. Depending on where our outings were for the day, sometimes several hours in a day. I still needed her to coach me from the passenger seat, but by the end of the week, I’d become proficient at roundabouts and merging onto motorways from the left side of the road. So much so that it was difficult to imagine driving on the right on my California streets back home.

I know that sounds strange. But it became normal to me.

So much so that I got a little scared when proposed with the idea of resuming normal right-side driving when I got home. Would I be able to switch my brain back again? How long would it take me? Sounds like I’m exaggerating. I’m not.

Tuesday morning back in the US, I had to go to the market: staples like eggs, bread and milk. I strapped the kids in my car, buckled my seatbelt and said a little prayer. I backed out.

By the time I reached the end of my own street, no more than 15 houses worth, I had it all back. England’s roundabouts became distant and I needed no time to adjust.

It was so difficult to learn a new habit (left side driving), but so simple to revert to an old habit (right side driving).

Its like anything with me. Breaking old habits are nearly impossible, it seems sometimes, because it is so easy and slippery to slide back into them. Eating poorly, becoming lazy with housework, speaking with tension to my kids. Whenever I try to break these habits, I am only successful for a short amount of time. One tiny mess-up and then I’m back to bingeing on peanut butter toast and bowls of Lucky Charms.

Erasamus said, “A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.”

In order to break a habit, I can’t ever revisit the old way of living. Whatever it is, eating right or being productive in my writing or in my housework, I need to create new habits and then allow them to replace (not overlay) any old way of living.

So I’m stuck here, driving on my right side of the road. An old habit. But this old habit is a good one.

I tried to take a nap yesterday afternoon.

I had the day planned out. In between emailing people back, getting caught up on blogs, going to the market, and paying bills would be laundry. Always laundry. And somewhere in the middle there, all three of us would take a nap.

Since the girls woke up at four in the morning, I thought that they’d be exhausted by noon. We would have an early lunch and then settle in to watch a [long] Disney movie up in my bedroom. My rule is that during the movie, they have to stay down on their sleeping bags. After the movie, we’d play outside, color, or anything else.

Almost as soon as the movie came on, the girls were wired. They bounced. They made skirts out of blankets. They asked for water. They asked for a different movie. They tried to jump off the end of my bed. Anything but sleep.

Which meant that I told them to stop bouncing, told them to stop making skirts out of blankets, went downstairs to get water, said “no” to a different movie, and told them to stop jumping off the bed.

I didn’t nap. And I was so tired.

I decided to pack my pilllow and blanket and head to the floor and squeeze between them trying to calm them with my presence. Still no nap.

My littlest kept gently kicking me and grabbing my arm. Constant. Incessant. I can’t even sleep when someone is touching me more or less kicking me.

I shut my eyes anyway. Then I realized that someday I won’t get the chance to nap between my daughters. I won’t have the luxury of three-year-old sized fingers grabbing at my ear or rubbing my eyebrows the wrong way. And it is a luxury.

I decided to let her kick and push and grab. I rolled toward her and held her.

Someday we’ll be women together and if forced to share a bed in a hotel room we might sleep with still limbs and be afraid to roll over and touch the other. We won’t have the same luxuries of affection we do now.

I didn’t get my nap. But I’m alright with that. I got to hold her.

My three-year-old woke up at 3:48 am.

I know because I heard her singing “B-I-N-G-O, And Bingo was his name-O” in her room this morning. Like all of us, she’s still adjusting to the 8 hour time difference in coming home from vistiting her cousins in England last week.

“Mama, can we go back on the plane to visit Madelyn, Josiah again? Next week?”

Apparently she quickly forgot the 24-plus hours of no sleep, the 3 hour bus ride, the 12 or so times we had to produce our passports at Heathrow, the 90 minutes we sat in the plane before we took off from London, the nearly 12 hour plane ride home and to top it all off, the LA traffic as we left the airport.

But she also doesn’t understand the sacrifices that were made to get us there and back cannot simply be reproduced so quickly or easily. Time spent off from work, from Hope’s school, the mail, the cat, the postponed bills, the canceled appointments, the LAUNDRY! All of these are sacrifices. The mental, emotional and physical energy from all of us to take four of us across the ocean is enormous.

And her sweet, focused three-year-old mind cannot comprehend that.

And that’s alright. That is what her parents are for.

To make the sacrifices so that her and her sister can spend 11 days playing with their cousins during pajama mornings and pizza dinners. We make the sacrifices so that she doesn’t have to worry. But she still doesn’t understand.

In some small similar way, we don’t understand the sacrifices of Christ for us.

Our minds are too small and too bound by earth to begin to understand what it took for God to move heaven to create redemption for us. It cannot be reproduced or even fully understood; just accepted. And we can be thankful.