A Season of Change

Mother's Day Lunch

Spring is already on its way out the door! After waiting so long for it to come after a seemingly never-ending winter, we've been spending as much time as possible outside enjoying the warmer temperatures. 

Tulip Festival

I will always remember this Mother's Day as standing out in my mind. On the Friday before, I was surprised to turn around (while cleaning the junk off my stovetop) to see my husband and children dressed in their Sunday best - in the middle of the day! I was instructed to put something nicer on and told we'd be going out to lunch to a surprise location. Given the style of dress, I could safely assume we'd not be going to some of our favourites like the "Panda Garden Buffet" or "Lone Star Texas Grill". We ended up at the "Le Cordon Bleu" for an extra special lunch! It was pointed out that starting next year, I wouldn't have both my kids at home for Mother's Day (bahhhhhhh). Both kids were on their best behaviour with napkins in their laps!! It was wonderful!

The lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley were so pretty this year! It seems their time just doesn't last long enough. I'm finding that this is also true of the seasons of life. 

I love my Sally Clarkson books and cherish some of the insight she gives especially when I'm in the midst of "all of motherhood" and she has some perspective. She writes in "Seasons of a Mother's Heart" about spring:
The springtime of life in nature is when colour and music invade the silent cold of winter. Flowers bloom in a profusion of beauty, green springs up everywhere, and birds trill songs to blue skies. The buds on trees burst out in colour, proclaiming that everything isn't really dead, it just seemed that way for awhile, but now is the time for life. Spring has always been a time symbolic of birth - of babies being born and life beginning again in an endless circle of renewal assuring each new generation that life will continue in the years to come. 
God has designed beauty and pleasure to inhabit the simplest of things, but we have to be still in our hearts to enjoy them. We have to submit and assent by faith to the reality of each day however mundane, choosing to see with heart-eyes the reasons for thanksgiving and joy. Otherwise we miss the power of the spring seasons. Every new season or segment of life - newly weds, pregnancy, babies, toddlers, elementary school, hormones and teen years, graduation and leaving home, marriage allover again - are all spring seasons, springboards to new opportunities and adventures. Each of these times of life is pregnant with hope and life within them, and yet each of these spring seasons will also require some adjustments to change. 

Spring mantel

Yes, it is spring here. I've graduated my first-born from Halldorson Homeschool. I look back on the time and memories I've been so blessed to have had with him. I'm not tiptoeing through the tulips - I remember the good and the bad and there was plenty of both! But I don't regret a single moment.  Sure I could have done better. I shouldn't have done some of it. The truth of the matter is he and I are both who and what we are today because of it all.  And it all has been a blessing. 

Bird-banding field trip

So I'm embracing this coming new season in life and looking forward - to the experiences and opportunities that Will will have at Luther Prep, for the one on one time I have with Zanna, the things we'll learn together, the field trips that we have to take and a small dream finally becoming a reality right now as I hear the banging of the hammer coming from the basement … my own salon business. 

Spring is an invitation to enter into the joy of the psalmist with his proclamation: This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." (Psalm 118:24). It is the spirit of the new season and returning life. 
Spring is a time of living fully in the present, loving deeply, and celebrating the newness of life as it comes our way.