Five on Friday--June 28

Hi friends! It’s almost July! I got a text from a friend yesterday saying “I just need to be honest, having kids home full time all summer is just hard sometimes. I don’t know if I’m quite ready for school to be back in session, but I think I’m ready for a bit of a break.” I can relate. And I’m sure many of you can as well. I ran out of the house to the grocery store as fast as I possibly could after my husband walked in the door tonight just to get away for a bit! I hope this finds you embracing the heat, enjoying time together with friends around a BBQ, or cooling off in water somewhere! Thanks for checking back in, and now on with this week’s 5 things…

ONE

The title of this blog is An Altar at my Kitchen Sink, a name I came up with as I realized what I loved writing about more than anything (well maybe with the exception of home organizing…I really really love organizing stuff!) is finding God in the ordinary, every day stuff of life. Finding God in the going to work and coming home, in the grocery shopping, laundry folding, and endless dish washing I do in my day to day. Finding God in conversations with friends and novels and playing a game with my boys. The Psalms tell us that the earth is the Lords and God’s fullness is in it—God is in everything we see and can be found not just in worship on Sundays but in the washing of dishes at the kitchen sink night after night. An altar at my kitchen sink. A place God reminds me over and over again that He is providing for us.

I think as humans we are all creatures of habit and our bodies actually crave routine—even those of us who don’t love the idea of a lot of structure have loose routines in our lives that give us a rhythm to our days. I’m fully convinced this need for rhythm is something God placed in each of us intentionally. There’s a rhythm to the very world God created—summer, fall, winter, spring. Sunrise, mid-day, afternoon, sunset, night time. The rhythm of our heartbeats he’s placed in our chest, the filling and exhaling of the air in our lungs, the spikes in melatonin at specific times a day inviting us into rest. God is a God who brought order out of chaos, spoke into the nothingness and created structure. The church year was designed around the rhythm of the life of Christ himself—with the church calendar beginning with the first Sunday of Advent as we prepare for the birth of the baby Jesus and carries us through his adult ministry to the season of Lent and the crucifixion, around through the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and back to Advent. We tell the story of Jesus over and over every year in specific seasons to give rhythm to our spiritual lives.

As I have reflected more and more about this idea of the cadence of our days I’ve realized I have very specific benchmarks in my every day that remind me of God-With-Us—that God is indeed in the midst of the ordinary stuff of our every day. My biggest benchmarks, my places I pause and remember God’s unending presence, are the sound and scent of the coffee brewing in the morning and the sound of the dishwasher clicking on every evening. I know, those may sound so silly to you. But every morning the very first thing I do is stumble to the coffee pot and pour a cup. The warmth through the mug, the familiar scent, the first sip—there is something to that small ritual that grounds my day and I find myself murmuring under my breath “God give me what I need to serve You today.” An altar at my coffee pot. A stopping point each morning to pause and acknowledge God’s presence as we begin another day together. The clicking on of the dishwasher every evening serves as the same reminder to me. Every day it’s one of the last things I do before I settle in for the night of reading or a show or writing—I wipe down the counters one last time and turn on the dishwasher. The sound of the water beginning to run always makes me pause and exhale—another day coming to an end, the work and tasks are finished. The kids are in bed. God’s been with us. God’s provided, and the dishes I’ve used throughout the day to feed my family are being readied for another day tomorrow. An altar at my dishwasher. A place to pause and say “thank you.”

Over and over the Israelite people were asked to take ordinary stones and build an altar to commemorate and remember something God did for them in a particular spot. He would proclaim that space holy, a space they would pause at and tell the story of what God’s done. I’m wondering if you think about it, do you have any mini-altars in your life? Any simple daily rhythms that bring to mind God’s goodness and provision? Maybe think about that this weekend as you go about your day to day routine, God just might show you that you indeed have an altar in your laundry room or in the driver’s seat of your car.

TWO

One of my five things in last week’s post was about the daily photo delete I try and employ to help narrow down the number of photos that accumulate on my phone throughout the month and I said I’d share this week about what I do with photos after they’ve been “daily deleted.” One of the things my mom was SO good at when we were growing up was keeping up with our family photo albums. She would get a roll of film developed into 4x6 prints, toss the terrible ones and place the good ones in albums where there was a small space to write a caption of who was in the photo or what the event was. My sister and I LOVED looking at those albums—we went through them all the time and when we got older and had to start writing more essays and reports on family and family events and our childhoods they were invaluable to help jog our memories. I knew that was something I wanted to do for my kids, but we don’t live in the age of 4x6 prints coming back in a roll of 24 photos. Starting back in 2008 when Charles and I were dating and got engaged, I started creating an annual family album on Shutterfly with our digital pictures from the year. Throughout the year I’ll work on the album in bits and pieces and this is why that daily delete of photos is SO helpful, when I go to work on a month or two of the album I have a much smaller number of photos to work with instead of first having to delete the bad ones—that part has already been done! Ideally (although I often get behind) I try and set aside about an hour the first week of each month to go back and build the pages of the previous month’s photos and keep on top of things that way. I go chronologically throughout the year, and in January of the next year I’ll hit “order” and have the book shipped to us. The awesome thing about digital albums is that they can always be reprinted if one is lost (for some reason when we moved cross country our 2010 album completely disappeared. I have no idea how that one random book got lost but it did. I was able to simply hit “reprint” on Shutterfly and it arrived a week later). I also started waiting for this sale they do several times a year that gives you free extra pages in your book, which cuts the price literally by 2/3, so I might have my book ready to go but I won’t hit order until that sale shows up—I order 3 copies of each year so someday when my boys move out they will have one box of 18 albums that were their growing up years. I don’t do separate albums for each kid’s first year or special events, I simply do one family “yearbook” each year and put in there ALL the photos and notes highlighting that year’s memorable events, milestones or happenings. I think if I tried doing separate albums for each kid or each event I’d get completely overwhelmed, so I decided early on I do ONE book a year and print 3. My boys LOVE getting them off the shelf and looking at them, seeing their baby pictures, vacation photos, etc and I love having them done so so much.

What I’d say to the person who wants to have albums made, but feels so overwhelmed by the years of photos that are sitting on a hard drive somewhere is this. Start with 2019. Start working through the photos on your phone, a few minutes a day, deleting ones you have no intention of putting in an album somewhere, and start uploading them to your favorite photo site. Is Shutterfly the absolute best on the market? No. But I am sticking with them because that’s where ALL our photos from our whole 10 years together are stored and albums are printed through. There are tons of companies who all provide a very similar service. But start with this year. Start an album and commit to spending 20 minutes a week on it, doing one page at a time, and by the end of the year you will have a 2019 family album ready to print. Once a routine is in place I promise it doesn’t take much time, it’s when I let months go by without touching it that I find myself needing to spend hours catching up!

THREE

Every night at bedtime, we have always sat in the room with our kids until they are asleep, usually softly singing songs (neither of us can sing, but the boys don’t seem to mind!). We have one who is a bit anxious at bedtime about the dark and mommy leaving the room so we’ve just always stayed with him as he’s fallen asleep. Well about 9 months ago we put our boys in the same room, figuring it would just be easier to do one joint bedtime, especially on nights when daddy has to work late. But what we found was that just reading a couple books and then forcing them to lay still and be quiet in the dark while we sang songs wasn’t working. They were too excited about being together and couldn’t settle well. So one night on a whim I said “boys! If you will close your mouths and hold still in your beds I will tell you a story.” Magic. Silence. Stillness. But the problem is, I am not really the type to make up awesome stories on the fly. So I went with what I knew best, the story of Noah’s Ark. They’d heard it before of course, but they were silent through the whole thing which calmed their brains and bodies down enough to stay quiet when I finished the story and started our songs. Thus began our tradition of telling them two bible stories a night as they lay still in the dark (they each get to pick one). I don’t read them, I simply tell them. I don’t worry about being word for word with the text, I don’t stress about whether or not I tell the same story with the exact same detail two nights in a row (Aidan went through a solid month of asking for the story of Esther literally every single night, and let me assure you it was not told with the exact same detail 30 straight nights). There are nights I choose to introduce a new story and don’t let them pick (like the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead—that was a mommy choice night and now it’s one of their favorites), and there are nights it’s late and they get one story instead of two.

What started as a desperate try to get my boys to shut up and lay still at bedtime (and stop throwing things at their brother in the other bed) has turned into a ritual that I think is actually changing me more than them. As a mom who loves Jesus, what I want for these boys more than anything this world has to offer them is to fall in love with the Lord. I want them to know these stories deep in their bones, to know what God did through David and Esther and the feeding of the 5,000 and the healing of the woman who was hemorraging (this is actually one of their favorite stories—we just say she’s been sick a long time and don’t dwell on the details of what kind of sickness!). Since 9 times out of 10 it’s me who does bible stories and songs while Charles does pajamas and reading of bedtime books, I’ve told a LOT of bible stories this year. And here’s what I’ve learned. When I get them in bed, I’m usually flustered and annoyed and so ready for the day to be over. But the lights go out, I lay down on their bedroom floor and begin “a long long time ago, there was a man named Moses…” and for the next ten minutes I walk the boys AND myself through the story of the Exodus, through the plagues and the Passover and the escape through the Red Sea. Night after night I say aloud phrases such as: “and God heard their cries for help…and God didn’t forget them….and God was with them….and God rescued them….and God fought for them….and God did a miracle for them….and God healed her….and God raised her from the dead…and God listened….and God acted…and God LOVED them.” You cannot say these phrases aloud day after day and not have them start to burrow their way into your own heart. Telling the stories of scripture to my own kids night after night has brought the Bible to life again for me in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. For thousands of years scripture was passed down orally, these stories were told to generation after generation and to join in that tradition of sharing them with another generation as they drift off to sleep is becoming one of the things I am coming to most cherish as a mom. You don’t have to be a bible scholar to tell your kids the stories in scripture. There are days one of them will ask for a story they heard in preschool or on a Veggie Tales video that maybe I’m not as familiar with. I’ll just tell them, “mommy needs to read that one in the bible tomorrow to remember it and I can tell it to you tomorrow night,” and there’s no shame in that. I sure hope when my boys move out they are polite, respectful and full of joy. But I also hope they have the words of God hidden so deeply in their hearts its simply a part of who they are. And the only way I know how to do that right now in this season is one bedtime story at a time.

FOUR

For years as I’ve followed different parenting and homemaking pages on the internet I kept hearing that if you want to save money on groceries, shop at Aldi. I had no idea what an Aldi was, but I had this image in my mind of some sketchy food mart, a la dollar tree, that sold almost expired products. Not a fair image but I had no idea what Aldi was, I hadn’t ever lived anywhere that had one of these stores! About a year and a half ago a brand new Aldi arrived in the Jacksonville Town Center which is maybe 15 minutes from us, so I decided to give it a shot. My sister in law has faithfully shopped at hers in Kentucky for years and fed 4 kids on a very reasonable grocery budget thanks to Aldi, so I wanted to see what the difference was. I was so surprised by what I found! They carried maybe everything but one item on my grocery list (for some reason ours doesn’t have diced green chilies and I use those a lot!), their produce was fresh, they had a great selection of organic products, and their prices were incredible. I could not believe the difference. Yes, their products are their own brand, which is one of their main way of keeping costs low, so if you are super brand loyal to a particular product Aldi won’t work well for you, but we just aren’t that attached to any particular brand of most staples (or once I realized I could buy a big thing of ketchup for about $2 and a bag of chips for less than $2 I told my family to start getting to use to a new brand!) I slowly started to change my grocery shopping routine to be almost exclusively Aldi and over time we’ve seen our grocery budget drop about $250-$300 dollars a month. Literally. I now go one evening a week, usually Friday once my husband gets home to start bedtime, and I can be in and out with a week’s wroth of groceries in 30 minutes with a bill of about $100-$120 a week. That includes a bottle of wine each week, meat, basic household goods like laundry & dishwasher detergent, and enough groceries to feed all 4 of us 3 meals a day for 7 days at home. We used to be close to $200 a week when I was shopping more at Target and Publix. You do have to bag your own groceries and place a quarter in to get a cart, but you get your quarter back when you return the cart. Every three weeks or so I might have to stop off at a Publix or Walmart for a couple items I want that Aldi doesn’t carry, but for the most part we buy almost everything exclusively here.

This past Friday night was one of those nights I had to run into Publix (which is across the street from Aldi so it’s not exactly out of my way) and what I realized that surprised me so much was how overwhelming it was to see SO many choices of EVERYTHING! I hadn’t ever realized it before, because I’ve grown up shopping at traditional American supermarkets, but after a year and a half of not doing any major grocery shopping at a big store I could not believe how much of a real thing decision fatigue is! For instance, we buy a box of Cheez Its every week. Everyone in the house loves them. Aldi has three kinds. Regular Cheez-Its, Reduced fat, or White Cheddar. The Cheez It selection in Publix was completely out of control—cheddar jack, spicy, scrabble letters imprinted on the cracker squares, low fat, fat free, something called a cheez it duo, regular, white cheese its, and I’m sure I’m missing more. It’s no wonder my grocery shopping time was cut in half when I stopped wandering huge stores with hundreds of options! I’ve been in so many conversations lately with other moms trying to get budgets under control and manage feeding a household well without breaking the bank. I guess I’m here joining all those other voices on the internet saying if you want to cut costs, this might be something to at least check out—or maybe try it for a month and see if it makes a difference. It’s expensive to feed a family, so perhaps this might be an option for yours. Any other Aldi loyalists out there? How has it made a difference for your grocery budget?

FIVE

About three years ago, Spotify recommended to me a new artist they thought I would enjoy on my “weekly suggestions for you” play list their algorithm puts together. I hit play on a song called Chain Breaker by Zach Williams and was almost immediately captivated by both his voice and lyrics. He’s got one of those soulful, almost gravely voices like a Chris Stapleton, and I loved it instantly. I’ve listened to his album, Chain Breaker off and on over the past few years and love every single song on it. His story of living a life of escapism into drugs and alcohol and rock and roll for years before being captivated by the redemption of Jesus—the One who can indeed break all the chains that bind us is a powerful testimony. His first album includes songs with lyrics like

Fear, he is a liar
He will take your breath
Stop you in your steps
Fear he is a liar
He will rob your rest
Steal your happiness
Cast your fear in the fire
'Cause fear he is a liar

and

Hear the voice of love that's calling
There's a chair that waits for you
And a Friend who understands
Everything you're going through

But you keep standing at a distance
In the shadow of your shame
There's a light of hope that's shining
Won't you come and take your place

And bring it all to the table
There's nothing He ain't seen before
For all your fear, all your sorrow and your sadness
There's a Savior and He calls
Bring it all to the table

This past week Amazon music let me know a new single of Zach’s had released called Rescue Story so of course I hit play immediately and was again instantly captivated by both his voice & lyrics and have had it on repeat literally all week. Zach is someone who knows what it’s like to be in need of a rescuer and he found his rescue in Jesus. He now takes his message of redemption into prisons (he did a live album from a prison in Tennessee that is incredible) and into arenas sharing about the Chain Breaker. If you don’t know Zach’s music yet, this is one I can’t recommend highly enough!