#11 out of 1000

11. My kids have been playing marveously by themselves for a few hours a day. This is a huge blessing. I refuse to take it for granted.

Potential Facebook Statuses for Today

These all could have been facebook statuses of mine today.

1.) I just told my children to "go pray in your room." I meant play. Oops. Prayer might be a good idea also.

2.) Sometimes a third hand would really be nice/necessary.

3.) My child just took a free joy ride through the parking lot in a free-rolling, runaway cart. Why are parking lots slanted away from cars?

4.) I just bought three boxes of organic granola bars and one thing of All laundry detergent for the price of 1 box of granola bars not on sale ($4).

5.) Why is it when you are trying not to wake up a child, a whisper will do it, but when you are trying to keep them awake, screaming and singing at the top of your lungs does nothing?

6.) My daughter just sat on the potty, got a really concentrated look on her face, and then successfully peed in the potty! She did it a couple of times and got really excited. She then told me "all done" and got done!

7.) Getting ready to go to Disney World for vacation. Seriously considering getting "leashes" for my kids. Hope that doesn't make me evil.

8.) My kids don't drink water very well. They just don't. Don't judge me. I would like to take some kind of drink mix with me to Disney World to mix in water throughout the day. Any suggestions of something that doesn't have artificial sweetners?

Those were some of my thoughts today - at least some of the ones that are worthy of sharing.

Prayer for those presenting His Word

This may seem like a strange post, but it was born the first time that my husband was able to preach in both morning services at our church. He has frequently been given the opportunity to teach in the evenings, but the crowd is much smaller and just different in the evenings. I had a great burden to spend the first service praying for him and his ministry, and then go listen to him during the second service. However, having a burden to pray, and knowing how to pray are two different things. I easily get distracted during prayer and find my mind going a thousand different directions, or I take the easy way out and say "Lord, help Curt" and then I don't know how to fill the 44 other minutes that I wanted to spend praying. I, thankfully, thought of calling my mother-in-law and asking if she had any resources. Curt's dad is a traveling evangelist, has been for most of Curt's life, and is an amazing example of a prayer warrior. He has taught me a lot as I have seen him praying for hours out in his parked car in the driveway. Curt's mom was able to email me a list of things that his dad prays for before he goes to a church and that she uses to pray for him also. I know that other people out there also have loved ones who minister the Word, and I thought this list might be beneficial to you as well. I made some changes to it as Curt's ministry is different from his dad's (he is in one church, not traveling to new churches each week), but the original list is still pretty much preserved.

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Prayer List for those Presenting the Word

1.      Remember that the battle is the Lord’s

2.      Grace not to be intimidated

3.      Grace to meet intimidation by God’s power with the right heart attitude

4.      Moral courage to preach against sin

5.      Uprightness before the Lord so that preaching is not from hypocrisy

6.      Take away from heart & head what Satan & old nature put there

7.      Humility & meekness of Christ

8.      He will say “Will & work in me for Your good pleasure”

9.      Remember “Faithful is He that called you, who will also do it”

10.  Spiritual power—lead him not into temptation

11.  Restore confidence if needed

12.  That God would take away anxious fears

13.  Pure motives

14.  Grace to use his mind, emotions, will, body and spirit

15.  That the Holy Spirit would have complete control of his mind, emotions, will, body, and spirit

16.  Give him a renewed zeal to serve you

17.  Grace to give You the glory

18.  Give him the compassion of Christ

19.  Grace not to be derogatory in the flesh

20.  Grace with colaborers

21.  Opportunities to minister in other’s lives

22.  Wisdom with finances/keep from greed

23.  Put love in the hearts of the congregation for him and his family

24.  Ability to get prep work done during the week

25.  Trust the Holy Spirit’s leading in choosing a sermon text

26.  Organize time wisely

27.  Speak clearly and articulately

28.  Sensitivity to know the right words to say

29.  Clear and logical progression in sermon/that it would flow well

30.  Words would accurately express intended thought

31.  Good eye contact with congregation

32.  Hedge about him as he preaches

33.  Grace to trust the Holy Spirit’s leading when speaking

34.  Boldness with the Word

35.  Preach with wisdom, love, authority, power, inspiration, liberty, simplicity, fluidness 

36.  Words to express the thoughts

37.  For him to be himself, be surrendered, be a channel

38.  Grace not to be rushed

39.  Grace to keep people’s attention

40.  Anoint his voice as he preaches

41.  Give him tact

42.  Give him wisdom to make decisions while preaching

43.  Give him clarity and the ability to not lose his train of thought

44.  Break down all the hindrances that are blocking the work of the Holy Spirit

45.  Be well received by those ministering to

46.  Real moving of the Holy Spirit

47.  Receptivity/Open Hearts of those hearing

48.  Father to draw some to be saved

49.  Good attendance/God would bring those that need to hear

50.  Freedom from distraction for those listening

51.  People to be encouraged in Christ

52.  People to be challenged/admonished in Christ

53.  People be honest about their spiritual condition

54.  People respond to the convicting work of the Holy Spirit

55.  Unbelievers be attentive to the Word

56.  The Devil to be defeated

57.  Work in people to pray, work, give, apply, respond, obey

58.  That the church be better off spiritually because of message

59.  The Holy Spirit convict audience of sin

60.  Permanent results

Preach leaning on the promise that “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Phil 4:13)

Preach leaning on the promise that “He that is in me is greater than he that is in the world.” (I John 4:4)

     

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(I may be updating and changing the list. You can access a current version of the list here.)


See anything that the list overlooks? 

Have any questions?

Either leave a comment or email me at laurasharbaugh-at-gmail-dot-com

I Heart Faces - Smile

I decided to go ahead and take the plunge and enter the i heart faces photo challenge for the first time this week. Here is one of my favorite smiles:

Go check out all the other smiles at i heart faces.

Tot Activities this week

~ Micah and Mackenna are 21 months old ~

I have been working on some more intentional, stimulating play activities with M and M. I'm not sure where we are going to go from here. I don't plan on getting extremely structured, but the planner and teacher in me is hard to beat down sometimes. I would like our times at home (specifically wed - fri) to be engaging, stimulating, enjoyable times for all three of us.

Here are some things we have tried with the limited resources that I have found around the house:

~ We attempted a real object matching game where I found pairs of objects around the house (clothespins, play hot dogs, legos, etc.) and put them in a container. The kids then dumped out the container and tried to put the objects back in, a pair at a time. I intended to see if the twins would take turns doing this back and forth. That didn't work. Mackenna kind of got into this and did it successfully maybe 1 and a half times. Micah really only wanted to take the container and put his own cars in it and carry it around the house (anything that can become a car holder - will become a car holder).

~ I saw an idea here to play a "too big/just right" game with varying objects and an empty 2-Liter bottle. This was a hit. They loved putting things into the bottle. I loved observing their different approaches to this. Micah quickly learned what objects were going to be too big, and wouldn't even attempt to put those in, they stayed in the bag the whole time for him. Mackenna seemed to know what was going to be too big, but she still liked to attempt it and say "no, big" to herself as she was doing it. Dumping it out was a big hit also.



(Here is proof that Mackenna was involved in some of these activities this week, even though she wasn't pictured above or in the next part. She is helping get the bottle ready.)



~ I purchased some pom-poms and some magnet discs with the intention of making pom pom magnets so that we can do activities like this. I definitely have not gotten around to it yet. I decided the other day to get out the pom poms and see if they could do some color sorting with them. They had other ideas. They loved playing with them, throwing them, touching them, squishing them, holding them up and hearing what color they were (they would then always say the color we had just said for the next pom pom they held up - but they were never right!). I got the 2-liter bottle back out and they loved putting the pom poms into the bottle; they actually took turns with this one pretty well. Shaking it out was fun as before.

~ Today Micah was home with me from church. I used our alone time to see if we could do a little more structured play with the pom-poms. After modeling it for him a little bit, he got really good at sorting four colors of pom-poms into clear glasses. He would even say "no" as he would start to put one in the wrong glass. He also would go in and pick out any that had gotten put in the wrong glass. He also had fun pouring the pom-poms between glasses some too. (And stacking the cups and wearing them on his head as a hat.) It was encouraging that even though we are a long way from really knowing our colors, he can make some matches for now. He also got some colors right when Daddy played with him after church.









See what I mean about everything becoming a container for cars!



For more tot inspiration - visit the link up at 1+1+1=1

Goals

One of the blogs, Intentionally Katie, that I have recently begun reading in my {beloved} google reader account has been showing her progress working her way through 101 goals in 1001 days. I've really enjoyed seeing her progress, and seeing the types of things that she is committed to accomplishing. Here are some goals that have come to mind in the last few days as things that I would really like to accomplish. Maybe this list will grow, and maybe it will just remain these five. (5 goals in 50 days doesn't sound as impressive, huh!?)

- Run a 5K. I think I'm going to start the Couch 2 5K plan while on vacation next week; I plan on downloading this app soon. This is a majorly scary thing for me. I don't like failure. It's not that I never fail at things, but I like to believe that when I fail it is because I purposefully chose to quit or that it wasn't worth me trying my best. (I remember having a conversation with my sister before student teaching about failure. What if I actually failed at being a teacher? Not because I didn't try hard enough, but because I just actually couldn't do it. That was something very scary to me and felt very out of my control comfort zone. I do thank the Lord for his blessing of my teaching career. Now the same for running!? haha.) Running is something that I really don't have much confidence in myself with. I've never been successful, never been an athlete, never run 3 miles. I don't think I really think it is possible for me to do. I'm going to do my best to put that out of my head and believe that if these other oofs can do this, I can too. There are some beach 5K's this summer that I should be able to do at the end/middle of the nine-week program. (Traveling and the Heat are two potential obstacles here - although the one may help alleviate the other!)

- Finish the twins' baby books - I'd say they are at 60% completion and have sat at that level for the last 8 months.

- Paint our bedroom. Get new curtains/blinds. Revamp our furniture. This is a 8 month overdue birthday present to myself. I want the look of a peaceful beach cottage...not a depressing clutter fest! (I'll look for some link inspiration on this one.)

- Complete a quilt-along. From start to finish - including the binding and the quilting. Not sure when I'll be able to do this one as I really want to join in on one that is just starting and be able to follow along on schedule with everyone else. The collaboration and community is part of the appeal to me.

- And this one I stole from Katie - get up at 6 am for 30 days in a row

"Reading"

A few months ago I made a list of words they could say. Now I don't think that is possible. I did want to mention a few of the more shocking things from the past few weeks. First of all, there are four books or so that the kids can "read" with us now. What's Wrong, Little Pookie? is a board book that goes through a series of questions between a mother and child about what is wrong. (It also happens to be the book that Audra read to Mackenna a year ago)

Each time the mother makes a guess, the child says "no." Both of the kids can now say "no" at all the right parts of the book. They can also do this with Do Zebras Have Spots? . They can say "oops" in all the right places in another Boynton book, Blue Hat, Green Hat. My favorite is reading Thomas & Friends: Go, Train, Go! with them. They are getting really good at different parts. If I stop reading and wait for them to fill in words, they can fill in many of them - such as hat, fast, slow, go, cow, moo, peep peep, dog. It is really fun.

They have also gotten a LOT better at puzzles. I'm shocked at the rapid improvement in this area. While doing a number puzzle with Mackenna yesterday, I decided to count with her. I said "1" and she filled in "2, 3." I then said "4, 5, 6, 7" without her really saying anything, but when I got to "7" she finished "8, 9." Craziness.

I've also seen big improvement (especially with Micah) in doing look and find activities, such as Elmo & Friends. A few months ago they didn't get the concept of matching objects at all - now he loves to look for certain items and find all of them in a picture. I especially like going through this book, because I remember a certain neice of mine also enjoying this book!