The House Collective

an epic day.

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It was a Friday, so we had Flour & Flowers; plus it was the first week of the month with cinnamon rolls. I was up and putting artisan loaves in pans at 5:30am when Nyein Nyein arrived with her little boy, and we got started on bread & cinnamon rolls.

Thida arrived for The Breakfast Club around 6am with her two sons, and they began serving fruit & soy milk to the kids around 6:15am. It was a school sport day, with four teams competing, so the kids were decked out in their team colors as they came for breakfast early—most arriving around 7am. Thida was out of the six kilos of longan fruit before 7:20, so we made do with watermelon, bananas, and apples from our fridge until 8.

Also by 7am, Pyo Pyo & Pwe Pyu Hey joined us for bread & cinnamon roll making. Mwei Mwei came to watch the kids. In all, they baked 22 loaves of bread, rolled out 120 tortillas, and made 173 cinnamon rolls.

Our morning was chaos: four of us baked here while kids ran in and out of the house. Stephen had breakfast with a friend and then went and one of The Reinforcers to deliver the sound system for the evening. He picked up lunch on the way back for all the bakers and us.

They asked about Bingo all day—I had promised we’d play this week but haven’t them the day. They chatted about how we hadn’t decided yet, which I corrected that I had, but just wasn’t telling them! They begged me all day to know.

Flour & Flowers finished baking around 1:30pm. We rested for about thirty minutes, before we had to shower and pack up the bread and load up the flowers.

As they walked out the door I asked if they were free on Sunday evening and might want to play Bingo? It was received with shouts, jumping, and cheers—grown women with children, jumping in our doorway to play Bingo this weekend! It was well worth the game all day 🙂

Because of reports of raids this week, Pyo Pyo didn’t make deliveries with me. I picked up Thida at 3pm instead, as she has legal paperwork. She doesn’t know the Flour & Flowers system, though, so we…made do. It was a lot of explaining and chatting while driving, until my head hurt.

Stephen left the house at 4pm, in a friend’s borrowed car, to take the two Reinforcers to the restaurant in town having a grand opening. They set up the sound system and did sound checks with the band; had dinner together and got started at 6:30pm.

I got back from deliveries about 6pm and did finances with Pyo Pyo, before heading out the door to the concert. I chatted with friends while The Reinforcers had their first paid gig running live sound. They did amazing! I think they exceeded many people’s expectations, both Stephen & the two guys, which is always fun to see. We had people asking about opportunities in the future!

They loaded up the car twice with gear, and we crashed at home around 11pm.

That’s eighteen hours later, spent entirely with the community. In those eighteen hours, eight people from our community had work and earned money for their families. In those eighteen hours, we had good conversations about the adoption system & children’s homes, about what their kids want to be when they get older, about inside jokes, about an absent father, about our weight (of course!), and all about Christmas and Bingo.

It worked, guys.

Flour & Flowers: it worked. It made profit. Four women took home money to their families and still got to see their kids through the day. It was relational. The loaves were beautiful, and every one raved at the concert about how much they love it. It’s a popular business to sell delicious things.

The Breakfast Club: it worked. It fed kids healthy food. It created stability. It was relational. And it will happen every school day this month because Thida is amazing.

The Reinforcers: it worked. It made profit. It kept kids in school. It gave them new skills. It was relational. And it looks like it might grow!

It’s working, and even on the most epic days, it’s worth it!

the breakfast club | week seventeen.

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Last week we wrapped up our seventeenth week of The Breakfast Club, and as of last Friday, Thida–with very minimal help from us–has served up 3,070 meals to kids in this community.

3,070!

That is so much rice I can’t even wrap my head around it, even after buying it and lugging it home from the market each week!

Thida is an incredible gift. She is a chef, server, leader, mom, grandma, and friend to each and every child, mom and dad that comes to the door. She understands the power of a steady, healthy meal in the unsteady, unhealthy lives of these kids. She gets why some are served free and some not. She gets why it’s hard to draw lines in the sand. She gets the value of it and the challenge of it; and she’s taking it on day after day with excellence.

And she’s become one of my best friends, in many ways through this endeavor. While we’ve shared the responsibility of early mornings and market trips and planning for feeding, that isn’t what brought us closer. It has been sharing the pain of the poverty of this community.

They ask her for loans, too, and she has to figure out what to do. They tell her their pains and ailments and worries, and she has to find words, too. She has unknowns in her future, too. She has become a confidant on how to handle difficult situations, what to say (in theory and in actual vocabulary!), what to hope for, and what to pray for. I don’t know exactly what she believes, but I know we’re having regular conversations about our prayers and hopes.

__________________________________

Last week as two of the bread ladies came in to bake, they dropped their kids at the door for breakfast & came into the kitchen. As they looked back at the large group of kids gathered around our Thanksgiving leftovers, one of them asked, “Do you just like feeding the kids? Are you happy?”

You see, while Thida gets it, most of the community doesn’t. It’s weird that we serve breakfast for free, only to the kids, and only to the skinny ones. It’s weird that we pour in loads of meat and eggs and pumpkins and beans. It’s weird.

But I was a little confused at her question. Am I happy…today? Am I happy to feed them Thanksgiving food? Am I happy…for what?

And once I understood, I tried to explain. This is in short what I attempted to say in Burmese: Well, yes, it does make me happy to see them eating good food. But, that’s not why we do this. We knew many of the kids were too skinny and not getting enough food. So we told our church about it, and asked if they would help us feed the kids breakfast. We thought about 50 of the kids would be “too skinny.”  Now, it’s more than that, so sometimes I get nervous we won’t have enough money to feed everyone. But, I think it’s really important. If they eat enough food and eat healthy food, they will be smarter. When they get older, I think this will help their lives be easier.

Easier? They asked.

Both of them have recently been in very hard seasons, and we’ve been helping them out. So I felt comfortable to say: I see how hard life is for you. It’s hard to get work, it’s hard to live, it’s hard to live here without papers, it’s hard to have enough money. I hope that if you’re kids eat healthy, life will be easier for them than it is for you.

And while this isn’t the first time we’ve explained The Breakfast Club–maybe more like the one thousandth time?–they seemed to see it. Three thousand meals in, and maybe a couple moms looked me in the eye and got it: it’s a long-term plan.

And it’s enough of a plan we think it’s worth getting up at 5am for. It’s enough of a plan we are going to measure all your kids and put them into a system and keep track of their growth. It’s enough of a plan for us to go to the market every week and buy insane amounts of food. It’s a plan, and it’s working.

We’re 3,070 meals in, folks!

thanksgiving.

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For Thanksgiving this year, we gathered around tables outside, lit by candlelight and mosquito coils and Christmas lights, with twenty or so friends from around Mae Sot.  We had collectively attempted a variety of dishes from scratch and sans some ingredients, just as we do each and every holiday that comes along.

I made Stephen’s grandmother’s famous rolls so it tasted like home to him and smelled like it to me. I wore a bandage from yet another eventfully unpleasant week of medical issues. We went for a walk, scaring off street dogs the whole way and talking about what we were thankful for and what we were celebrating this week. It was our weekly celebration, after all.

Home and holidays are becoming so vague.

As friends packed up extras to go, there was still so, so very much leftover. But I couldn’t see it thrown out, not serving breakfast to fifty malnourished kids every day. So we packed it up, stored it in our oven for a few hours, and then reheated everything at 6am.

The kids got to take their pick for breakfast, trying sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, rolls, stuffing, turkey bone & skin & tendon (what you and I would determine “meat” had been eaten!), and watermelon!

They loved it. Thida loved it. She would encourage them to try something new, and take whatever leftovers they denied! We had a second feast, right alongside the sunrise.

The Flour & Flower ladies arrived to bake bread that morning, but we have rules about the breakfast food being for the malnourished kids, not the adults. However, we often share the leftovers on Friday, so I heard them checking in periodically, disappointed, Are the kids eating it all? Oh, it’s nearly gone…

There were still leftovers (!!!) though that were then packed back into the fridge a bit longer. Around noon, when the ladies finished bread baking, I re-heated everything in the ovens again, while they cleaned up. I made it look like it was for Stephen & I’s lunch, not mentioning anything to them and setting up a little table out of sight around the corner.

And then we surprised them with a little feast for us to have together. And while the stuffing didn’t taste amazing the third time around, and Stephen assured them if you heat the mashed potatoes through (oops!) they taste much better…it was a hit. They each took home a full plate of extras to their husbands.

I love how this community teaches us more and more of home and holiday. So that while it wasn’t a typical holiday and certainly didn’t come in an easy week, we gave thanks together!

fourteen.

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This girl, who means the world to us, turned fourteen this week.

I know it may seem like she’s my neighbor, a little girl I know, or a friend.

But we love her. Beyond words.

She is the little girl who broke her finger on our porch, with Stephen’s great idea of soaping up steps in the rain. She is the little girl who had a whole bowl of oil dumped on her head in our kitchen. She is the little girl who I imagined as a teenager {in a distant blog I cannot now locate} and now she is.

She is the little girl who was baptized this year with her father, in one of the most redemptive moments in my life. She is one of the best gifts we’ve ever gotten, and she’s not even ours.

She is this little girl…

And this one.

And now she’s this young woman who loves Jesus.

She has grown up right in front of us, right in our home, and she isn’t even ours. What a privilege to be a part of.

We love her. We love the way her family has shown so many signs of redemption over the years, and now functions, despite so many challenges, as a family. We love that we’ve been a part of witnessing it, even in the hardest things we’ve had to witness.

And so we celebrated her big, as a community and as a couple.

Extremely out of the blue on Wednesday, as I decorated her birthday cake, she asked me if we were moving back to America tomorrow. I said no, quite confusedly. She said she had heard we were moving away tomorrow, and she was visibly scared. I asked who or where this rumor had started, but reassured her we were definitely not moving tomorrow. She was so relieved.

I asked Thida about it later–had she heard this? She said no, but that Yaminoo would be so sad if we left. “She loves you so much,” she said.

Ditto.

celebrations.

by Filed Under: kelli 1 Comment

Sometimes I feel surrounded by suffering. While there is some suffering that we encounter personally, most of it is those we love suffering in our midst. I cry so many tears for this community: for individual children, for vulnerable women, for seemingly hopeless situations. For poverty, for abuse, for addiction, for loneliness.

There was a point a few years ago where I needed to learn to mourn for these things: to let myself cry, to let myself hurt deeply; to see that I am mourning with God, for things that hurt him even more. This has taken many forms: writing, worship, meditating; most recently, it took the form of a jar. My sister gave me the sweet gift of a Bottle of Tears jar. It became a physical way to write down griefs and losses in our lives and community, and really, to release them. To drop them into a bottle, where they are not forgotten—they are recorded, literally, and yet no longer mine to carry.

It filled quickly over the past few months. There were a few days, a few events, where I would simply walk out of the community, overwhelmed, to write things down and drop them in the bottle. And while it was a beautiful way to mourn, to record, to recognize suffering and pain: sometimes I didn’t want to go back into it again. I didn’t want to return into the community, the community center.

Ever.

And yet I can’t really avoid it: it’s my house, my kitchen, and honestly, my life. I’m there all the time.

But you can be present somewhere and not be there. And so I was.

Quite a few painful encounters happened over Breakfast Club hours. It has naturally brought the community together and brought ailments and sorrows and requests. So while I kept popping in, I stopped sitting with the kids; I stopped chatting with the parents. And while it is Thida’s job and she doesn’t need me, and all the other million excuses I could use, I know that I was hiding when I could.

During Playhouse, my goal is to engage with the kids. To play games with them, to ask about their days and families; to learn who likes who and who passed their exams. And sometime in recent weeks, I noticed I was playing the rock game everyday—a game I can focus on; a game I can play and not chat; a game that looks engaged when I know I’m not. I’m using it to hide amidst forty children. (A feat, nonetheless.)

Flour & Flowers has also been difficult as of late. I had some interesting encounters with one of the ladies, and they were painful. She was frustrated with me and handled it somewhat elementary—imagine a junior high cafeteria scenario, and then play it out in your kitchen and street. I was exhausted of the work we’ve put in, the sacrifices we’ve made, only to be hurt. I started wishing it would end; that business would dry up; that this business endeavor could be over. I was tired of all my Fridays being consumed.

And as you can see: I lost joy in the work, which is also our whole life and our house. It’s so hard to escape.

But it’s also so much more than I can bear: too many problems to fix, to hear, to carry. Too many to even write down and drop in a jar.

And while I tried to keep mourning each piece of sorrow, it became easier to avoid it. To hide. Mourning defined my heart more than anything else. And while I still believe that God carries those tears and sufferings—and I’m thankful he’ll continue to, because they come day after day—I can’t stop there. I can’t let that hide my hope, my salvation, the joy of the Lord.

And if I’m hiding from my life, from my best friends, from my ministry: I don’t look much like Christ.

If I’m exasperated at the first call or frustrated that someone is sick again: I don’t look much like Christ.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said of Christians he knew, “I would believe in their salvation if they looked a little more like people who have been saved.”

How do I show my salvation? How do I show the goodness of God? How do I show his joy? How do I find pleasure in my toil?

___________________

I was listening to a podcast recently on celebration (an excellent one, if I may say: Upside Down Podcast, episode 26: Commitment to Celebration). They referenced the story of Esther, where she fasted, along with all the Jews, for three days and three nights before approaching the king.

The task was too big for her; for all of them. She was in over her head, and so they fasted.

He had heard their cries; he rescued them. In their inadequacy, he took care of them. So then they celebrated all that God had done.

Esther 8 says that the city “shouted and rejoiced. The Jews had light and gladness and joy and honor. And in every province and in every city, wherever the king’s command and his edict reached, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday.”

I see a parallel in the feeding of the 5,000+, where Jesus tells his disciples to feed the crowd. It’s quickly apparent they are inadequate to do so: to provide the food or even the money for such a crowd. It is too big for them. But in their inadequacy, he took care of them. And then they feasted.

And here, this is where we sit: we are inadequate for this neighborhood. We are way in over our heads (and have been for years) to handle the language, the lifestyle, the suffering, the needs, the poverty, the problems.

We can’t fix so many of them. It’s like saving an entire people group or feeding a host of families with a few loaves of bread and fish.

But in our inadequacy, he will take care of us.

And we must celebrate that.

Enter our weekly celebrations! We’re now taking once a week to fast, followed by a small “feast”–really just something fun for Mae Sot, whether that’s a homemade pizza or ordered in Indian food or a homemade funfetti cake!–whatever feels like a “feast” to us! We’re setting up a little party.

In the podcast, they referenced this organization‘s Commitment to Celebration, and there are two pieces of it we are using as a form of liturgy for our weekly feast. The first is this:

I will listen for the echo of rejoicing in heaven when those I minister among step into the light or even take a small step forward, and will remind myself that persistent celebration rolls back the power of the enemy.

Just a couple weeks in, it’s been incredible to dwell on this. Each week we’ve been sharing the little ways we saw the kingdom come this week; the little joys; the littlest steps forward. And some weeks, we are just celebrating the fact that this is not the end, and HE WINS. Sometimes we are just choosing persistent celebration.

But we’re finding that’s a powerful thing.

I’ll end with the second piece of liturgy we are using at our weekly shindig. This has been one of the warmest concepts to me lately, and I’ve been wrapping it around me:

I will celebrate
the light of Christ in a world of darkness,
the life of Christ in a culture of death,
the liberty of Christ in a kingdom of captivity,
and the hope of Christ in an age of despair.
I will rejoice always & in everything give thanks.

times and seasons.

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I’ve been ruminating, somewhat stuck, on the wise words of Ecclesiastes 3.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil–this is God’s gift to man. 

I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away. 

It’s been a season of keeping silence. Silence here, in written word; somewhat silence between friends and family; sometimes even Stephen & I. I’m a bit out of words. Or perhaps they just don’t seem to be helping.

It’s been a season of healing, literally. I’ve faced a number of random physical ailments, one after another since July, from dengue fever to dog bites that become infected and full rounds of rabies vaccinations; rashes and ear infections; to lymph node infections that become abscessed and require surgery.

And while said surgery was done well, kept clean, and an overall good experience here in this lovely little border town, it was painful. It seems they are still working on lidocaine usage, and when asked if it was painful, our conversation went like this, as he was cutting,
“Pain?”
“Yes, pain.”
“Pain?”
“Yes. Pain.”
“I think no pain. Just fear.”
“Yes, pain. Sharp pain. SHARP PAIN. VERY SHARP PAIN.”

By the time I got home, my entire arm was numb, and the left side of my face. My face stayed a bit numb for 48 hours. So, y’know. There was healing needed.

There’s been mourning. Mourning for the pace of our adoption, for the suffering of the community around us, for the unknowns of the season ahead. Mourning for hunger and sickness and abuse and poverty. Mourning for our host country, which also mourns deeply, fears deeply.

There has been so much planting. Sometimes it feels like we spend every day planting tiny little seeds and hoping, hoping, hoping that something falls on good soil.

There’s been seeking: for dancing, for laughter, for peace.

And as we look to adopt, or not; as we look to stay in this community, or find them all returning to their home country; as we look to new seasons…whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.

And in all my questions…he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

And as we look forward: there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil–this is God’s gift to man. 

Seeking to find pleasure in this again. In the many loaves of baked bread, in the many bouquets of flowers, in the many conversations over breakfast and a game of Sorry, in the many vulnerable children, in the many sicknesses, in the many drunken brawls: to find pleasure in all the toil. To be joyful. To do good.

To walk humbly, to love mercy, and to act justly, in all seasons.

weekends & sabbaths.

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Friday: I was up at 5am, meeting one of the bread ladies at the door at 5:30. We had our first loaves rising in the oven by 5:45am and our first pans of cinnamon rolls being rolled out by 7:15am.

While baking, we served oranges, soy milk, & vitamins to about forty kids.

One of the batches went funny, and the neighbors absolutely refuse to throw out a mistake. I absolutely refuse to sell one 🙂 So we bake it for the neighborhood, who will generally eat anything. And they did.

But it means that, in total, we kneaded sixteen bowls of dough. We baked 24 loaves of bread & rolled out 174 tortillas. And made 192 cinnamon rolls.

At various points through the morning, I also made twelve flower bouquets. Daw Ma Oo is still away for her chemotherapy & radiation treatment, but the family still needs the money from flower sales. Her sons have been helping to keep the business going, but sometimes ask for help with the bouquet-making.

We baked until 2:30pm, when Pyo Pyo & I climbed in the car for deliveries. There was a break for lunch–about fifteen minutes because Burmese folks eat fast!–and I took a shower while they packaged up the products.

We delivered until 6:30pm, when I joked with Pyo Pyo that we started before sunrise and finished after it. We counted up finances and I skidded off to dinner with friends, followed by two more deliveries. The last deliveries were made at 9:30pm that evening, for a total of thirty-three houses around Mae Sot.

I have absolutely no photos of the entire day, but I survived it, which counts for something! And it was our most profitable Friday yet 🙂

Saturday was relatively uneventful, with only a trip to the bus station at 5:30am with a friend; only one trip to the clinic; only one English class at church; a worship practice that was less than two hours; previous-days-failed-bread served to hungry kids; and two hours of play with only one broken computer.

Yaminoo beat us all six times in a row at Sorry!  And the sunset was gorgeous above a host of kids playing and giggling in the street.

It was a beautiful day in our little neighborhood, for sure.

Sunday saw us to church with a whole lot of excited kids. They were lectured in the car about sitting down, and how they must listen or they will go home. They were told to behave at church or they wouldn’t be returning.

This lecture went unheard.

Within minutes of opening up the back of our car, a kid jumped out into a large, slippery mud puddle, spraying me with water and mud and who-knows-whatelse past my knees, then sliding on his butt through it all. Right outside the front doors of the church.

As I tried to help him up, another 3-year-old was shoved out of the back by the remaining twelve or so kids–who knew our little crew of church-going neighbor kids can create a mob in a second?–and ended up face planting on the concrete from a few feet up.

Fast foward a few minutes, when I’m very muddy and now very wet, holding a naked, bleeding, crying three-year-old as we bandage up his face. Stephen walks out after worship practice to ask, “What happened?!”

Turns out he had also dumped his entire “non-spillable” mug on the church floor when he arrived earlier, so #winning. So thankful our church still loves us, even when we show up with a host of bleeding, muddy, misbehaving kids and make a scene.

I then sat through church soaking wet with said three-year-old on my lap, sleeping from exhaustion while the lump on his forehead and lip grew exponentially. Thankfully, my anger in the car and the blood and mess helped the kids to shape up a bit, so they were extremely well-behaved through church and Sunday school, so…#youwinsomeyoulosesome.

Today, one of our best little friends, Aung Aung Ley, made his way to Bangkok to live with different family members. It’s hard to say if it will be better or not, but either way, he’ll be missed most certainly. Either way, he’s a big part of our lives, has brought many tears and smiles our way. I might even miss him asking every single day if we’ll be playing at 4pm.

And I sit here over a cup of coffee and thank the Lord for weekly Sabbaths, because that weekend alone nearly took me!

hi, it’s us again.

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And then we skipped off to the beach again!

Turns out that every year around this time, it’s just super cheap to hop down to the islands. We found $10 tickets again, and this time we had a couple free hotel nights…and it just seemed too good to be true. We squeezed in a shorter trip between two Flour & Flowers Fridays, and thankfully had the capacity to keep The Breakfast Club, sewing, church, The Reinforcers, and Playhouse going without us!

When we arrived at the hotel, the front desk staff recognized us. Because, yes, it’s us again 🙂 We did get a special fruit treat as returning guests, and they brought Stephen cake on his birthday again. We really can’t lose at this place!

And despite it being rainy season, we had a beautiful experience yet again. It was storming when we arrived, delaying our landing for twenty minutes; and it was storming again when we left. We had gorgeous blue skies for the days in between.

While you run the risk of rain during rainy season, you get a few benefits: everything is in “low season”–less people and less money, so win-win; the sunsets are stellar when you get them through the clouds; and the waves are indescribable–and a bit deadly–but amazing! It’s such fun to be out playing in the water. The undertow is powerful, so you can’t go out too deep, but the waves will crash way over your head at times and tumble you all over the place.

We found this cute little ice cream shoppe with locally-made ice cream and hand-dipped cones that taste so much like iced animal crackers. So it was delicious, and now we are requesting those in the next care package! 😂

the birthday party.

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One of our sweet little friends, Win Mo, turned two on the 16th and nearly shares a birthday with Stephen. And since he’s one of her favorites–Oo Oo See-binnn!— it seemed fitting to throw a collective party.

And, oooh, did she come ready!

And since we all know sprinkles, strawberry filling, and teddy bears are Stephen’s favorite, we included those, too 🙂

Her mom, Pwe Pyu Hey, is one of our bread ladies and dear friends.

Her uncle is one of The Reinforcers, and we suspect a budding relationship between he & our seamstress…just wanted some photo evidence that we saw it coming 🙂

We had lots of friends come out to join us for the evening! And then we all sugar-crashed together 😁

still.

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Still.

We are still baking bread and making flower bouquets every Friday. And it’s still profitable! Three women make a days salary + savings on the bread baking, and Daw Ma Oo’s family is still coming together to keep up flower sales and make ends meet while she’s away for cancer treatment.

There are still two ladies sewing in our house three days a week, and usually a sleeping baby within sight. They are still cute as ever.

I’m still teaching Mwei Mwei a few days a week in math, English, and typing; she is reading Burmese books and answering essay questions; and she is taking a Thai class.

Oh, and I’m still an ogre next to all the tiny folks in this community.

This girl is still a part of our lives, day in and day out. And now she’s a teenager, going to church in her lovely outfits with her hair braided and styled. I’m still snapping blurry photos on my phone so I don’t forget the moment I realized she’s grown and beautiful.

We’re still resting one day a week to stay alive. We find pretty places or quiet places or cool places and make a day of it.