“Did anything sprout last night?” My girls clamber down the stairs, their excitement reaching a Christmas-morning fever pitch. They dash over to the little seedlings that sit in our front window.
“Nothing yet! Maybe tomorrow! We should water them so they have what they need to grow!”
It’s slow work, this gardening. After some measuring and planning, we decided to go all-in with over fifty plants this year. We’re eschewing typical landscaping and creating some front yard garden beds. Visions of tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and zinnias are dancing in our heads.
We know what can come of these little seeds, quietly growing. A harvest of abundance, with extra cucumbers sending us over to our neighbors house, asking them to please take a few of these off our hands.
Bur right now, it just looks like mud.
It’s slow work. It’s good work. We’re better humans for having planted things. Our girls rightly wonder if anything at all is happening. But it is. Small, almost imperceptible. But things are happening just below the surface.
After (re)tucking our kids into bed, Joseph and I head downstairs. Three times a week, when we’re not derailed by stomach bugs or the exhaustion that is parenting, we do a workout together. We pick up a set of dumbbells, chatting about our day between sets in our living room.
We squat and bench press, do push-ups, and rows. The weight we pick up is gradually growing. My goal is to gain weight, a goal that goes against every advertisement and lie I’ve been sold as a woman around what I “should” weigh. But our sweet William is over thirty pounds and thirty inches tall. He’s almost three, but he’s just starting to learn the mechanics of crawling. I weigh in at 111 pounds and am 5’4”. My biceps are more defined than ever thanks to the Gym of Mom, but I want to be stronger for William. For all of my kids. For my whole family. And for myself.
We’re almost a month into this hard, good work of showing up to workouts. Some days I give it my all and some days I barely show up. But when I look in the mirror in the morning I don’t see any change. My jeans still fit the same, the number on the scale remains unmoved.
But I know things are happening. Slowly, unnoticeable day-to-day. But cumulatively, all this work is going to make a difference. By the end of the year, there will be change.
We’re have five therapy sessions each week with our sweet boy. William is doing such hard work to learn how to crawl, make vowel sounds, and eat orally. He’s putting in so many hours learning how to breathe without a trach. We cheer him on as he props himself up to grab a toy, as he works to tell us what his preferences are.
It’s incredible to see him learn. He picks up on things so fast and the skills he’s mastered in just a few months are mind-blowing. Some days we’re making incredible progress, albeit slowly. Other days, the progress is sidelined by stomach bugs, cancelled therapies, and complications from scar tissue.
We know that it is good that William is here, regardless of how many hours he can tolerate his trach capped or how many feet forward her crawls. It is good that William is here. And we also know that him (that all of us) are capable of doing good, hard work.
Maybe you have the same conversation with your toddler, day after day. Or you’re putting in hours at therapy sessions wondering if you’re ever going to get down to the bottom of a wound that haunts you. You’re pouring your heart into your marriage. You’re putting in long hours to master a new skill, to earn a degree, to make it through another shift so your family has what they need.
It is hard, slow work becoming the people that the Lord has created us to be. But it’s not just up to us and our hard work. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. He knows the slow, hard work of thirty years on this earth before the three short years of his public ministry started. He knows the disappointment of things not going as planned.
And he invites us to come to him. All of us who are weary, heavy with our burdens, tired out from the hard work laboring and aching for the garden.
He asks hard things of us. And he will give us rest.
Now onto this month’s edition of Naptime Notes—although it would be more accurate to start calling this newsletter Bedtime Notes. I’m typing this from the rocking chair in William’s room while the kids snooze and Joseph hosts small group downstairs.
Read on for the books I’m reading, the latest episodes of a brand new series of the Letters to Women podcast, and the songs we’re listening to over and over in our listening room!
Songs I’m playing on repeat:
The books and Substack reads keeping me up at night:
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. My Well Read Mom book club is the social event on my calendar that I look forward to every month. Eight to ten moms from different seasons of life get together and chat about books, life, motherhood, and the Lord. We start after the kids are tucked into bed and most of the times we’re still chatting at 11pm in my living room. It’s such a lifegiving night—and I can’t wait to dive into this read with the women in the group. It’s been a beautiful read so far and perfect for Lent.
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by John Mark Comer. This book has been on my to-read list for awhile and I’m so glad I picked up the audiobook version, read by John Mark. His thoughts on hurry have started some great conversations on Sabbath and simplicity here in our home.
Ilium by Lea Carpenter. I’m a sucker for spy stories, particularly with a Cold War focus. I had high hopes for this new international espionage story. But this wasn’t my favorite read this past month. The plot wasn’t plausible and the unnamed heroine was difficult to connect with.
The books I’m reading (and re-reading!) with the Langr littles:
Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran. I had never read this book before picking it up with the girls for our homeschool week focused on the letter ‘R’. This is such a lovely, immersive read. It reminded me of the hours of imaginative play in my backyard growing up and made me so excited to see my own kids create and grow their own pretend worlds.
Once There Was a Story: Tales from Around the World by Jane Yolen. Short, full of lovely characters, and divided into sections like “Homely stories” and “Tales of Magic Makers”. I’m slowly trying to cleanse Maeve’s pallet of Frozen as the only fairytale she knows and loves and this book is helping her fall in love with new characters and plots.
Red Riding Hood by James Marshall. In this version of the storybook, the big bad wolf gobbles up both Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Ada is intrigued.
Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch by Eileen Spinelli. This is such a lovely read for February! A beautiful reminder about how being reminded you are loved impacts your relationship with everyone you meet.
A question for you:
New episodes of the Letters to Women podcast!
🎙️I’m back behind the podcast mic and I’m changing things up a bit. First, there’s the new intro music that is just son fun. But I’m also dividing new Letters to Women episodes up into seasons based on the original Letter to Women penned by Saint Pope John Paul II back in 1995. Tune into hear more about what’s coming up in the newest season!
🎙️In this first season of Letters to Mothers, I had such a lovely conversation with friend of the show Shelby Hirschman. We talk about postpartum body image, how to be gentle and compassionate to our bodies as mothers, and what our closets could look like if we honored the season we’re in. But even if you’re not a physical mother, there’s so much to learn here from Shelby’s wisdom.
An eclectic collection of links to some my favorites this month:
This beautiful magazine that I’m loving in old-fashioned printed form // This seminar on disability and the Catholic Church // These adorable shoes we picked up for William that have little squeakers in them // This pizza recipe on repeat // A fantastic morning cup of coffee with this brew // This examination of conscience for your Lenten confession
A quote that has me thinking:
In the apostle Paul’s description of love, the first descriptor is ‘patient’. There’s a reason people talk about walking with God not running with God. It’s because God is love.
John Mark Comer
A poem to leave you with:
There’s nothing like Lent for a little Memento Mori poetry. Enjoy to hold by Li-Young Lee:
So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky, she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me. One day we’ll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered. Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn’t for our having. So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I’ll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping.
Thanks for reading along!
In His Sacred Heart,
Chloe